This is the right place to surface, once for this volume's cluster, what has happened to Blavatsky's Root Race doctrine after it left her hands — because the Stanza here gives the color-sequence (moon-coloured first, then yellow, red, brown-becoming-black-with-sin) that has been the most weaponized passage in any nineteenth-century esoteric text. Two things are true at once. First: Blavatsky's stated framing through both volumes is cosmic-evolutionary — Root Races are stages of spiritual descent and re-ascent, not biological types, and the Theosophical Society's first object was universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caste, or colour. She was anti-imperialist and opposed contemporary scientific racism. Second: the language and structure of her doctrine — hierarchically ordered races, an Aryan fifth as the apex of the present cycle, sub-race valuation — was taken up in early-twentieth-century Austria and Germany by Lanz von Liebenfels and Guido von List into the school later called Ariosophy, and through the Thule Society and Karl Maria Wiligut eventually reached National Socialist racial mysticism (Himmler's Ahnenerbe). The reception is documented in Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) and Joscelyn Godwin's Arktos (1996). Blavatsky's intent and what was later made of her language are both real, and a serious reader has to hold both at once.Editor