Where the claim comes from
We begin with a book published in 1888, and with the circumstance that its author presented it as something she had received.
The Secret Doctrine appeared as commentary upon the Stanzas of Dzyan, and Helena Blavatsky maintained throughout that the material reached her through teachers, principally the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi. The same sequence had already entered print five years earlier, in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism of 1883, drawn from that same correspondence. I mention the transmission at the outset because it bears upon what follows. The structure we shall be examining came through several hands across several years, and it is the structure, rather than the elaboration surrounding it, that turns out to have something in it.
The account runs as follows. Humanity passes through seven Root Races in succession. The first, the Polarian, possesses no physical body whatever. The second, the Hyperborean, remains subtle, though it has begun to gather. The third, the Lemurian, is where humanity arrives fully in flesh, upon a land lying across what we now call the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and it closes in fire. The fourth, the Atlantean, faces the Atlantic, and it closes in water. The fifth is our own.
The direction of that sequence deserves a moment of attention, since it runs contrary to what a modern reader arrives expecting. We are accustomed to a story in which our ancestors climb upward out of an animal condition. Here the movement runs the other way. Spirit descends into matter, and each race stands denser and more settled than the one before it. We came into these bodies by sinking into them.
And here we meet the circumstance that gives this essay its opening. By the account's own terms, the first two races left the physical world untouched, having possessed no physical part to leave behind. The record therefore becomes available for examination at precisely one moment, which is the moment it declares that bodies grew solid, and that moment is the Third Race. The doctrine specifies its own point of contact with the fossil and the genetic record, and it places that point exactly where such a record could begin to exist. Anyone wishing to test these claims against the evidence of the ground is told, by the claims themselves, where to start looking.
Rudolf Steiner took up this same material and published Cosmic Memory in 1904, in the Theosophical journal Lucifer-Gnosis, during the years when he served as General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. He had read Blavatsky closely and worked within her organisation, and he departed from it in 1912 to found Anthroposophy. So his testimony stands within the tradition rather than beside it, and a reader should weigh it accordingly. What he adds is a second clairvoyant reading by a man of unusual capacity, differing from Blavatsky in many particulars while agreeing with her on the points this essay uses. He describes Lemurian bodies as still soft and unfinished, the ground beneath them thin and everywhere undermined by volcanic forces, with mighty volcanoes almost everywhere, and he holds that Lemuria closed through the working of that fire.
A word is owed here about how this knowledge came down to us, and about its age, since a reader meeting it fresh might suppose the whole edifice to have been raised in 1888.
Blavatsky received it. She was emphatic upon that point throughout her life, and the men from whom she received it are named. They are the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi, adepts of the Himalayan brotherhood, and she first met Morya in London in 1851, recognising him as the figure who had appeared to her since childhood. They came to her in the body and they came to her out of it. Ramaswamier walked into Sikkim in 1882 to find Morya and met him upon the road, and afterward wrote that he took the man by the hand and found him solid flesh. Others met Koot Hoomi in the same plain way, and many more met both of them in the projected body, which the tradition calls the mayavi-rupa. Their letters arrived by precipitation, the writing forming upon the paper with no hand to hold the pen, often inside sealed envelopes and often before witnesses. So the line runs: an ancient teaching, held by living teachers, brought to a woman who could receive it, and set down partly from their instruction and partly from her own direct reading of the record.
Behind the teachers stands the Book of Dzyan, which she describes as manuscript rather than printed book, written in Senzar, a sacred tongue older than Sanskrit, and preserved in rock libraries among the spurs of the Himalayas. The Stanzas of Dzyan are the oldest thing in The Secret Doctrine, and Blavatsky presents her book as commentary upon them.
Now, the two continents come to us wearing names, and the names have their own histories, which are worth a moment because one of them is quite remarkable.
The eastern continent is called Mu in the channeled and traditional material. Lemuria is a scientific name, and a recent one. In 1864 the zoologist Philip Sclater needed to explain how lemurs came to live both in Madagascar and in India with an ocean lying between them, and he proposed a sunken land in the Indian Ocean and called it Lemuria after the animals. The animals themselves had been named a century earlier by Linnaeus, who took the word from the Latin lemures, the wandering spirits of the ancestral dead, because the creatures moved by night with slow and quiet steps. And the Romans kept a festival of that name. The Lemuria fell in May, and on those nights the head of each household rose in the dark and made offerings to the ancestral dead, that they might rest and depart in peace.
So the word already carried its meaning before any naturalist reached for it. Lemuria is the rite of the ancestors. Sclater gave that name to a drowned land in the Indian Ocean; Haeckel, within a few years, proposed that same drowned land as the cradle of humanity. Two naturalists, working from the distribution of a nocturnal animal and from evolutionary descent, arrived at a sunken continent in precisely the ocean the tradition names, and hung upon it a word meaning the honouring of the ancestral dead. I find that a striking piece of providence, and Blavatsky, writing in 1888, simply took the term that was already in the air and filled it with what she knew.
Atlantis comes to us through Plato, the Athenian philosopher of the fourth century before our era, whom most readers know for the image of the prisoners watching shadows upon the wall of a cave. He tells the Atlantis story in two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, and he presents it as something handed down rather than invented, reaching the Athenian statesman Solon from the priests of Sais in Egypt. So even at the earliest surviving telling, Atlantis arrives as transmitted knowledge with an older source standing behind it. The name itself has spread very widely: Atlas, the Atlantic, and, on the far shore, Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Mexica, in a language where atl is the word for water.
And the deepest layer lies further back than either name. The Hindu scriptures describe humanity as passing through a succession of world-ages called manvantaras. Each has its own Manu, and a Manu is the first man of his age, the ancestor and lawgiver who carries life across the ending of one world into the beginning of the next, the figure who survives the flood and starts the race again. Successive humanities, each founded by its own first ancestor, each closing and giving way. That is precisely the architecture this essay sets out to explore, and it was written down in India many centuries before Blavatsky, upon a tradition older still, and she drew upon it openly. Mesopotamia keeps its own version, in the Sumerian King List with its kings who reigned before the flood for spans of many thousands of years, and in the flood story of Atrahasis and of Gilgamesh, where the humanity before the water stands apart from the humanity after it.
So the shape is very old, and it reaches us everywhere by revelation. Science arrived late and supplied a label for one of the two continents, and supplied it, as it happens, for the right ocean.
How this started
It began some way from Lemuria, and I set the route down here because the route belongs to the evidence.
I came to this through the channelers. The modern body of that material opens with Seth, spoken through Jane Roberts from 1963, and continues with the Law of One, received through Carla Rueckert from 1981, and with Bashar, spoken through Darryl Anka from 1984. Afterward came a great deal of Pleiadian material from many hands, and then, these several years, my own weekly work with the channeler Jim Charles.
These sources differ from one another in a hundred particulars, and upon one point a good many of them hold steady together: that humanity is a hybrid. They speak of genetic hybridization, and they mean by it precisely what a biologist means by it, the crossing of two lineages and the birth of offspring carrying both. They also describe several distinct crossings rather than one. The Law of One tells of a population brought from Mars into earthly incarnation, with the physical vehicle altered to receive them. Bashar's own account places him as a Sassani, whose people arose from a crossing of human beings with the Greys, which is a separate lineage and a separate programme from the Martian one. The Pleiadian material describes work of its own. And the material through Jim Charles holds that the crossing continues in our own day.
So the picture the channelers give is of a long and various enterprise, carried out by more than one people, over a great stretch of time.
And this picture arrives supported. A second body of testimony, gathered by quite other means and by people with no interest in channeling whatever, describes the same enterprise from the human end.
I mean the abduction accounts. John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a Pulitzer winner, took up these cases in 1990 expecting to find psychopathology, and reported instead that he found none, and that his experiencers were ordinary people describing something that had happened to them. Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs assembled hundreds of further cases. And running through that literature is a particular and consistent thread: reproductive procedures. Ova taken from women and sperm from men. Pregnancies that begin and then, some weeks later, are gone. Children shown to their human mothers aboard the craft, children who look partly like them and partly like something else, and who are said to be theirs.
So we have two independent bodies of testimony describing one enterprise. One arrives by channeling and gives the purpose. The other arrives by recollection, often under hypnosis, from ordinary people who came to it by surprise, and gives the procedure. Both hold that human beings are being crossed with other lineages, and that the crossings produce children.
And if any of that is so, then it is happening in bodies, and bodies keep records.
This is where my own work has been. A hybridization event of the kind described would leave a very particular mark, and it is worth being exact about what the mark is. Every human being carries chromosomes in pairs, one of each pair from the mother and one from the father, and that is the whole rule of inheritance. Any sequence a person carries should therefore be traceable to one parent or the other. Sequence that belongs to neither is impossible under ordinary descent. So one looks for exactly that: variants present in a child and absent from both parents, insertions and replacements that have no parental source. That is what Starseed Genetics has been searching for, and it is a search conducted upon living people, in the present day.
The turn toward the old
There is a difficulty in that search, and a second difficulty standing behind it which is the more serious of the two.
The first is practical. An event happening now marks one genome. To see it at all you must read that person deeply and both parents besides, at considerable cost, and a single unexplained variant will be offered a dozen ordinary explanations before anyone grants it an extraordinary one.
The second is that even a clean finding would sit there mute. Suppose a variant turns up in a child that neither parent carries. What is it to be compared against? To say that a sequence came from elsewhere, one must know what elsewhere looks like, and there is no reference genome for elsewhere. The finding stays a curiosity, and curiosities persuade nobody.
What opened the way was a thought that began with Dean Radin.
In his book Real Magic, Radin described how the Church dealt with power that arose outside itself. Magic within the bounds of the church was permitted, and he points out that the ceremony of the Eucharist is itself a magical practice, performed by a man anointed to perform it. Magic outside those bounds was another matter altogether. He calls it a heavy-handed way of keeping power inside the institution, and says that in enforcing their ideology they eliminated anybody who had alternative powers or visions. He gives the case of Joseph of Cupertino, who was seen levitating by thousands, was cleared by the Inquisition of any pact with the Devil, and was then moved by his superiors from one remote friary to another, away from the crowds.
Now, eliminated is a word with consequences when it is said of human beings and repeated across many centuries. Whoever is killed before they have children leaves nothing behind them. That is selection, in the plain biological sense, and it works upon any trait that draws the attention of the executioner. Run that pressure long enough and humanity would lose, by wholly ordinary genetics, what it formerly carried. The capacity would thin out of the population as any punished trait thins.
Now set beside that the message which comes through the channeled material more consistently than any other. Across sources agreeing on very little else, the word is restoration. Telepathy is returning. The old capacities are coming back to us. And the hybridization work is described as part of how they return.
Put the two together and a definite proposition appears. The crossings now under way are restoring to the human genome the psychic variants that selection removed from it.
That proposition can be checked, and checking it requires exactly one thing: the older genome. The genome of the people who carried those variants before the long pressure began. Which is to say, a Lemurian genome and an Atlantean one.
We have no such thing, and there my reasoning halted for a while.
Then it occurred to me that we might have it already, sequenced and sitting in the databases under another name.
Before Blavatsky
A teaching given by divination is given more than once. It comes to whoever can receive it, in whatever century and whatever language, and one would expect to find it laid down repeatedly across the world. So I went looking for the earlier tellings, searching in English, in French, in Spanish, in Russian, in Chinese, in Hebrew, and in the Tamil and Sanskrit material.
They are there, and they run in three streams.
The Hebrew stream, which carries the architecture whole
Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, and its central book is the Zohar, the Book of Splendour, which appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century and is attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai of the second. Behind it stands the Talmud, the great compilation of rabbinic teaching completed around the sixth century. Both carry humanities before our own.
The Talmud, in the tractate Hagigah at folio 13b, speaks of nine hundred and seventy-four generations who came before Adam. The number is exact and it has occupied commentators ever since.
The Zohar is more specific still, and what it says is remarkable in our context. It states that before the coming of Adam there were many generations of people in the world, that they were like monkeys, and that there was no true human image in them. Elsewhere it teaches that the Holy One created worlds and destroyed them, and reads the tohu and bohu of the second verse of Genesis, the without-form and void, as the condition of those former worlds.
So: successive humanities, before ours, in bodily form, lacking the finished human shape, and destroyed at the close of their age.
The framework holding this together is the doctrine of the cosmic Sabbaticals, the shmitot. As the land rests every seventh year in the Torah, so creation runs in seven great cycles, each governed by one of the lower seven sefirot, the divine emanations. Each cycle carries its own humanity. The one before ours stood under Hesed, which is mercy. The Ma'arekhet Elokut, an early Kabbalistic classic, states that the Talmud's nine hundred and seventy-four generations belong to that previous cycle. The doctrine appears in the Tikunei Zohar and is carried by Nachmanides, by Rabbeinu Bahya, by Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco, by Recanati, by the Radbaz, and by many after them.
And the Kabbalists make the connection we are making. The reason so many peoples remember a lost and advanced civilization before our own, they say, is that there was one, in the cycle before this.
One dissent belongs in the record, and it is instructive. Rabbi Haim Vital, who set down the teachings of the Ari, rejected the Sabbaticals and held that the pre-Adamic worlds were spiritual throughout and never came into physical manifestation. Which is precisely the Theosophical account of the first two Root Races, the Polarian and the Hyperborean, who left nothing findable because there was nothing physical to leave. The two traditions disagree about where in the sequence matter arrives, and they agree that it arrives.
There is one further passage worth having. At the ninth folio of the first volume the Zohar describes seven lands, and says that when Cain was banished after the killing of Abel he was exiled to one of them, called Arka, where he took a wife from among the people living there. Rav Hamnuna Saba is explicit that the inhabitants of those other lands are human beings and not creatures of some other order. A separate land, a separate people already living on it, and a crossing between them.
So consider what this stream supplies, set beside the others.
The Puranas give the architecture, ages in succession each with its founding ancestor, and say very little about bodies. The channeled material gives the bodies in detail and arrives late. The Zohar gives both, and gives them in the thirteenth century.
It says there were peoples before Adam. It says they were in the world, which is to say on the earth and in flesh. It says they were like monkeys and that the true human image was absent in them, which is a description of beings who are human and are not us. And it says they ended.
That is precisely the category this essay concerns. Our own kind preceded by other human kinds, bodily, near to us and falling short of us, and afterward gone.
The Cain passage adds the other half. A land apart, a people already established upon it, and children born between them. Which is introgression, set down in Spain some seven hundred years ago.
And the Sabbaticals supply the reason for the whole pattern. A humanity to each cycle, each closing when its age closes.
One point of chronology should be kept straight here. The doctrine of the pre-Adamic generations and of the cosmic Sabbaticals is medieval and older, and it stands entirely on its own. The identification of that lost world with Atlantis or with Mu is made by Kabbalistic teachers of our own time, and could hardly be otherwise, since the word Mu did not exist in any European language until 1864. What the medieval sources give is the earlier humanity. Naming it is later work.
What the Hebrew stream withholds is the map. It places these peoples in time and in kind and leaves the geography alone. For the geography we go back to the seers of the Indian and Pacific oceans, whose agreement upon that ocean is set out further on.
The French stream, which is where the name came from
Mu is the name most often used for the eastern continent in the channeled material, and it entered European writing by an unexpected road.
Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg was a French abbe and one of the founders of Mesoamerican studies, who travelled in Mexico and Guatemala and recovered manuscripts that would otherwise have been lost. In 1869 and 1870 he was working on the Troano Codex, a Maya screenfold book now known as part of the Madrid Codex, using a phonetic alphabet recorded in the sixteenth century by Bishop Diego de Landa. He read one sign as Mu, and took it to name a land that had been submerged in a catastrophe.
The reading has since been shown mistaken. The de Landa alphabet is unreliable, Maya script being largely logographic rather than alphabetic, and the codex has turned out to be an almanac. But the name entered the literature there, out of a Maya manuscript, eighteen years before The Secret Doctrine. Augustus Le Plongeon took it up in the 1880s, and James Churchward carried it into the twentieth century and moved it to the Pacific.
The second Frenchman matters more. Louis Jacolliot was a lawyer and colonial judge who served at Pondicherry, the French enclave on the southeastern coast of India, in the Tamil country. He learned Sanskrit, collected local traditions, and in 1873 published Les Fils de Dieu, the Sons of God, describing a sunken land he called Rutas, drawn from what he had gathered in India. The Tamil poets had long remembered a drowning of their own southern coast, and Jacolliot took that memory of lost land in the Indian Ocean and enlarged it into a continent. He expanded the account the following year in Les Peuples et les continents disparus, the Vanished Peoples and Continents. Blavatsky cites him.
So the geography reached her from the Indian Ocean by way of a Frenchman sitting on its shore.
The Sanskrit stream, which supplies the architecture
The Puranas are a body of Sanskrit scripture, compiled over many centuries, which carry the traditional cosmology and the histories of the gods. They describe time as divided into manvantaras, a word built from Manu and antara, meaning the interval of a Manu.
A Manu is the first man of an age, the ancestor and lawgiver of a humanity, the figure who survives the destruction of one world and begins the next. The best-known is Manu Vaivasvata, who is warned by a fish, builds a vessel, and rides out the flood, which is the Indian telling of a story found across the world.
Each manvantara has its own Manu, and each closes and gives way to the one following. Fourteen of them make a kalpa, a day of Brahma. So the architecture is a succession of humanities, each with its own founding ancestor, each ending and being replaced.
That is the shape this essay is examining, and it was written down in India long before any of the rest of this existed. Blavatsky drew on it openly.
What the other languages gave
The Russian material carries one detail worth having, since Blavatsky was Russian and the Russian summaries of her geography preserve her northern reach, which the English accounts often drop. It is the reach described further on, taking in Siberia and Kamchatka and running to Norway.
The Chinese material has a curiosity attached to it. The term used is Mu dalu, the Mu continent, and it arrived in Chinese in the twentieth century through Churchward, so it is downstream rather than independent. But the Chinese writers on it repeatedly make an observation of their own: that the same symbols and customs recur in Egypt, Burma, India, Japan, China, the Pacific islands, Central and South America, and among the tribes of North America. Whatever one makes of the conclusion they draw, the observation stands on its own and belongs in any account of these matters.
What this adds up to
The teaching was given many times before it was given to Blavatsky, and the separate givings agree.
The Talmud and the Zohar carried successive humanities before our own, in bodies, without the finished human form, each age closing and giving way.
The Puranas carried the architecture of the manvantaras, each age with its founding ancestor.
And the name Mu came into European hands from a Maya codex in 1869, while the geography came from the Tamil country by way of a French judge in 1873, and the word Lemuria came from an English zoologist counting lemurs, carrying with it the Roman festival of the ancestral dead.
Blavatsky received the whole of it and set it down as one account, which is what a transmission looks like when it finally arrives complete.