Root-Race

Root-Race is a Theosophical concept that refers to successive evolutionary stages through which humanity goes in its pilgrimage on our earth. There are seven Root-Races:

Every life-cycle on Globe D (our Earth) is composed of seven root-races. They commence with the Ethereal and end with the spiritual on the double line of physical and moral evolution—from the beginning of the terrestrial round to its close. (One is a “planetary round” from Globe A to Globe G, the seventh; the other, the “globe round”, or the terrestrial).

The Root-Races go through a process of cyclic evolution going from subtlety to materiality and back to subtlety:

These Races evolve from ethereality to materiality, and from the latter back again into relative physical tenuity of texture, so every living (so-called) organic species of animals with vegetation included, changes with every new Root-Race.

It is important to keep in mind that these Root-Races are different stages humanity as a whole goes through successively. As H. P. Blavatsky wrote: "The mankind of the First Root-Race is the mankind of the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc."

Each Root-Race succeed each other, although there is a period of overlapping between the old forms dying out and the new forms beginning to be more and more dominant. The end of a Root-Race and the beginning of a new one is marked by important geological changes:

The periods of the great root races are divided from each other by great convulsions of Nature, and by great geological changes.

Every root-race is separated by a catastrophe, a cataclysm—the basis and historical foundation of the fables woven later on into the religious fabric of every people, whether civilized or savage, under the names of “deluges,” “showers of fire” and such like.

Each Root-Race is in turn divided in seven sub-races. Currently, humanity is undergoing the fifth Root-Race stage and five sub-races have been developed.

Further reading

• Root Races at Theosopedia