Blavatsky's Root Races in Our Genome

Abstract

The esoteric tradition holds that two humanities stood between us and the beginning, both of them in flesh and both of them our ancestors: the Lemurians of the Third Race and the Atlanteans of the Fourth. It has held this since 1888 and in older forms long before.

Genetics has now found two vanished human peoples living inside us, and only two: the Denisovans, whose inheritance gathers in the Indian and Pacific world, and the Neanderthals, who lie to the north and west. Two and two, with no third on either side to choose between.

The shape agrees as well as the count. The tradition has the Atlanteans coming out of Lemurian stock. The genome has both branches coming out of one parent population, one remaining east and one moving north and west.

This essay proposes that the Denisovans are the Lemurians and the Neanderthals are the Atlanteans, and follows the identification through the geography of Mu, through Blavatsky's naming of the Australians as the purest Third Race descendants, through the fire that took Lemuria and the water that took Atlantis, and through the sub-races of both. It states where the correspondence costs something, and it ends with two ideas about what the hybridization now under way may be restoring to us.

Where the claim comes from

We begin with a book published in 1888, and with the circumstance that its author presented it as something she had received. [1]

The Secret Doctrine appeared as commentary upon the Stanzas of Dzyan, and Helena Blavatsky maintained throughout that the material reached her through teachers, principally the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi [2]. The same sequence had already entered print five years earlier, in Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism of 1883 [3], drawn from that same correspondence. I mention the transmission at the outset because it bears upon what follows. The structure we shall be examining came through several hands across several years, and it is the structure, rather than the elaboration surrounding it, that turns out to have something in it.

The account runs as follows. Humanity passes through seven Root Races in succession. The first, the Polarian, possesses no physical body whatever. The second, the Hyperborean, remains subtle, though it has begun to gather. The third, the Lemurian, is where humanity arrives fully in flesh, upon a land lying across what we now call the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and it closes in fire. The fourth, the Atlantean, faces the Atlantic, and it closes in water. The fifth is our own.

The direction of that sequence deserves a moment of attention, since it runs contrary to what a modern reader arrives expecting. We are accustomed to a story in which our ancestors climb upward out of an animal condition. Here the movement runs the other way. Spirit descends into matter, and each race stands denser and more settled than the one before it. We came into these bodies by sinking into them.

And here we meet the circumstance that gives this essay its opening. By the account's own terms, the first two races left the physical world untouched, having possessed no physical part to leave behind. The record therefore becomes available for examination at precisely one moment, which is the moment it declares that bodies grew solid, and that moment is the Third Race. The doctrine specifies its own point of contact with the fossil and the genetic record, and it places that point exactly where such a record could begin to exist. Anyone wishing to test these claims against the evidence of the ground is told, by the claims themselves, where to start looking.

Rudolf Steiner took up this same material and published Cosmic Memory in 1904, in the Theosophical journal Lucifer-Gnosis [4], during the years when he served as General Secretary of the German Section of the Theosophical Society. He had read Blavatsky closely and worked within her organisation, and he departed from it in 1912 to found Anthroposophy. So his testimony stands within the tradition rather than beside it, and a reader should weigh it accordingly. What he adds is a second clairvoyant reading by a man of unusual capacity, differing from Blavatsky in many particulars while agreeing with her on the points this essay uses. He describes Lemurian bodies as still soft and unfinished, the ground beneath them thin and everywhere undermined by volcanic forces, with mighty volcanoes almost everywhere, and he holds that Lemuria closed through the working of that fire. [5]

A word is owed here about how this knowledge came down to us, and about its age, since a reader meeting it fresh might suppose the whole edifice to have been raised in 1888.

Blavatsky received it. She was emphatic upon that point throughout her life, and the men from whom she received it are named. They are the Mahatmas Morya and Koot Hoomi, adepts of the Himalayan brotherhood, and she first met Morya in London in 1851, recognising him as the figure who had appeared to her since childhood. They came to her in the body and they came to her out of it. Ramaswamier walked into Sikkim in 1882 to find Morya and met him upon the road, and afterward wrote that he took the man by the hand and found him solid flesh. [6] Others met Koot Hoomi in the same plain way, and many more met both of them in the projected body, which the tradition calls the mayavi-rupa. Their letters arrived by precipitation, the writing forming upon the paper with no hand to hold the pen, often inside sealed envelopes and often before witnesses. [7] So the line runs: an ancient teaching, held by living teachers, brought to a woman who could receive it, and set down partly from their instruction and partly from her own direct reading of the record.

Behind the teachers stands the Book of Dzyan, which she describes as manuscript rather than printed book, written in Senzar, a sacred tongue older than Sanskrit, and preserved in rock libraries among the spurs of the Himalayas. [8] The Stanzas of Dzyan are the oldest thing in The Secret Doctrine, and Blavatsky presents her book as commentary upon them.

Now, the two continents come to us wearing names, and the names have their own histories, which are worth a moment because one of them is quite remarkable.

The eastern continent is called Mu in the channeled and traditional material. Lemuria is a scientific name, and a recent one. In 1864 the zoologist Philip Sclater needed to explain how lemurs came to live both in Madagascar and in India with an ocean lying between them, and he proposed a sunken land in the Indian Ocean and called it Lemuria after the animals [9]. The animals themselves had been named a century earlier by Linnaeus, who took the word from the Latin lemures, the wandering spirits of the ancestral dead [10], because the creatures moved by night with slow and quiet steps. And the Romans kept a festival of that name. The Lemuria fell in May, and on those nights the head of each household rose in the dark and made offerings to the ancestral dead, that they might rest and depart in peace. [11]

So the word already carried its meaning before any naturalist reached for it. Lemuria is the rite of the ancestors. Sclater gave that name to a drowned land in the Indian Ocean; Haeckel, within a few years, proposed that same drowned land as the cradle of humanity [12]. Two naturalists, working from the distribution of a nocturnal animal and from evolutionary descent, arrived at a sunken continent in precisely the ocean the tradition names, and hung upon it a word meaning the honouring of the ancestral dead. I find that a striking piece of providence, and Blavatsky, writing in 1888, simply took the term that was already in the air and filled it with what she knew.

Atlantis comes to us through Plato, the Athenian philosopher of the fourth century before our era, whom most readers know for the image of the prisoners watching shadows upon the wall of a cave. He tells the Atlantis story in two dialogues, the Timaeus and the Critias, and he presents it as something handed down rather than invented, reaching the Athenian statesman Solon from the priests of Sais in Egypt. [13] So even at the earliest surviving telling, Atlantis arrives as transmitted knowledge with an older source standing behind it. The name itself has spread very widely: Atlas, the Atlantic, and, on the far shore, Aztlan, the ancestral homeland of the Mexica, in a language where atl is the word for water.

And the deepest layer lies further back than either name. The Hindu scriptures describe humanity as passing through a succession of world-ages called manvantaras [14]. Each has its own Manu, and a Manu is the first man of his age, the ancestor and lawgiver who carries life across the ending of one world into the beginning of the next, the figure who survives the flood and starts the race again. Successive humanities, each founded by its own first ancestor, each closing and giving way. That is precisely the architecture this essay sets out to explore, and it was written down in India many centuries before Blavatsky, upon a tradition older still, and she drew upon it openly. Mesopotamia keeps its own version, in the Sumerian King List with its kings who reigned before the flood for spans of many thousands of years [15], and in the flood story of Atrahasis and of Gilgamesh [16], where the humanity before the water stands apart from the humanity after it.

So the shape is very old, and it reaches us everywhere by revelation. Science arrived late and supplied a label for one of the two continents, and supplied it, as it happens, for the right ocean.

How this started

It began some way from Lemuria, and I set the route down here because the route belongs to the evidence.

I came to this through the channelers. The modern body of that material opens with Seth, spoken through Jane Roberts from 1963 [17], and continues with the Law of One, received through Carla Rueckert from 1981 [18], and with Bashar, spoken through Darryl Anka from 1984 [19]. Afterward came a great deal of Pleiadian material from many hands [20], and then, these several years, my own weekly work with the channeler Jim Charles [21].

These sources differ from one another in a hundred particulars, and upon one point a good many of them hold steady together: that humanity is a hybrid. They speak of genetic hybridization, and they mean by it precisely what a biologist means by it, the crossing of two lineages and the birth of offspring carrying both. They also describe several distinct crossings rather than one. The Law of One tells of a population brought from Mars into earthly incarnation, with the physical vehicle altered to receive them. [22] Bashar's own account places him as a Sassani, whose people arose from a crossing of human beings with the Greys, which is a separate lineage and a separate programme from the Martian one. [23] The Pleiadian material describes work of its own. And the material through Jim Charles holds that the crossing continues in our own day.

So the picture the channelers give is of a long and various enterprise, carried out by more than one people, over a great stretch of time.

And this picture arrives supported. A second body of testimony, gathered by quite other means and by people with no interest in channeling whatever, describes the same enterprise from the human end.

I mean the abduction accounts. John Mack, professor of psychiatry at Harvard and a Pulitzer winner [24], took up these cases in 1990 expecting to find psychopathology, and reported instead that he found none, and that his experiencers were ordinary people describing something that had happened to them. Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs assembled hundreds of further cases [25], [26]. And running through that literature is a particular and consistent thread: reproductive procedures. Ova taken from women and sperm from men. Pregnancies that begin and then, some weeks later, are gone. Children shown to their human mothers aboard the craft, children who look partly like them and partly like something else, and who are said to be theirs.

So we have two independent bodies of testimony describing one enterprise. One arrives by channeling and gives the purpose. The other arrives by recollection, often under hypnosis, from ordinary people who came to it by surprise, and gives the procedure. Both hold that human beings are being crossed with other lineages, and that the crossings produce children.

And if any of that is so, then it is happening in bodies, and bodies keep records.

This is where my own work has been. A hybridization event of the kind described would leave a very particular mark, and it is worth being exact about what the mark is. Every human being carries chromosomes in pairs, one of each pair from the mother and one from the father, and that is the whole rule of inheritance. Any sequence a person carries should therefore be traceable to one parent or the other. Sequence that belongs to neither is impossible under ordinary descent. So one looks for exactly that: variants present in a child and absent from both parents, insertions and replacements that have no parental source. That is what Starseed Genetics has been searching for, and it is a search conducted upon living people, in the present day.

The turn toward the old

There is a difficulty in that search, and a second difficulty standing behind it which is the more serious of the two.

The first is practical. An event happening now marks one genome. To see it at all you must read that person deeply and both parents besides, at considerable cost, and a single unexplained variant will be offered a dozen ordinary explanations before anyone grants it an extraordinary one.

The second is that even a clean finding would sit there mute. Suppose a variant turns up in a child that neither parent carries. What is it to be compared against? To say that a sequence came from elsewhere, one must know what elsewhere looks like, and there is no reference genome for elsewhere. The finding stays a curiosity, and curiosities persuade nobody.

What opened the way was a thought that began with Dean Radin.

In his book Real Magic, Radin described [27] how the Church dealt with power that arose outside itself. Magic within the bounds of the church was permitted, and he points out that the ceremony of the Eucharist is itself a magical practice, performed by a man anointed to perform it. Magic outside those bounds was another matter altogether. He calls it a heavy-handed way of keeping power inside the institution, and says that in enforcing their ideology they eliminated anybody who had alternative powers or visions. He gives the case of Joseph of Cupertino [28], who was seen levitating by thousands, was cleared by the Inquisition of any pact with the Devil, and was then moved by his superiors from one remote friary to another, away from the crowds.

Now, eliminated is a word with consequences when it is said of human beings and repeated across many centuries. Whoever is killed before they have children leaves nothing behind them. That is selection, in the plain biological sense, and it works upon any trait that draws the attention of the executioner. Run that pressure long enough and humanity would lose, by wholly ordinary genetics, what it formerly carried. The capacity would thin out of the population as any punished trait thins.

Now set beside that the message which comes through the channeled material more consistently than any other. Across sources agreeing on very little else, the word is restoration. Telepathy is returning. The old capacities are coming back to us. And the hybridization work is described as part of how they return. [29]

Put the two together and a definite proposition appears. The crossings now under way are restoring to the human genome the psychic variants that selection removed from it.

That proposition can be checked, and checking it requires exactly one thing: the older genome. The genome of the people who carried those variants before the long pressure began. Which is to say, a Lemurian genome and an Atlantean one.

We have no such thing, and there my reasoning halted for a while.

Then it occurred to me that we might have it already, sequenced and sitting in the databases under another name. That the ancient genomes I wanted might be among the ghost populations.

Ghost populations

So I needed an ancient human genome, and the obvious objection is that ancient genomes come from ancient bones. Whether such bones exist is a question I set aside here. Some may await discovery, some may have been found and set apart from public study, and the history of archaeology gives grounds for that second possibility which I have no wish to argue in these pages. What matters for my purposes is simpler: bones were never what I was looking for.

What I had in mind was the other half of the hybridization account. The sources describe visitors who settled, who took a place among us, who ruled and taught and were taken for gods, and who had children with human women. Every mythology carries them. The Elohim and the sons of God who saw that the daughters of men were fair. The gods of Sumer and of Greece with their half-human offspring. And leaders of that kind, holding rank across generations, would contribute at a rate no ordinary person could match, seeding their line widely into the population beneath them.

That is what I expected to find, and it has a definite genetic form. Integration means procreation, procreation across generations means descendants, and descendants carry sequence. So the trace I wanted was never in the ground at all. It was in the living, and the prior question became this.

Can a vanished people be detected in the DNA of the living?

They can, and the method is worth following step by step, because each step yields something we shall use again later.

First, sequence divergence gives us a clock. Mutations accumulate at a roughly steady rate, so the number of differences between two DNA sequences measures the time since their lineages separated. Geneticists call that the coalescence time, the point at which two sequences trace back to a common ancestor. Two Europeans coalesce recently. A modern human and a Neanderthal coalesce somewhere beyond five hundred thousand years. [30] What this buys us: a lineage split can be dated from sequence alone, with no fossil required.

Second, the clock can be run on small pieces rather than whole genomes. The unit here is the haplotype, which is a block of DNA inherited as a single piece, a run of variants sitting along one segment of chromosome that pass down the generations together. Run the divergence clock haplotype by haplotype across a population and most of them coalesce where they should. A few do not. Certain haplotypes, present in some people and absent in others, coalesce with the rest of human variation around a million years back, which is several times deeper than the ordinary run of human haplotypes. [31] What this buys us: specific blocks of DNA can be flagged as foreign, and located precisely on the chromosome.

Third, haplotype length tells us when the foreign block arrived. Recombination cuts inherited blocks smaller in every generation, since chromosomes cross over and exchange material during the formation of eggs and sperm. A haplotype resident in our lineage for a million years would have been reduced to fragments long ago. These are long. [32] What this buys us: the foreign DNA entered recently, from a population that had been separate for a very long time. That process has a name. It is introgression, meaning the flow of genes into one population from another after a long separation.

Fourth, the donor can often be named. Compare the introgressed haplotype against the archaic reference genomes now sequenced. If it matches the Neanderthal genome, the donor was Neanderthal. If it matches the Denisovan, Denisovan. What this buys us: a vanished people can be identified inside living human beings without ever excavating them.

And fifth, sometimes the haplotype matches nothing. Not Neanderthal, not Denisovan, not any archaic genome yet recovered anywhere. The donor was real, since the DNA is there and long and divergent, and the donor has never been sampled.

That is a ghost population: a people known solely by the haplotypes they left in the living. Several are on record. One contributed to West African genomes. [33] A deeper one contributed to the Denisovans themselves. [34] At least one further donor is unaccounted for in Island Southeast Asia. [35]

And that is the answer to the question I came in with. Ancient populations can be detected, dated, and in some cases identified, from living people alone. The bones are beside the point. These donors are already in the literature, already partly sequenced, and claimed for nothing.

Which is where the idea arrived in its final shape. Some of these ghosts may be the humanities the record has been describing all along.

The Denisovans

Of all the ghosts, one has a name, and that is where I began.

In 2008 a fragment of a child's finger bone came out of Denisova Cave, in the Altai mountains of southern Siberia. In 2010 the team under Svante Paabo drew a genome from it [36], and that genome belonged to a kind of human nobody had known. They were named for the cave. Sixteen years afterward the physical remains still amount to very little: a few teeth, a jaw and a rib from a cave upon the Tibetan plateau [37], and a jawbone that a fishing trawler brought up from the sea floor off Taiwan [38]. The type specimen of an entire kind of human being is a fingertip.

So the Denisovans are a ghost who acquired a reference genome. Nearly everything known of them is read from the haplotypes they left in people now living, which is the method set out above, applied to a donor who can at last be named.

The first question the genome settled was where they stood in relation to ourselves and to the Neanderthals. Lay the three side by side, count the places where they differ, and the Denisovan comes out nearer to the Neanderthal [39] than either of them stands to us. Two lineages, sharing an ancestor with one another more recently than either shares one with our own line. Neither is our ancestor. They are cousins, and they are cousins to each other. [40]

We can put a floor under when the western branch went west, because a heap of skeletons in a cave shaft in northern Spain, four hundred and thirty thousand years old, is already on the Neanderthal side of that divide [41].

And that is why the Denisovans were the natural place to begin. They had a name, a sequence, and a measured distribution across the living world. And nobody had matched them to anything at all in the esoteric record. An unclaimed people, with their evidence already gathered.

The first question was which Race, and geography answers it without difficulty.

Denisovan haplotypes fall below detection in Europe. Across most of Asia they run at a fraction of one percent. And then, in one region, they rise sharply: New Guinea, Aboriginal Australia, and the Negrito peoples of the Philippines, where they reach some five percent of the genome [42].

That is the Indian and Pacific ocean world. That is where the tradition places Mu.

And with the Third Race in hand, the second question follows on its own. If the Third stands findable, the Fourth should stand findable also. The record tells us what to look for. It must be a near relation of the Lemurians, since the Atlanteans came out of Lemurian stock. And it must lie north and west of them, toward the Atlantic.

A close relative of the Denisovans, living in Europe. Which describes the Neanderthals, and describes nothing else.

So the two accounts may now be set beside one another, and the first thing worth noticing is how few pieces there are to arrange.

The archaic record names two vanished human populations that are sequenced, identified, and found inside people now living. Denisovans and Neanderthals. That is the whole list.

The esoteric record names two vanished humanities standing between us and the beginning, both of them physical, both of them ancestral to us. Lemurians and Atlanteans. That is also the whole list.

Two and two, with no third on either side to choose between.

And the shape agrees as well as the count. The Secret Doctrine, volume two, says the Atlanteans were developed from a nucleus of Northern Lemurian Third Race men. Steiner says only a small part of Lemurian humanity was capable of further development, and from that part the Atlanteans were formed. Both describe one people, part of which broke away, moved north and west, and became a second people. The genome describes one population, part of which broke away, moved north and west, and became a second population.

So the identification is very nearly forced. There is no long list here from which a favourite has been selected.

The Denisovans may be the Lemurians who stayed. The Neanderthals may be the Atlanteans who left.

That is the hypothesis. What follows is the expansion, going back and forth between the two bodies of evidence to see how far the agreement carries.

Neanderthals and Atlanteans

I want to stop here, because this identification takes some getting used to, and it took me some getting used to.

Neanderthal and Atlantis are both household words, and they live in entirely separate rooms of the mind. Neanderthal belongs to science. It calls up a museum diorama, a heavy brow, a spear, a failed branch of the family. Atlantis belongs to myth. It calls up a golden civilization, towers, wisdom, and the sea closing over all of it. I doubt the two have ever appeared in the same sentence before.

Under this hypothesis they are the same people.

The reason that sounds wrong is worth facing at once, because it is the whole of the resistance. We were taught a brutish Neanderthal, and an Atlantean is supposed to be advanced. The two pictures refuse each other.

But the brutish Neanderthal is a Victorian construction, and the field has been dismantling it for thirty years. Their brains were the size of ours or larger. [43] They buried their dead. They used pigment. They wore pierced shell ornaments. They made birch tar adhesive, which requires heating bark to a controlled temperature with the air kept out, a process nobody stumbles into. [44] And at Bruniquel, in southern France, they built rings out of broken stalagmites three hundred metres inside a cave system, in absolute darkness, a hundred and seventy six thousand years ago [45].

So the picture that makes this identification look absurd is a picture the science has already given up.

One caution about names before going further. Blavatsky assigns the Palaeolithic cave men of Europe to Atlantean descent, and among them she names Cro-Magnon. We should hold that lightly. In 1888 the naming of these fossils was still unsettled, and what she called Cro-Magnon need be no reliable guide to what we call Cro-Magnon now. What she is plainly writing about is the cave men of Europe. Which of them she had in view is a question rather than a given.

What Blavatsky gave us, and how long it took us to read it

Blavatsky drew upon two kinds of source, and she was open about both.

One was reading, and she read enormously. Plato is discussed at length in her pages, the Timaeus and the Critias, and with him Solon and the priests of Sais, so that the Atlantis she takes up arrives already as a chain of transmission rather than as a story with an author. She had the Puranas and the manvantaras, the succession of world ages each with its Manu. She had the whole mystical literature of Europe and Asia. And she had the archaeology of her own day: Lubbock, who divided the Stone Age into Palaeolithic and Neolithic in 1865 [46]; Lyell, who established the antiquity of man in 1863 [47]; de Mortillet, who argued that a whole Palaeolithic population had been replaced by a Neolithic one [48]; and the long dispute over the Neanderthal skull.

The other source was the Book of Dzyan, the instruction of Morya and Koot Hoomi, and her own reading of the Akashic record.

She wove the two together into a single account, and in that account the Palaeolithic cave men of Europe are the descendants of Atlantis. She gives them a whole section of volume two. She says that across the entire vast period assigned to the Chipped Stone Age progress is almost wholly absent, and she reads that as a cyclic descent, the weight of Atlantean karma resting on stocks carried far from their origin. She says Palaeolithic man at last makes room for his successor and disappears almost entirely from the scene.

She published that in 1888, and nobody took it up.

Then it sat for a hundred and thirty-eight years while the evidence came in, one piece at a time, every piece of it after her death.

Radiometric dating arrived in the twentieth century and gave the Mousterian a run of well over a hundred thousand years with very little change in it [49], which is a far longer stasis than any Victorian imagined and remains among the hardest things about the Neanderthals to account for. Her period of no progress turns out to be measurable, and it is enormous.

Ancient DNA arrived in our own century and showed that these cave men were a separate people rather than a rougher variety of ourselves, which is what her account requires and what her contemporaries mostly denied.

The replacement she described was confirmed. They disappear, and we are what follows them.

And the brutish Neanderthal of the schoolbooks was dismantled and replaced by a people with brains the size of our own or larger, who buried their dead, worked pigment, wore pierced shells, cooked birch tar by a controlled process, and built rings of stalagmite three hundred metres deep inside a cave in total darkness.

Every one of those findings fits what she set down, and every one of them arrived after she was gone.

So the message was delivered in 1888. What has taken until now is our being in any position to read it.

Lemuria, and where the tradition puts it

Let us begin inside the teaching rather than outside it, and ask first what the esoteric sources actually say about where Mu lay.

Blavatsky, in the second volume of The Secret Doctrine, gives it a great reach. Lemuria runs from Madagascar through Ceylon and Sumatra, takes in Australia and Tasmania, and extends far into the Pacific beyond Easter Island. Northward it reaches further than is usually remembered. She writes that Sweden and Norway had formed part of ancient Lemuria on the European side, and that eastern and western Siberia and Kamchatka had belonged to it upon the Asiatic side. [50] The Theosophical summaries of her geography run the continent from Tibet and Mongolia down to Ceylon before turning east to Australia and the Pacific and west to Madagascar. Australia, the islands of the Pacific, and a piece of what is now California she names as surviving fragments of that ground.

She is specific, too, about where in that great territory the Third Race finished its passage into solid physical bodies. She places that transformation in the northern regions, naming the Bering Straits and what dry land then stood in Central Asia, and notes that the climate was semi-tropical even in the Arctic in those days.

Steiner, reading the Akashic record for himself and publishing Cosmic Memory in 1904, sets it south of Asia, east of Africa, and north of Australia, and says the volcanic fire took that land.

Scott-Elliot published The Lost Lemuria in the same year, working from Leadbeater's clairvoyant sight [51], and printed maps of it: a vast southern continent spread across the Indian and Pacific oceans, reaching from the eastern coast of Africa across to South America.

Cayce, in trance, places Mu in the South Pacific, and names remnants of it both among the Pacific islands and in Lower California and the Death Valley country [52].

Kryon, through Lee Carroll, centres Lemuria upon Hawaii, holding the present islands to be the surviving peaks of it, and singles out Kauai [53].

The Telos material, through Aurelia Louise Jones, calls Lemuria the motherland, spread across the Pacific, and has its survivors entering the mountain at Shasta in northern California [54].

Six sources, given across a century and a quarter, by seers who worked in different countries, in different languages, under different teachers, and by methods they described differently. They differ at the edges. They argue about how far the land reached toward Africa and toward the Americas, and about where the last of it went under. They agree upon the ocean. Every one of them puts Mu in the Indian and Pacific world, and not one of them puts it anywhere else.

And inside that agreement, Blavatsky says one thing sharper than the rest.

She names the Australians as the only pure and direct descendants of the Third Race, and holds the remainder of humanity to be of mixed Lemuro-Atlantean descent. That was written in 1888.

Consider what the learning of her day would have counselled. Victorian anthropology ranked the peoples of the world and set the Australians at the bottom of its ranking. To assign the purest surviving line of an ancient humanity to them inverted the whole scale her contemporaries were using. Egypt was there for the taking, and India, and Tibet, and the Andes, each with ruins and prestige and an air of lost wisdom about it, each the obvious choice for anybody assembling a story meant to be believed. She named the one people her age held in least regard.

Which sets the question this paper is asking. If the Third Race left descendants among the living, where in the genome are they?

The map answers on two counts.

The Denisovan bones lie in the Altai of southern Siberia, on the Tibetan plateau at Baishiya, and in the Taiwan Strait. Every one of those sites falls inside the Lemuria Blavatsky drew, and the two oldest of them, the Altai and Tibet, fall in the Central Asian north where she places the making of the physical Third Race.

The living inheritance points to the other end of the same continent. Denisovan DNA falls below detection in Europe. Across most of Asia it runs at a fraction of one percent. In New Guinea, in Aboriginal Australia, and among the Negrito peoples of the Philippines it rises to about five percent of the genome, which is the highest archaic fraction carried by anybody now living, higher than any population's Neanderthal share anywhere on earth.

So the bones sit toward the north of Lemuria and the descendants sit in its tropical heart, and both lie within the one continent as the seers described it.

And the split between them has a plain physical cause. Bone keeps in cold dry northern caves and perishes in wet tropical ground, where everything organic goes with it: wood, fibre, hide, cordage, boats, houses. A maritime people build almost wholly in materials that rot. So the northern Lemurians left remains and the southern Lemurians left none, and the difference records what the ground did with them rather than where the people were.

And the people Blavatsky singled out in 1888, against the whole grain of her age, are the people carrying the most.

There was no Denisovan then to be right or wrong about. There was no way to measure archaic ancestry in anybody, and there would be none for a hundred and twenty years. Nothing in the science of her day pointed toward Australia, and a good deal in the prejudice of her day pointed away from it.

So far as I can see, that one came by divination and by nothing else.

Why the bones are in the wrong country

The Denisovan ancestry maximum is in New Guinea and the Philippines. The Denisovan fossils are in the Altai, in Tibet, and one jaw a trawler pulled off Taiwan. The population that actually did the interbreeding, the one that put five percent into Papuans, has yielded no bone anywhere in the region it must have occupied. It exists as a signal in its descendants and nothing else. [55]

Taphonomy accounts for that without special pleading. Cold dry karst in the Altai holds readable DNA in a finger bone for eighty thousand years. [56] Humid tropical lowland destroys bone in a few thousand, and destroys wood, fibre, hide, cordage and boats in less, which is the entire material culture of a maritime people. [57] And at the last glacial maximum the coastline lay a hundred and twenty metres lower, across a subcontinent, Sundaland, joining Sumatra and Java and Borneo to the mainland. [58] The sea did not cover that landscape. It took it. Whoever lived on it is under the Java Sea.

So the fossil distribution maps preservation conditions rather than habitation, and the conditions permitted preservation only in the north. For a homeland described as warm, coastal, maritime and finally drowned, genetic loudness with physical silence is the expected signature. A tidy row of tropical skeletons would be the anomaly.

Fire and water

Blavatsky does not say that Lemuria burned and Atlantis drowned as two separate items of news. She states it as a law. At the close of every root race there comes a cataclysm, in turn by fire or water. Alternating. Fire, then water, then fire. [59]

Steiner gives the Lemurian half in detail: a land thin and undermined everywhere by volcanic forces, mighty volcanoes almost everywhere, destroyed in the end by that fire. [60] Atlantis ended in water, and the flood is there in Plato and in every telling that has followed him. [61]

Now put the two peoples on a map.

The Denisovan world is Island Southeast Asia and the western Pacific rim. That is the Ring of Fire. Not merely volcanic: the most volcanically active ground on the surface of this planet, and it has been for the entire span in which either lineage existed. Toba, in Sumatra, the largest eruption in two million years [62], detonated in the middle of the Denisovan homeland.

The Neanderthal world is Europe and western Asia, and nothing in its history is written in fire. It is written in water. Glacial cycles governed that world, and when the ice let go the sea came up and rewrote the map of it. The European continental shelf went under. Doggerland, dry land across which you could have walked from Britain to Denmark, is the floor of the North Sea. [63]

East is fire. West is water. In that order, which is the order the rule specifies.

And consider what would have had to be known to arrange that. Plate tectonics was not accepted by geologists until the 1960s; before then continental drift was a crank position. [64] The drowned landscape of Doggerland was not seriously mapped until later still. In 1888 there was no Ring of Fire in the modern sense, no ice-age sea level curve, and no reason on Earth to associate the western Pacific margin with volcanism and northwestern Europe with inundation. The correspondence was not available to be built.

Neither Race was one people

There is a correction to make here, and making it will improve the picture rather than damage it.

I have been writing as though Lemuria and Atlantis were each a single people, and the teaching says nothing of the sort. Every Root Race divides into seven sub-races, and the sub-races are peoples in their own right, with their own countries, their own periods, and their own characters.

For Atlantis the account is remarkably full. Scott-Elliot set it out in The Story of Atlantis in 1896 [65], and printed maps of four separate periods to go with it. He worked from the clairvoyant reading of Charles Leadbeater, an English Theosophist who held that he could read the akashic record directly, and who supplied the sight while Scott-Elliot did the writing. [66] He names the seven: the Rmoahal, the Tlavatli, the Toltec, the First Turanian, the Original Semite, the Akkadian, and the Mongolian. [67] He explains his own naming principle, which is worth knowing. Wherever the ethnologists of his day had found traces of one of these peoples he adopted whatever name the ethnologists had given it, for simplicity. For the first two, where science had found nothing to seize upon, he used the names by which they called themselves.

And he gives each of them a place. The Rmoahal arose four to five million years ago, while large portions of the southern continent of Lemuria were still standing and Atlantis had yet to reach its full extent. [68] The Toltecs came up near the western coast of Atlantis and ruled it at its height, and their reach carried into Mexico and Peru. The Turanians began east of the Tlavatli mountains and colonised eastward. The Original Semites arose on the northeastern peninsula, the country we now call Scotland and Ireland. The Akkadians came later, east of Atlantis, a sea-going people who took the rule from the Semites. The Mongolians were born on the plains of Tartary, which is the old European name for the steppe belt running across Central Asia, and they came out of the Turanian stock, and Scott-Elliot says they never set foot on Atlantis at all.

Seven peoples, then, spread across a hemisphere and across an immense stretch of time, some of them never setting foot on the mother country.

Which sharpens what we are claiming rather than loosening it. The hypothesis stands: the Neanderthals are Atlanteans and the Denisovans are Lemurians. What the sub-races add is that neither could ever have been the whole of its Race. A Root Race is seven peoples across an immense span of time, and any single line carries only its own portion of that.

And the doctrine gives Lemuria its seven as well, although the sources describe them far less fully than the Atlantean ones. That thinning is itself worth noticing. The further back a Race stands, the sparser the account of it, in the esoteric literature exactly as in the ground. What is given clearly is the seventh Lemurian sub-race, which Scott-Elliot describes as the stock from which the Atlantean nucleus was drawn and kept guarded. [69]

So what we have in each case is one authentic branch, descended from one of the sub-races, which lasted long enough to meet our own kind and leave something of itself in us. That is what the teaching leads one to expect. A Race closes, most of its lines close with it, and here and there a branch runs on past the ending and reaches the Race that follows. The Denisovans are that branch for Lemuria, and the Neanderthals that branch for Atlantis: true representatives, and the surviving portion rather than the whole.

Most of both Races, on this reading, left us nothing we can presently see.

And the genetics has arrived at the same untidiness from its own direction, which is what one would want.

The Denisovans, by genetic analysis, are themselves not one population. The work here is the same work described earlier: archaic haplotypes are pulled out of the genomes of living people, their divergence is measured to give a coalescence time, and their length is measured to date their arrival. Applied to Papuans, that analysis recovers haplotypes from two distinct Denisovan lineages whose coalescence with one another sits at more than three hundred and fifty thousand years, meaning those two donor populations had been separate from each other for that long before either of them met our ancestors. A third Denisovan lineage, distinct again, turns up by the same method in East Asians. [70]

So the genetics gives several Denisovan peoples, long divided, each feeding a different set of living descendants. That is a finding from sequence, arrived at by geneticists with no interest in Root Races, and it stands independent of everything the seers said. A Race with seven sub-races should look exactly like that.

Before Blavatsky

A teaching given by divination is given more than once. It comes to whoever can receive it, in whatever century and whatever language, and one would expect to find it laid down repeatedly across the world. So I went looking for the earlier tellings, searching in English, in French, in Spanish, in Russian, in Chinese, in Hebrew, and in the Tamil and Sanskrit material.

They are there, and they run in three streams.

The Hebrew stream, which carries the architecture whole

Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism, and its central book is the Zohar, the Book of Splendour, which appeared in Spain in the thirteenth century and is attributed to Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai of the second. Behind it stands the Talmud, the great compilation of rabbinic teaching completed around the sixth century. Both carry humanities before our own.

The Talmud, in the tractate Hagigah at folio 13b, speaks of nine hundred and seventy-four generations who came before Adam [71]. The number is exact and it has occupied commentators ever since.

The Zohar is more specific still, and what it says is remarkable in our context. It states that before the coming of Adam there were many generations of people in the world, that they were like monkeys, and that there was no true human image in them [72]. Elsewhere it teaches that the Holy One created worlds and destroyed them, and reads the tohu and bohu of the second verse of Genesis, the without-form and void, as the condition of those former worlds.

So: successive humanities, before ours, in bodily form, lacking the finished human shape, and destroyed at the close of their age.

The framework holding this together is the doctrine of the cosmic Sabbaticals, the shmitot. As the land rests every seventh year in the Torah, so creation runs in seven great cycles, each governed by one of the lower seven sefirot, the divine emanations. Each cycle carries its own humanity. The one before ours stood under Hesed, which is mercy. The Ma'arekhet Elokut, an early Kabbalistic classic, states that the Talmud's nine hundred and seventy-four generations belong to that previous cycle [73]. The doctrine appears in the Tikunei Zohar and is carried by Nachmanides, by Rabbeinu Bahya, by Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco, by Recanati, by the Radbaz, and by many after them [74].

And the Kabbalists make the connection we are making. The reason so many peoples remember a lost and advanced civilization before our own, they say, is that there was one, in the cycle before this.

One dissent belongs in the record, and it is instructive. Rabbi Haim Vital, who set down the teachings of the Ari, rejected the Sabbaticals and held that the pre-Adamic worlds were spiritual throughout and never came into physical manifestation [75]. Which is precisely the Theosophical account of the first two Root Races, the Polarian and the Hyperborean, who left nothing findable because there was nothing physical to leave. The two traditions disagree about where in the sequence matter arrives, and they agree that it arrives.

There is one further passage worth having. At the ninth folio of the first volume the Zohar describes seven lands, and says that when Cain was banished after the killing of Abel he was exiled to one of them, called Arka, where he took a wife from among the people living there [76]. Rav Hamnuna Saba is explicit that the inhabitants of those other lands are human beings and not creatures of some other order. A separate land, a separate people already living on it, and a crossing between them.

So consider what this stream supplies, set beside the others.

The Puranas give the architecture, ages in succession each with its founding ancestor, and say very little about bodies. The channeled material gives the bodies in detail and arrives late. The Zohar gives both, and gives them in the thirteenth century.

It says there were peoples before Adam. It says they were in the world, which is to say on the earth and in flesh. It says they were like monkeys and that the true human image was absent in them, which is a description of beings who are human and are not us. And it says they ended.

That is precisely the category this essay concerns. Our own kind preceded by other human kinds, bodily, near to us and falling short of us, and afterward gone.

The Cain passage adds the other half. A land apart, a people already established upon it, and children born between them. Which is introgression, set down in Spain some seven hundred years ago.

And the Sabbaticals supply the reason for the whole pattern. A humanity to each cycle, each closing when its age closes.

One point of chronology should be kept straight here. The doctrine of the pre-Adamic generations and of the cosmic Sabbaticals is medieval and older, and it stands entirely on its own. The identification of that lost world with Atlantis or with Mu is made by Kabbalistic teachers of our own time, and could hardly be otherwise, since the word Mu did not exist in any European language until 1864. What the medieval sources give is the earlier humanity. Naming it is later work.

What the Hebrew stream withholds is the map. It places these peoples in time and in kind and leaves the geography alone. For the geography we go back to the seers of the Indian and Pacific oceans, Blavatsky and Steiner and Scott-Elliot and Cayce and Kryon and Telos, whose agreement upon that ocean was set out earlier.

The French stream, which is where the name came from

Mu is the name most often used for the eastern continent in the channeled material, and it entered European writing by an unexpected road.

Charles-Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg was a French abbe and one of the founders of Mesoamerican studies, who travelled in Mexico and Guatemala and recovered manuscripts that would otherwise have been lost. In 1869 and 1870 he was working on the Troano Codex, a Maya screenfold book now known as part of the Madrid Codex, using a phonetic alphabet recorded in the sixteenth century by Bishop Diego de Landa. He read one sign as Mu, and took it to name a land that had been submerged in a catastrophe. [77]

The reading has since been shown mistaken. The de Landa alphabet is unreliable, Maya script being largely logographic rather than alphabetic, and the codex has turned out to be an almanac. But the name entered the literature there, out of a Maya manuscript, eighteen years before The Secret Doctrine. Augustus Le Plongeon took it up in the 1880s [78], and James Churchward carried it into the twentieth century and moved it to the Pacific [79].

The second Frenchman matters more. Louis Jacolliot was a lawyer and colonial judge who served at Pondicherry, the French enclave on the southeastern coast of India, in the Tamil country. He learned Sanskrit, collected local traditions, and in 1873 published Les Fils de Dieu, the Sons of God, describing a sunken land he called Rutas [80], drawn from what he had gathered in India. The Tamil poets had long remembered a drowning of their own southern coast, and Jacolliot took that memory of lost land in the Indian Ocean and enlarged it into a continent. He expanded the account the following year in Les Peuples et les continents disparus [81], the Vanished Peoples and Continents. Blavatsky cites him.

So the geography reached her from the Indian Ocean by way of a Frenchman sitting on its shore.

The Sanskrit stream, which supplies the architecture

The Puranas are a body of Sanskrit scripture, compiled over many centuries, which carry the traditional cosmology and the histories of the gods. [82] They describe time as divided into manvantaras, a word built from Manu and antara, meaning the interval of a Manu.

A Manu is the first man of an age, the ancestor and lawgiver of a humanity, the figure who survives the destruction of one world and begins the next. The best-known is Manu Vaivasvata, who is warned by a fish, builds a vessel, and rides out the flood, which is the Indian telling of a story found across the world. [83]

Each manvantara has its own Manu, and each closes and gives way to the one following. Fourteen of them make a kalpa, a day of Brahma. [84] So the architecture is a succession of humanities, each with its own founding ancestor, each ending and being replaced.

That is the shape this essay is examining, and it was written down in India long before any of the rest of this existed. Blavatsky drew on it openly. [85]

What the other languages gave

The Russian material carries one detail worth having, since Blavatsky was Russian and the Russian summaries of her geography preserve her northern reach, which the English accounts often drop. It is the reach already described, taking in Siberia and Kamchatka and running to Norway.

The Chinese material has a curiosity attached to it. The term used is Mu dalu, the Mu continent, and it arrived in Chinese in the twentieth century through Churchward, so it is downstream rather than independent. [86] But the Chinese writers on it repeatedly make an observation of their own: that the same symbols and customs recur in Egypt, Burma, India, Japan, China, the Pacific islands, Central and South America, and among the tribes of North America. Whatever one makes of the conclusion they draw, the observation stands on its own and belongs in any account of these matters.

What this adds up to

The teaching was given many times before it was given to Blavatsky, and the separate givings agree.

The Talmud and the Zohar carried successive humanities before our own, in bodies, without the finished human form, each age closing and giving way. [87]

The Puranas carried the architecture of the manvantaras, each age with its founding ancestor. [88]

And the name Mu came into European hands from a Maya codex in 1869, while the geography came from the Tamil country by way of a French judge in 1873, and the word Lemuria came from an English zoologist counting lemurs, carrying with it the Roman festival of the ancestral dead. [89]

Blavatsky received the whole of it and set it down as one account, which is what a transmission looks like when it finally arrives complete.

Where it breaks

Two places, and I would rather state them than have them found.

The first is where Atlantis began. Blavatsky puts the nucleus in the north, out in the Atlantic. Scott-Elliot, writing later and second-hand through Leadbeater, puts it in the tropics, on land where Ghana and Nigeria are now. Steiner names no place but says the region was hot, which sides with Scott-Elliot. And Neanderthals were never in tropical West Africa.

The sub-race structure absorbs part of this, since a race divided into seven is not expected to have one point of origin, and the deeply divergent North African lineages recovered at Taforalt in Morocco [90] and Takarkori in Libya are a serious candidate for a southern component [91]. Blavatsky's own named Atlantean remnants scatter across both: the Guanches of the Canary Islands were North African Berber in origin, with their closest ancient relatives in the Taforalt-related populations [92], which puts them squarely in the African column. But this is not resolved, and I am not going to pretend it is.

The second is cleaner and it cuts. If Atlantis was centred on Europe, Neanderthal ancestry ought to be highest in Europeans. It is not. It is slightly higher in East Asians. [93] The argument here needs only global dominance, which holds, so nothing collapses. But it removes the one clean confirmation that was sitting there available, and its absence is a fact about the world rather than a fact about my presentation of it.

The state of this

I call this a hypothesis rather than a result, because the territory it covers contains insufficient data to support even the dream of being a result.

It is days old. One incomplete traverse of the esoteric corpus stands behind it, and a great deal of channeled material on Lemuria and Atlantis has not been read at all. A second and more systematic pass is planned, along with fresh channeling aimed at the specific gaps, particularly the number and location of the Atlantean nuclei.

We are in the position of explorers who have mapped one river and can do no more than indicate the mouths of the others running into it. What it would take to turn this into evidence is not yet known, and it is more work than one person can do.

What each Race brings

The Races are not only a sequence of peoples. Each brings one faculty of the human being into existence, and when it is established the Race closes and hands on. Setting that sequence out is worth the space, because it is where this paper ends up.

The Third Race, and the height of the faculty

Lemuria is where mind arrives. Steiner puts the moment precisely: humanity became ready to receive Manas in the third race, in the middle of the Lemurian period. [94] Before that there were bodies without self-conscious thought in them. The Theosophical account names the beings who brought it, the Manasaputras, the Sons of Mind, who had passed through the human stage in earlier ages. [95]

And Lemuria is where the psychic faculty stands at its highest, which is worth dwelling on, because the usual assumption runs the other way.

They had no speech. They communicated by direct thought, one to another, and language came afterward as the faculty began to fade. [96] Steiner describes the Lemurian body as still soft and malleable, not yet finished into the fixed form ours has. [97]

The third eye was theirs. Blavatsky treats it as a Third Race organ, the eye of the Cyclops of the old stories, functional and outward-looking, and she has it beginning to close only afterward, as the race grew dense and the outer eyes took over. The pineal gland is what remains of it. [98]

And out of that wordlessness came the magic word. Steiner is specific about this and it is the most concrete thing in the whole account. He places it at the opening of the Fourth Race, in the first Atlantean sub-race: the word of the Rmoahals, he says, not only had meaning but also power, so that a spoken word developed a power like that of the thing it named. [99] Sound doing work in the world, not sound describing it. He traces the inheritance forward from there: the Tlavatlis still possessed it. As ordinary language came forward, knowledge of the magic word was gradually lost. By the time of the Toltecs it had less and less effect upon the outside world, and a few kept it afterward as an art. [100]

That is a description of a faculty in decline across three Races, and the decline begins the moment speech begins.

The Fourth Race, and the turn toward feeling

Atlantis develops kama, which is feeling and desire, and its psychism is coloured by that.

The Theosophical account calls the Fourth the first fully human Race, the one in which the physical body consolidated and reached its finished form. Intellect began in it, and speech with it. [101]

The psychic gifts were still very great. Blavatsky writes that the Atlanteans were born with a sight which embraced all living things, and adds that it was independent of both distance and material obstacle. [102] Remote viewing, in a sentence, in 1888.

Steiner's account is the fuller one and it is worth having in detail. The soul-powers of those people, he says, were of a different nature from ours. Their perception was pictorial and dreamlike rather than rational, a living imagination rather than a faculty of argument. [103] They held clairvoyant and magical powers, and those powers were what they built with. The remark of his that has stayed with me longest is made of the Lemurians and carries forward to their descendants: such a man built without engineering knowledge, on the basis of a faculty of imagination which acted with the sureness of a kind of instinct, seeing directly how much a tree trunk would bear and where a stone would sit and where it would not. [104] Their science was psychic and it was applied.

That is the part of the account I keep returning to, so it is worth setting out properly.

What they worked with was the life force itself, the etheric energy latent in living things, and specifically the germinal energy held in seeds. Steiner says they knew how to put the germinating power of organisms into the service of their technology. They stored seed in quantity and drew the force out of it, and the vessels they built with it floated a short distance above the ground rather than flying as ours do. [105]

He adds a condition that makes it intelligible. Neither their bodies nor the air around them were as dense as ours. The atmosphere was thicker, the water thinner, and the whole world more answerable to the working of will upon it. [106] A technology of that kind requires a world of that kind, and both faded together.

Scott-Elliot, working from Leadbeater's sight, gives the same picture from a different angle. He calls the earliest motive power personal vril, the force carried in the operator rather than in the machine, and says that later this was replaced by something generated mechanically, of an etheric nature and undiscovered by science. His airships were built to be driven by it. [107]

And the same mastery went further than transport. Steiner has the Atlantean drawing on the life force in his own body in a way no modern body can, and using his physical powers in an entirely different way because of it. [108] Scott-Elliot has their agricultural schools working the same knowledge upon plants, and credits them with the making of the banana out of a wild seed-filled thing like an elongated melon, by centuries of guided selection. [109]

So the picture is consistent across two independent sights: a civilization whose engineering was the direct handling of vital force, in machines, in medicine, in agriculture, and in the length of a human life.

They kept mystery centres. Steiner says of the earlier ones that they were educational and scientific institutions at the same time, and he is careful to say that what was cultivated in them was not really religion but divine wisdom and art. There were seven of them, the Atlantean oracles. [110]

And the Race fell through the misuse of exactly these powers. The Theosophical literature is unanimous on that point, and Blavatsky has the last Atlantean island going under with the sorcerers still on it. [111]

So: the faculty at Lemurian height was active, spoken, world-affecting. At Atlantean height it was vast and increasingly passive, a seeing that came rather than a seeing commanded, and it curdled.

The Fifth Race, and the price

Ours develops manas, the intellect, and the price is named by Steiner without softening. The pictorial, dreamlike perception recedes as reasoning comes forward. The two cannot occupy the same attention. [112]

And the persecution described by Radin falls in the middle of this Race, upon whatever remained. He gives the mechanism as the Church enforcing its own ideology and eliminating anybody who had alternative powers or visions. [113] Joseph of Cupertino was seen levitating by thousands, was cleared by the Inquisition of any pact with the Devil, and was then moved by his superiors from one remote friary to another, away from the crowds. [114]

What we gained in argument, we lost in sight, and then what was left of the sight was hunted.

The Sixth Race, and why it is a different thing

Here a natural objection answers itself. Two Races given the same task would make little sense, and they are not.

The Sixth develops buddhi, intuitive wisdom. The Atlantean faculty was dreaming and unbidden; what is coming is conscious, and it is joined to the intellect the Fifth Race built. Blavatsky describes the coming sub-race as blending the intelligence of the Fifth with the emotion of the Fourth [115], and A. E. Powell is oddly specific about the organ, saying the pituitary body will develop and give an additional sense, that of cognising astral emotions in ordinary waking consciousness. [116]

In ordinary waking consciousness. That is the whole distinction. The Atlantean saw while dreaming. The Sixth will see while awake, and will know that it sees.

So the line runs: body, then mind, then feeling and vision, then intellect, then vision restored beneath the intellect, then spirit. Nothing repeats.

The Neanderthals

The Fourth Race was psychic. The Neanderthals are its surviving branch. So the Neanderthals were psychic, and the Denisovans, standing nearer the height of it, more so.

The idea

What I was looking for, when this began, was traces of alien genetic manipulation in living people.

Radin describes what was done to psychics across the centuries of persecution. Whoever is killed before they have children leaves nothing behind, so the capacity thinned out of our species by ordinary selection. [117]

The channeled sources say it is being restored, and that the hybridization is how. [118]

Put those beside the identification and an idea follows. The faculty was Lemurian and Atlantean. The Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes are sequenced and public. The alleles that carried it are therefore known quantities, and restoring the faculty would mean restoring those alleles to a species that has lost them.

Which gives the work its shape: an archaic allele returning to a modern genome, carrying an old faculty into a mind built long after it.

Autism

There is a place this may already be visible.

So the second idea, and it is a far-out one.

Recall where this essay began. The channelers hold that humanity is a hybrid, and they mean hybridization in the technical sense: the crossing of two lineages and the birth of offspring carrying both. Seth from 1963, the Law of One from 1981, Bashar from 1984, the Pleiadian material, and Jim Charles. [119] The Law of One tells of a population brought from Mars into earthly incarnation with the physical vehicle altered to receive them. Bashar's own people, the Sassani, arose from a crossing of human beings with the Greys.

And the abduction record describes the same programme from our side of it. John Mack at Harvard, Budd Hopkins, and David Jacobs gathered those accounts across decades [120], and the experiencers themselves have been telling it for longer: ova and sperm taken, pregnancies begun and then gone, hybrid children shown to their mothers aboard the craft. That programme is described as continuing now, in our own generation.

What I set out to look for was its consequences in living people.

Now set the autism figures beside that, because the rise is the thing to look at rather than the number.

In 2000 the American surveillance network found autism in 0.7 percent of eight-year-old children. [121] By 2020 it was 2.8 percent. [122] By 2022, 3.2 percent. That is a fourfold rise inside a single generation of children. And the highest site in the country is California, at 5.3 percent [123], better than seven times the figure of 2000. The surveillance network's own investigators attribute much of the difference between sites to how thoroughly children are identified, and California identifies more thoroughly than most.

A substantial share of those children, perhaps a quarter to a third, are nonspeaking or minimally speaking. [124]

And it is precisely among the nonspeaking that the telepathy appears. Ky Dickens brought this to public attention with The Telepathy Tapes in 2024, working with the neuropsychiatrist Diane Hennacy Powell [125], and the work has continued since. What began as a podcast has become a movement, with parents, caregivers and teachers coming forward in numbers with accounts of their own. Children with no speech at all, reading their mothers' thoughts, and families who had known it privately for years finding that others knew it too.

And the shape of that is what holds my attention. Telepathy without speech is the Lemurian condition exactly, as the Third Race is described: direct thought, one to another, before language existed. Speech is the thing the tradition names as what displaced it.

So here is the claim, and I hold this part firmly. Autism is a consequence of the hybridization. The programme is restoring telepathic capacity to our species, and this is what that restoration looks like from inside: a generation arriving in numbers, many of them without speech, carrying the faculty back with them.

What I hold more loosely is where the alleles come from. The restoration is one thing and its source is another. They may be archaic, Lemurian and Neanderthal, returned to a species that lost them. They may be something else entirely, brought in from outside rather than recovered from within. I do not know, and the identification set out in this essay is what makes the first possibility worth raising at all.

If it does prove to be the archaic ones, then Terence McKenna's archaic revival [126], which he meant as a return to the older ways of knowing that our age set aside, will have turned out to describe something happening in the genome as well as in the culture.

References

H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy, 2 vols. (London: Theosophical Publishing Company, 1888). Blavatsky's account of the transmission is given in her prefaces to both volumes.
A. T. Barker, ed., The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett from the Mahatmas M. and K.H. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1923), comprising the correspondence of 1880–1884.
A. P. Sinnett, Esoteric Buddhism (London: Trübner & Co., 1883).
Rudolf Steiner, Cosmic Memory (Aus der Akasha-Chronik, GA 11), serialised in Lucifer-Gnosis, 1904. The Lemurian chapters describe the land as thin and everywhere undermined by volcanic forces, and destroyed by that fire.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), in the chapters "Our Atlantean Ancestors" and "The Lemurian Race", where the Lemurian land is described as thin, everywhere undermined by volcanic forces, and destroyed by that fire.
S. Ramaswamier, "How a 'Chela' Found His 'Guru'," The Theosophist 4, no. 3 (December 1882), reprinted in Five Years of Theosophy (London: Reeves & Turner, 1885).
On the precipitated letters see Barker, The Mahatma Letters (see note 2), and C. Jinarajadasa, ed., Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, first series (Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1919).
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. I, Proem, where the Book of Dzyan is described as manuscript rather than printed book, written in Senzar and preserved in Himalayan rock libraries.
Philip Lutley Sclater, "The Mammals of Madagascar," The Quarterly Journal of Science 1 (1864): 213–219. The Lemuria proposal is at p. 219.
Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 10th ed. (Stockholm: Laurentius Salvius, 1758), where the genus Lemur is named from the Latin lemures.
Ovid, Fasti, book V, lines 419–492, on the Roman festival of the Lemuria and the household rite for the ancestral dead.
Ernst Haeckel, Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1868). The explicit identification of the sunken southern land as humanity's cradle, and the accompanying migration map, are usually dated to the 1870 edition.
Plato, Timaeus 24e–25d and Critias 108e–121c.
The Puranas describe time as divided into manvantaras, each with its own Manu; see in particular the Vishnu Purana and the Bhagavata Purana.
The Sumerian King List, in the edition of Thorkild Jacobsen, Assyriological Studies 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939).
Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet XI, where the humanity before the water stands apart from the humanity after it.
Jane Roberts, The Seth Material (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970). The Seth sessions begin in 1963.
Don Elkins, Carla Rueckert and James Allen McCarty, The Ra Material: An Ancient Astronaut Speaks (Atglen, PA: Whitford Press, 1984). The sessions begin in 1981. The account of the Martian population brought into earthly incarnation, with the physical vehicle altered to receive them, is in the early sessions.
Darryl Anka, channelling Bashar, from 1984. The Sassani are described as arising from a crossing of human beings with the Greys.
Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1992), and Earth: Pleiadian Keys to the Living Library (Santa Fe, NM: Bear & Company, 1995).
Jim Charles, weekly channelling sessions with the author. Unpublished primary material.
Elkins, Rueckert and McCarty, The Ra Material (see note 18), in the early sessions on the peopling of this planet, where the Martian population is described as brought here and the physical vehicle as altered to receive it.
Anka, channelling Bashar (see note 19), on the Sassani as the offspring of a hybridization of human beings with the Greys.
John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994).
Budd Hopkins, Missing Time (New York: Richard Marek, 1981) and Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods (New York: Random House, 1987).
David M. Jacobs, Secret Life: Firsthand Documented Accounts of UFO Abductions (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992) and The Threat (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998).
Dean Radin, Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe (New York: Harmony Books, 2018), on the suppression of magic outside the Church, on the Eucharist as a magical rite, and on Joseph of Cupertino.
On Joseph of Cupertino (1603–1663), see Michael Grosso, The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), which collects the depositions and the Inquisition record.
The restoration theme runs across the channelled sources already cited: Roberts (note 17), Elkins, Rueckert and McCarty (note 18), Anka (note 19), the Pleiadian material (note 20), and the Jim Charles sessions (note 21).
Kay Prüfer et al., "The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains," Nature 505, no. 7481 (2014): 43–49, doi:10.1038/nature12886, which puts the divergence of the modern human and Neanderthal lineages at between about 550,000 and 765,000 years.
Michael F. Hammer et al., "Genetic evidence for archaic admixture in Africa," PNAS 108, no. 37 (2011): 15123–15128. doi:10.1073/pnas.1109300108.
Sriram Sankararaman et al., "The date of interbreeding between Neandertals and modern humans," PLOS Genetics 8, no. 10 (2012): e1002947, doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1002947, where the length of the introgressed blocks is used to date the admixture.
Arun Durvasula and Sriram Sankararaman, "Recovering signals of ghost archaic introgression in African populations," Science Advances 6, no. 7 (2020): eaax5097. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aax5097.
Alan R. Rogers, Nathan S. Harris and Alan A. Achenbach, "Neanderthal-Denisovan ancestors interbred with a distantly related hominin," Science Advances 6, no. 8 (2020): eaay5483. doi:10.1126/sciadv.aay5483. See also Melissa J. Hubisz, Amy L. Williams and Adam Siepel, "Mapping gene flow between ancient hominins through demography-aware inference of the ancestral recombination graph," PLOS Genetics 16, no. 8 (2020): e1008895. doi:10.1371/journal.pgen.1008895.
Guy S. Jacobs et al., "Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans," Cell 177, no. 4 (2019): 1010–1021.e32. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2019.02.035. This is also the source for the two Papuan Denisovan lineages separated by more than 350,000 years and for the third, distinct lineage in East Asians.
Johannes Krause et al., "The complete mitochondrial DNA genome of an unknown hominin from southern Siberia," Nature 464, no. 7290 (2010): 894–897, doi:10.1038/nature08976; and David Reich et al., "Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia," Nature 468, no. 7327 (2010): 1053–1060, doi:10.1038/nature09710.
Fahu Chen et al., "A late Middle Pleistocene Denisovan mandible from the Tibetan Plateau," Nature 569, no. 7756 (2019): 409–412, doi:10.1038/s41586-019-1139-x; and Dongju Zhang et al., "Denisovan DNA in Late Pleistocene sediments from Baishiya Karst Cave on the Tibetan Plateau," Science 370, no. 6516 (2020): 584–587, doi:10.1126/science.abb6320. On the Laotian molar see Fabrice Demeter et al., "A Middle Pleistocene Denisovan molar from the Annamite Chain of northern Laos," Nature Communications 13 (2022): 2557, doi:10.1038/s41467-022-29923-z.
Takumi Tsutaya et al., "A male Denisovan mandible from Pleistocene Taiwan," Science 388, no. 6743 (2025): 176–180. doi:10.1126/science.ads3888.
Matthias Meyer et al., "A High-Coverage Genome Sequence from an Archaic Denisovan Individual," Science 338, no. 6104 (2012): 222–226. doi:10.1126/science.1224344.
That the two lineages met and had children is now documented in a single individual: Viviane Slon et al., "The genome of the offspring of a Neanderthal mother and a Denisovan father," Nature 561, no. 7721 (2018): 113–116. doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0455-x.
Matthias Meyer et al., "Nuclear DNA sequences from the Middle Pleistocene Sima de los Huesos hominins," Nature 531, no. 7595 (2016): 504–507. doi:10.1038/nature17405.
David Reich et al., "Denisova Admixture and the First Modern Human Dispersals into Southeast Asia and Oceania," American Journal of Human Genetics 89, no. 4 (2011): 516–528, doi:10.1016/j.ajhg.2011.09.005; and Maximilian Larena et al., "Philippine Ayta possess the highest level of Denisovan ancestry in the world," Current Biology 31, no. 19 (2021): 4219–4230.e10, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2021.07.022.
Marcia S. Ponce de León et al., "Neanderthal brain size at birth provides insights into the evolution of human life history," PNAS 105, no. 37 (2008): 13764–13768, doi:10.1073/pnas.0803917105; and Christopher B. Ruff, Erik Trinkaus and Trenton W. Holliday, "Body mass and encephalization in Pleistocene Homo," Nature 387, no. 6630 (1997): 173–176, doi:10.1038/387173a0.
Marcel J. L. Th. Niekus et al., "Middle Paleolithic complex technology and a Neandertal tar-backed tool from the Dutch North Sea," PNAS 116, no. 44 (2019): 22081–22087, doi:10.1073/pnas.1907828116; Patrick Schmidt et al., "Production method of the Königsaue birch tar documents cumulative culture in Neanderthals," Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 15 (2023): 84, doi:10.1007/s12520-023-01789-2; and Paul R. B. Kozowyk et al., "Experimental methods for the Palaeolithic dry distillation of birch bark," Scientific Reports 7 (2017): 8033, doi:10.1038/s41598-017-08106-7.
Jacques Jaubert et al., "Early Neanderthal constructions deep in Bruniquel Cave in southwestern France," Nature 534, no. 7605 (2016): 111–114. doi:10.1038/nature18291.
John Lubbock, Pre-historic Times, as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages (London: Williams & Norgate, 1865).
Charles Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (London: John Murray, 1863).
Gabriel de Mortillet, Le Préhistorique: Antiquité de l'homme (Paris: C. Reinwald, 1883), for the argument that a Palaeolithic population was replaced rather than continued.
Steven L. Kuhn, "Cultural Transmission, Institutional Continuity and the Persistence of the Mousterian," in Dynamics of Learning in Neanderthals and Modern Humans, vol. 1, ed. Takeru Akazawa, Yoshihiro Nishiaki and Kenichi Aoki (Tokyo: Springer, 2013), 105–113. doi:10.1007/978-4-431-54511-8_6.
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, on the extent of Lemuria, including the northern reach through Scandinavia and Siberia.
W. Scott-Elliot, The Lost Lemuria (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1904), written from the clairvoyant reading of C. W. Leadbeater.
The Edgar Cayce readings on Mu and Lemuria, held by the Association for Research and Enlightenment, Virginia Beach. No reading number has been supplied for the Lower California and Death Valley attribution, and it should be treated accordingly.
Lee Carroll, the Kryon material, on Lemuria centred upon Hawaii.
Aurelia Louise Jones, Telos, Volume 1: Revelations of the New Lemuria (Mount Shasta, CA: Mount Shasta Light Publishing, 2004).
On the ancestry maximum see note 42; on the three fossil finds, notes 36, 37 and 38.
Katerina Douka et al., "Age estimates for hominin fossils and the onset of the Upper Palaeolithic at Denisova Cave," Nature 565, no. 7741 (2019): 640–644. doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0870-z.
Logan Kistler et al., "A new model for ancient DNA decay based on paleogenomic meta-analysis," Nucleic Acids Research 45, no. 11 (2017): 6310–6320, doi:10.1093/nar/gkx361, on the strong dependence of DNA survival upon temperature.
Harold K. Voris, "Maps of Pleistocene sea levels in Southeast Asia: shorelines, river systems and time durations," Journal of Biogeography 27, no. 5 (2000): 1153–1167. doi:10.1046/j.1365-2699.2000.00489.x.
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, where the destruction of each Root Race by fire and by water in turn is stated as a rule of the cycle rather than as two separate events.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "The Lemurian Race".
Plato, Timaeus and Critias (see note 13).
Craig A. Chesner et al., "Eruptive history of Earth's largest Quaternary caldera (Toba, Indonesia) clarified," Geology 19, no. 3 (1991): 200–203.
Bryony J. Coles, "Doggerland: a Speculative Survey," Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 64 (1998): 45–81. doi:10.1017/S0079497X00002176.
Naomi Oreskes, The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). The plate-tectonic synthesis was assembled between about 1963 and 1968.
W. Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896).
C. W. Leadbeater, Clairvoyance (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1899), for his account of reading the akashic record. Scott-Elliot names his clairvoyant source in the preface (see note 65).
Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis (see note 65), where the seven sub-races are named and the naming principle explained.
Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis (see note 65), on the periods of the sub-races.
Scott-Elliot, The Lost Lemuria (see note 51), on the seventh Lemurian sub-race.
Jacobs et al., "Multiple Deeply Divergent Denisovan Ancestries in Papuans" (see note 35).
Babylonian Talmud, tractate Hagigah 13b. A parallel appears at Shabbat 88b.
Zohar, on the generations before Adam, within its treatment of the shmitot; the teaching is carried also in the Tikunei Zohar. The passage is commonly cited as Bereishit 134a, but that folio does not sit within Bereshit in the standard pagination, and repeated searching has not established the true locus, so no folio is given here.
Ma'arekhet Elokut, which assigns the Talmud's 974 generations to the previous shmitah.
On the doctrine of the cosmic Sabbaticals see Tikunei Zohar; Nachmanides, commentary on Leviticus 25:2; Rabbeinu Bahya; Rabbi Yitzhak of Acco, Otzar Ha-Chaim; Menahem Recanati; and the Radbaz, Magen David.
Rabbi Haim Vital, Etz Chaim, for the rejection of the Sabbaticals and the doctrine that the pre-Adamic worlds were spiritual throughout.
Zohar I:9b, on the seven lands, the exile of Cain to Arka, and Rav Hamnuna Saba's teaching that the world turns like a ball, so that the inhabitants of the other lands are human beings.
Charles-Étienne Brasseur de Bourbourg, Manuscrit Troano: etudes sur le systeme graphique et la langue des Mayas, 2 vols. (Paris: Imprimerie Imperiale, 1869-1870), where the reading of the sign as Mu is proposed. His edition of Diego de Landa, Relation des choses de Yucatan (Paris: Arthus Bertrand, 1864), supplied the alphabet but does not contain the Mu reading. The de Landa alphabet has since been shown unreliable, Maya script being largely logographic, and the Troano portion of the Madrid Codex is now read as an almanac.
Augustus Le Plongeon, Queen Móo and the Egyptian Sphinx (New York: published by the author, 1896).
James Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (New York: William Edwin Rudge, 1926).
Louis Jacolliot, Les Fils de Dieu (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1873).
Louis Jacolliot, Les Peuples et les continents disparus (Paris: A. Lacroix, 1874).
On the Puranas see note 14, and H. H. Wilson, trans., The Vishnu Purana: A System of Hindu Mythology and Tradition (London: John Murray, 1840).
The earliest form of the Manu flood is at Shatapatha Brahmana 1.8.1.1–10; the best-known telling is Matsya Purana, chapters 1–11.
Vishnu Purana, book I, chapters 3–7, in Wilson's translation (see note 82).
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), which takes the manvantara framework and its vocabulary from the Puranic cosmology.
Churchward, The Lost Continent of Mu (see note 79), which is the route by which the term entered Chinese as Mu dalu.
Hagigah 13b (see note 71) and the Zohar (see notes 72 and 76).
See notes 14 and 82.
Brasseur de Bourbourg (see note 77), Jacolliot (see notes 80 and 81), Sclater (see note 9), and Ovid on the Lemuria (see note 11).
Marieke van de Loosdrecht et al., "Pleistocene North African genomes link Near Eastern and sub-Saharan African human populations," Science 360, no. 6388 (2018): 548–552. doi:10.1126/science.aar8380.
Nada Salem et al., "Ancient DNA from the Green Sahara reveals ancestral North African lineage," Nature 641, no. 8061 (2025): 144–150. doi:10.1038/s41586-025-08793-7.
Ricardo Rodríguez-Varela et al., "Genomic Analyses of Pre-European Conquest Human Remains from the Canary Islands Reveal Close Affinity to Modern North Africans," Current Biology 27, no. 21 (2017): 3396–3402.e5. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2017.09.059.
Jeffrey D. Wall et al., "Higher Levels of Neanderthal Ancestry in East Asians than in Europeans," Genetics 194, no. 1 (2013): 199–209. doi:10.1534/genetics.112.148213.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "The Lemurian Race", where the union of the spirit with the human ancestor is placed at about the middle of the Lemurian period.
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, on the Sons of Mind and the lighting of the mental principle in the Third Race.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), on the Lemurians as without speech, communicating directly, speech arising only afterward.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "The Lemurian Race".
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, pp. 293–294, where the Third Race are called actual Cyclopes, three-eyed mortals, and where she writes that the third eye is dead and has left the pineal gland behind as the witness to its existence.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the word of the Rmoahals having power as well as meaning.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the gradual loss of the magic word through the Tlavatli and Toltec periods.
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, on the Fourth Race as the first fully physical humanity, and Scott-Elliot (see note 65).
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, p. 221, on the Atlanteans born with a sight which embraced all living things, independent of distance and of material obstacle.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the pictorial and dreamlike character of Atlantean perception.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "The Lemurian Race", on building without engineering knowledge by a faculty of imagination acting with the sureness of a kind of instinct.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the germinating power of seeds put into the service of technology and on vehicles that moved a short way above the ground.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the denser air and thinner water of the Atlantean world.
Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis (see note 65), in the chapter on the air-ships, where the earlier personal vril is distinguished from the later mechanically generated force of an etheric nature.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), "Our Atlantean Ancestors", on the Atlantean drawing upon the life force in his own body.
Scott-Elliot, The Story of Atlantis (see note 65), in the chapter on agriculture, for the schools and for the making of the banana out of a wild seed-filled fruit.
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), and Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science (Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss, GA 13), 1910, on the Atlantean mystery centres and the seven oracles.
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, on the sorcery of the later Atlanteans and the destruction of the last island; and Scott-Elliot (see note 65).
Steiner, Cosmic Memory (see note 4), on the withdrawal of the older pictorial consciousness as the power of reasoning develops.
Radin, Real Magic (see note 27).
Grosso, The Man Who Could Fly (see note 28).
Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine (see note 1), vol. II, on the sub-race now forming and on the Sixth Root Race to come.
Arthur E. Powell, The Solar System (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1930), chapter 52, pp. 326–330, where the pituitary body is said to develop and to give an additional sense, the cognition of astral emotions in ordinary waking consciousness.
Radin, Real Magic (see note 27).
See notes 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21.
See notes 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21.
See notes 24, 25 and 26.
Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network Surveillance Year 2000 Principal Investigators, "Prevalence of autism spectrum disorders — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, six sites, United States, 2000," MMWR Surveillance Summaries 56, no. SS-1 (2007): 1–11. PMID 17287714.
Matthew J. Maenner et al., "Prevalence and Characteristics of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 11 Sites, United States, 2020," MMWR Surveillance Summaries 72, no. SS-2 (2023): 1–14 (27.6 per 1,000). doi:10.15585/mmwr.ss7202a1.
Kelly A. Shaw et al., "Prevalence and Early Identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder Among Children Aged 4 and 8 Years — Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network, 16 Sites, United States, 2022," MMWR Surveillance Summaries 74, no. SS-2 (2025): 1–22. The overall figure is 32.2 per 1,000 and the California site 53.1 per 1,000. doi:10.15585/mmwr.ss7402a1.
Helen Tager-Flusberg and Connie Kasari, "Minimally verbal school-aged children with autism spectrum disorder: the neglected end of the spectrum," Autism Research 6, no. 6 (2013): 468–478. doi:10.1002/aur.1329.
The Telepathy Tapes, produced by Ky Dickens, 2024, with Diane Hennacy Powell. See also Diane Hennacy Powell, The ESP Enigma: The Scientific Case for Psychic Phenomena (New York: Walker & Company, 2009).
Terence McKenna, The Archaic Revival (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991).