Karma

Author(s): Annie Besant
Publisher: Theosophical Publishing House

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his present lot had only his individual karma been concerned.
A man's birth in a particular nation is influenced by certain general principles of evolution as well as by his immediate characteristics. The soul in its slow development has not only to pass through the seven Root Races of a globe (I deal with the normal evolution of humanity), but also through the sub-races. This necessity imposes certain conditions, to which the individual karma must adapt itself, and a nation belonging to the sub-race through which the soul has to pass will offer the area within which the more special conditions needed must be found. Where long series of incarnations have been followed, it has been found that some individuals progress from sub-race to sub-race very regularly, whereas others are more erratic, taking repeated incarnations perhaps in one sub-race. Within the limits of the sub-race, the individual characteristics of the man will draw him towards one nation or another, and we may notice dominant national characteristics re-emerging on the stage of history en bloc after the normal interval of fifteen hundred years; thus crowds of Romans reincarnate as Englishmen, the enterprising, colonizing, conquering, imperial instincts reappearing as national attributes. A man in whom such national