Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891 AD) wrote the following regarding her concept of the root races in her book The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, Stanza IV, “Creation of the First Races”:
Mankinds different from the present are mentioned in all the ancient Cosmogonies. Plato speaks, in the Phaedrus, of a winged race of men. Aristophanes (in Plato’s Banquet), speaks of a race androgynous and with round bodies. In Pymander, all the animal kingdom even is double-sexed. Thus in § 18, it is said: “The circuit having been accomplished, the knot was loosened….and all the animals, which were equally androgynous, were untied (separated) together with man…..” for….”the causes had to produce effects on earth.”
Again, in the ancient Quiche Manuscript, the Popol Vuh — published by the late Abbe Brasseur de Bourbourg — the first men are described as a race “whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once”: thus showing the divine knowledge of Gods, not mortals. The Secret Doctrine, correcting the unavoidable exaggerations of popular fancy, gives the facts as they are recorded in the Archaic symbols [ellipses in original]…
In Vol. 2, “Millions of Years Hence,” Blavatsky further notes:
What is known of other continents, besides our own, and what does history know or accept of the early races? Everything outside the repulsive speculations of materialistic science is daubed with the contemptuous term “Superstition.” The wise men of to-day will believe nothing. Plato’s “winged” and hermaphrodite races, and his golden age, under the reign of Saturn and the gods, are quietly brought back by Haeckel to their new place in nature: our divine races are shown to be the descendants of Catarrhine apes, and our ancestor, a piece of sea slime.
Now back to Vol. 2, Stanza IV wherein she references “recent perplexity of the Assyriologists, who express their wonder through the late George Smith” and notes:
“My first idea of this part” (of the rebellion), he says, “was that the wars with the powers of Evil preceded the Creation; I now think it followed the account of the fall” (Chaldean Account of Genesis, p. 92). In this work Mr. George Smith gives an engraving, from an early Babylonian cylinder, of the Sacred Tree, the Serpent, man and woman. The tree has seven branches: three on the man’s side, four on that of the female.
These branches are typical of the seven Root-Races, in the third of which, at its very close, occurred the separation of the sexes and the so-called FALL into generation. The three earliest Races were sexless, then hermaphrodite; the other four, male and female, as distinct from each other.
In the subsection “The Divine Hermaphrodite” H. P. Blavatsky delves into her very own home spun anthropology:
An impenetrable veil of secrecy was thrown over the occult and religious mysteries taught, after the submersion of the last remnant of the Atlantean race, some 12,000 years ago, lest they should be shared by the unworthy, and so desecrated. Of these sciences several have now become exoteric — such as Astronomy, for instance, in its purely mathematical and physical aspect. Hence their dogmas and tenets, being all symbolised and left to the sole guardianship of parable and allegory, have been forgotten, and their meaning has become perverted.
Nevertheless, one finds the hermaphrodite in the scriptures and traditions of almost every nation; and why such unanimous agreement if the statement is only a fiction?
It is this secrecy which led the Fifth Race to the establishment, or rather the re-establishment of the religious mysteries, in which ancient truths might be taught to the coming generations under the veil of allegory and symbolism. Behold the imperishable witness to the evolution of the human races from the divine, and especially from the androgynous Race — the Egyptian Sphinx, that riddle of the Ages!
Divine wisdom incarnating on earth, and forced to taste of the bitter fruit of personal experience of pain and suffering, generated under the shade of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil — a secret first known only to the Elohim, the SELF-INITIATED, “higher gods” — on earth only. [Blavatsky’s footnote, “See ‘Book of Enoch.’ which I reviewed here].
See my review of Ken Johnson’s book Ancient Book of Enoch here.
H.P. Blavatsky noted the following in her book Isis Unveiled (1877 AD), part I, Science, chap. V:
But there are myths which speak for themselves. In this class we may include the double-sexed first creators, of every cosmogony. The Greek Zeus-Zen (aether), and Chthonia (the chaotic earth) and Metis (the water), his wives; Osiris and Isis-Latona—the former god representing also ether—the first emanation of the Supreme Deity, Amun, the primeval source of light; the goddess earth and water again; Mithras, [Blavatsky’s footnote, “Mithras was regarded among the Persians as the Theos ek petros—godof the rock”] the rock-born god, the symbol of the male mundane-fire, or the personified primordial light, and Mithra, the fire-goddess, at once his mother and his wife; the pure element of fire (the active, or male principle) regarded as light and heat, in conjunction with earth and water, or matter (female or passive elements of cosmical generation).
Mithras is the son of Bordj, the Persian mundane mountain [Blavatsky’s footnote, “Bordj is called a fire-mountain—a volcano; therefore it contains fire, rock, earth, and water—the male and active, and the female or passive elements. The myth is suggestive”] from which he flashes out as a radiant ray of light. Brahma, the fire-god, and his prolific consort; and the Hindu Unghi, the refulgent deity, from whose body issue a thousand streams of glory and seven tongues of flame, and in whose honor the Sagniku Brahmans preserve to this day a perpetual fire; Siva, personated by the mundane mountain of the Hindus—the Meru (Himalaya). This terrific fire-god, who is said in the legend to have descended from heaven, like the Jewish Jehovah, in a pillar of fire, and a dozen of other archaic, double-sexed deities, all loudly proclaim their hidden meaning.
And what can these dual myths mean but the physico-chemical principle of primordial creation? The first revelation of the Supreme Cause in its triple manifestation of spirit, force, and matter; the divine correlation, at its startingpoint of evolution, allegorized as the marriage of fire and water, products of electrifying spirit, union of the male active principle with the female passive element, which become the parents of their tellurian child, cosmic matter, the prima materia, whose spirit is ether, the ASTRAL LIGHT!
In part II, Religion, chap. VI Blavatsky wrote:
Whenever the Eternal awakes from its slumber and desires to manifest itself, it divides itself into male and female. It then becomes in every system
THE DOUBLE-SEXED DEITY, The universal Father and Mother…IN CHALDEA. The trinity—Anu, Bel, Hoa (or Sin, Samas, Bin), blend into ONE who is Anu (double-sexed) through the Virgin Mylitta…
Though he is termed the “Primitive Man,” Ennoia, who is like the Egyptian Pimander, the “Power of the Thought Divine,” the first intelligible manifestation of the Divine Spirit in material form, he is…neither the male nor female principle, blended into the idea of a double-sexed Deity in ancient conceptions, could be comprehended by an ordinary human intellect, the theology of every people had to create for its religion a Logos, or manifested word, in some shape or other…
As the revealed one, he is Androgyne, Christos, and Sophia (Divine Wisdom), who descend into the man Jesus. Both Father and Son are shown by Irenaeus to have loved the beauty (formam) of the primitive woman, [Blavatsky’s footnote, “See ‘Irenaeus,’ book i., chap. 31-33”] who is Bythos—Depth—as well as Sophia, and as having produced conjointly Ophis and Sophia (double-sexed unity again), male and female wisdom, one being considered as the unrevealed Holy Spirit, or elder Sophia—the Pneuma—the intellectual “Mother of all things”; the other the revealed one, or Ophis, typifying divine wisdom fallen into matter, or God-man—Jesus, whom the Gnostic Ophites represented by the serpent (Ophis).
In chap. IX Blavatsky writes:
“Ever ONE, although having three forms of double nature (androgynous)—he rises! and the priests offer to God, in the act of sacrifice, their prayers which reach the heavens, borne aloft by Agni”…
And now, Abel having disappeared out of that line of descent, he is replaced by Seth, who was clearly an afterthought suggested by the necessity of not having the human race descend entirely from a murderer. This dilemma being apparently first noticed when the Kenite table had been completed, Adam is made (after all the generations had appeared) to beget this son, Seth.
It is a suggestive fact that, whereas the double-sexed Adam of chapter v. is made in the likeness of the Elohim (see Genesis chapter i. 27 and v. 1 of the same), Seth (v. 3) is begotten in Adam’s “own likeness,” thus signifying that there were men of different races. Also, it is most noticeable that neither the age nor a single other particular respecting the patriarchs in the Kenite table is given, whereas the reverse is the case with those in the Sethite line.
In chap. XII she wrote:
Esoteric philosophers held that everything in nature is but a materialization of spirit. The Eternal First Cause is latent spirit, they said, and matter from the beginning. “In the beginning was the word…and the word was God.”[ellipses in original] While conceding the idea of such a God to be an unthinkable abstraction to human reason, they claimed that the unerring human instinct grasped it as a reminiscence of something concrete to it though intangible to our physical senses.
With the first idea, which emanated from the double-sexed and hitherto-inactive Deity, the first motion was communicated to the whole universe, and the electric thrill was instantaneously felt throughout the boundless space. Spirit begat force, and force matter; and thus the latent deity manifested itself as a creative energy.
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See my section on this topic here: Postgender Androgyny, Hermaphroditism & Beyond
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