Mystical systems
Root Races
Direct answer
Root Races: Root races are the seven successive races of humankind in the teaching of Helena Blavatsky, each tied to a continent such as Lemuria or Atlantis. The scheme ranks peoples, and the house rejects it.
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At a glance
- Also called
- aryan root race
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Lemuria, Atlantis, Hyperborea, Theosophy
Root races are the seven successive races of humankind in the teaching of Helena Blavatsky, each tied to a continent such as Lemuria or Atlantis. The scheme ranks peoples, and the house rejects it.
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What are the root races in Theosophy?
In The Secret Doctrine of 1888 Blavatsky taught that humanity unfolds through seven root races, each with seven sub-races, over millions of years. The first two were said to be bodiless, the third lived on Lemuria, the fourth on Atlantis, and the fifth, which she called Aryan, is the present one. Two more are still to come.
The scheme was offered as a spiritual history, but it arranged living peoples on a ladder, calling some of them remnants of earlier and lower races. Writers in Germany and Austria joined it to racial nationalism in the early twentieth century, and through Ariosophy it reached the occult fringe of the early Nazi movement, though historians dispute how far it shaped Nazi doctrine. It has no basis in biology, archaeology or history.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Lost worlds.
What sets Root Races apart
The scheme joins two things that had been separate: a spiritual teaching about cycles and the racial classifications of nineteenth-century Europe. Its numbers are tidy, seven races of seven sub-races, and its spans of time run to millions of years. What made it dangerous was the ladder, on which living peoples were placed as leftovers of earlier stages. That part passed into Ariosophy, whose circles touched the early Nazi movement, though historians find few direct lines from it to Nazi doctrine.
- Set out in: Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, two volumes, 1888
- Number: seven root races, each with seven sub-races
- Continents assigned: Hyperborea to the second, Lemuria to the third, Atlantis to the fourth
- Claimed source: the Stanzas of Dzyan, a text no scholar has located
- Later elaboration: William Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis, 1896
Often mistaken for something else: Theosophy is the wider movement founded in 1875, with teachings on karma and rebirth; the root races are one doctrine within it, and the one most justly condemned.
The story behind Root Races
Blavatsky drew on Victorian ideas of racial hierarchy and on the lost continents then being proposed. Annie Besant, Charles Leadbeater and William Scott-Elliot elaborated the scheme, the last in The Story of Atlantis (1896). Guido von List and Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels fused it with German nationalism under the name Ariosophy. Rudolf Steiner taught a version of his own. Many later Theosophists have read the races as stages of consciousness and not as peoples.
Why Root Races matters
Much modern lore of lost continents carries this scheme inside it, and a reader who can recognise it can see what else comes with the story.
How to read Root Races
Readers learn the term in order to spot it: talk of Lemurian, Atlantean or Aryan races in a book marks its source at once.
Root Races in practice: an example
A reader who finds Atlantis described as the home of a fourth root race has found a Theosophical book, not an ancient tradition.
Where readings of Root Races go wrong
This doctrine ranks human beings and helped to justify persecution and murder. The house gives it as history and holds no part of it to be true.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- root race, root races theosophy, seven root races, blavatsky root races, aryan root race
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What are the root races in Theosophy?
Seven stages of humanity taught by Helena Blavatsky in 1888, each called a race and each linked to a continent. The third was placed on Lemuria, the fourth on Atlantis, and the fifth is said to be the present one.
Why is the root race teaching rejected?
Because it ranks peoples as higher and lower and has no support in any science. Human populations do not descend from separate lost continents, and the scheme was taken up by racial nationalists, among them sources of Nazi doctrine.
Is the idea of root races ancient?
No. It was set out in The Secret Doctrine in 1888. Blavatsky said it came from a secret book, the Stanzas of Dzyan, which no scholar has been able to find or date.
