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Updated: July 13, 2025
From the earliest ages of the race in India, Reincarnation in some of its various forms has been the accepted doctrine, and today it is accepted by the entire Hindu people, with their many divisions and sub-races, with the exception of the Hindu Mohammedans.
From each of these great root-races there are many offshoots which we call sub-races such, for example, as the Roman races or the Teutonic; and each of the sub-races in turn divides itself into branch-races, such as the French and the Italians, the English and the Germans. These arrangements are made in order that for each ego there may be a wide choice of varying conditions and surroundings.
So then, four sub-races would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race's history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races would have flourished and passed; and this present sixth family-race would be about ten millenniums old.
The new races springing from the fittest of these survivors quickly form sub-races, being composed of the better adapted souls seeking reincarnation, while the less fit sink into barbarism, and show evidences of decay, although a remnant drags on for thousands of years, being composed of the souls of those who have not advanced sufficiently to take a part in the life of the new races.
It is the same over and over again in our Theosophical studies, and especially do we find this to be true in the characteristics important in this particular relation the characteristics of the great Races, the Root-Races, as represented in miniature in the sub-races of each Root-Race.
After a time the number of advancing souls which had outstripped their fellows in progress became sufficiently large for sub-races to be formed, and so the branching off process began. In this way the various races and types were formed, and the progress of Mankind gained headway.
But to this latter subject we shall presently return. The partial or complete extinction of many races and sub-races of man is historically known. Humboldt saw in South America a parrot which was the sole living creature that could speak a word of the language of a lost tribe.
Before the eagle of the Tenth Legion was planted on the shore of Cantium before the first Phoenician ship stowed tin at the Cassiterides the Celt had inhabited the British Islands long enough to branch into distinct sub-races, and to rise from paloeolithic savagery to the use of metals, the domestication of animals, and the observance of elaborate religious rites.
The time that the life-wave stays upon each planet is known as a world-period, and in the course of a world-period there are seven great root-races. As has been previously explained, these are subdivided into sub-races, and those again into branch-races.
This at once explains why the posterity of Japhet is so different from that of Sem and of Cham. In each of those great primitive stocks, an all-wise Providence introduced a large number of sub-races, if we may be allowed to call them so, out of which are sprung the various nations whose intermingling forms the web of human history. Our object is to consider only the Celtic branch.
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