View source for Rounds, Human Evolution Through the

The Secret Doctrine mentions the nature of human evolution in each of the four Rounds of the Earth Chain when humanity was in Globe D, or the physical Earth. (For a background of the entire evolutionary process, see CHAIN, PLANETARY.)  The description comes from a letter of an Adept and quoted by Helena P. BLAVATSKY (SD I:188-9).

First Round – Man was etherial, non-intelligent but super-spiritual.  Correspondingly, by the law of analogy, this is duplicated in the First Root Race of the Fourth Round.  He was sexless, and developed a monstrous body.

Second Round – “He (Man) is still gigantic and ethereal but growing firmer and more condensed in body, a more physical man.  Yet still less intelligent than spiritual, for mind is a slower and more difficult evolution than is the physical frame.”

Third Round – “He has now a perfectly concrete or compacted body, at first the form of a giant-ape, and now more intelligent, or rather cunning, than spiritual.  For, on the downward arc, he has now reached a point where his primordial spirituality is eclipsed and overshadowed by nascent mentality.  In the last half of the Third Round his gigantic stature decreases, and his body improves in texture, and he becomes a more rational being, though still more an ape than a Deva. . . .  (All this is almost exactly repeated in the third Root-Race of the Fourth Round.)”

Fourth Round – “Intellect has an enormous development in this Round.  The (hitherto) dumb races acquire our (present) human speech on this globe, on which, from the Fourth Race, language is perfected and knowledge increases.  At this half-way point of the Fourth Round (as of the Fourth Root, or Atlantean, race) humanity passes the axial point of the minor Manvantara cycle . . . the world teeming with the results of intellectual activity and spiritual decrease. . . .”

See Root RACES; Chain, Planetary.

[[Contributors|V.H.C.]]

© Copyright by the Theosophical Publishing House, Manila