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from NewDawnMagazine Website
November 3, 2008
The immensity of the coming
turbulence occasioned by this shift from West to East is
incalculable, the outer symptom of a global revolution of
consciousness.
What are we mutating into and what kind of social realities will replace those we know?
The mystery and the terror is not so much the speed of change as its unknown destination.
Striving to answer such questions, many leading esotericists today have turned to certain very ancient traditions to throw light on the crisis of our times.
Increasingly heeding the overwhelming evidence
for their thesis, they suggest that the key to humanity's future
lies in its distant past, in the heritage of an unknown antediluvian
race that lived in a time so remote that its existence has been
erased from racial memory. i
A Forgotten Race
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions changed and the great ice sheets melted.
There, in a fertile, paradisial land, these unknown sages became the core of a
Ural-Altaic race that continued to evolve over the millennia,
improving the stock of primitive humanity by intermarriage,
developing cosmological sciences and political structures that sowed
the seeds of our present civilized state, migrating across the earth
and then disappearing, leaving immortal legends about itself behind.
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of
prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced
body of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which
can guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Yet it is Central and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder race walked tall on the earth.
And it is
these Ural-Altaic regions that are now taking centre stage as the
search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a
viable future.
The region was known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse
cultures, ranging from every epoch and every direction of the
compass, but Arkaim was the first clear evidence of an ancient
advanced culture flourishing on Russian soil.
The inhabitants and the common central square were thus well protected by Arkaim's defensive, inward-turned ground plan.
The town was found to be
closely aligned to several celestial referent points, and is
therefore believed to have been an observatory as well as a
fortress, an administrative and a religious centre.
Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down and deserted.
It was equipped with a drainage gutter and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued with a fireproof substance - a strong compound the remnants of which can still be found in the ruins.
Each house gave
onto an inner ring road paved with wooden blocks; and in each house
there was a hearth, a well, cellars, an oven and provision for a
cooled food storage system. The oven was such that it may have been
possible to smelt bronze in it, as well as to fire pottery.
With Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the
Land of Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was
the first concrete evidence of a lost Neolithic civilization in
southern Russia, confirming what had long been believed, that the
southern Urals and northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of
Asia and Europe, was an important region in the formation of a
complex Aryan society.
Increasingly rejecting the American and Western European vision of a global hegemony rooted in Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain.
Many, especially among the young, are already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or Islam.
Arkaim has become a ready focus
for these ideals, a symbol of the future basis for world peace.
Here the material and the spiritual are inseparable.
In fact, it is doubtful whether peace and harmony existed in the period of Arkaim, since it and the surrounding fortified settlements were obviously geared to warfare or at least to heavy defensive measures in a hostile environment.
It is noteworthy that the cult of Tengri, the Mongol/Turkic Sky God who plays a prominent part in Central Asian religion, fosters a fierce competitive nationalism rather than peaceful relations with neighbors.
However, Sparkey is
right to emphasize the principle of harmonious accord implicit in
the Arkaim ideology, pointing as it does to the settlement's
inheritance of a once more peaceful culture. The head of the archaeological team observed:
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in Asia Minor that the Greek king Agamemnon destroyed during the Trojan Wars.
Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described,
All these legendary troy towns have the same circular ground plan.
They have gone down in history as Neolithic
Wisdom centers and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this
undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its
day, as we shall see.
However, the discovery of the settlement has opened an historical aperture onto far more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands, where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe.
What the Land
of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above
all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples - a past of
such enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it
solves.
Essentially, this
was the religion of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and
other wonder-workers in touch with the spirits of nature.
René Guénon, the eminent French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolizing eternal motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult, originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the Great Bear.
This center, Guénon stresses,
The swastika is therefore known
world-wide as the ‘sign of the pole.' viii
One universal feature of troy towns is missing in Arkaim - presumably because it has been destroyed over the centuries - and that is the altar pillar in the central square.
Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late
expression of a megalithic Pillar religion that once reigned
universally in every corner of the globe, among nearly all peoples,
whatever their ethnic type, and which became associated with troy
towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and goes back to the
most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as revolving around
the axis of the Pole Star.
Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos above according to the principle of "as above so below" by means of a central axis symbolized by a stone pillar.
Thus Diodorus Siculus of the first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres,
These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the ramparts.
The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when hunter-gatherers still roamed the land.
Colin Wilson, a highly accredited investigator, in answer takes us back to the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, a people who almost certainly had their origin in Central Asia, as the Bible states:
Sumer is regarded as the site of one of the first true
civilizations in human history.
He adds that according to the library of
clay tablets compiled by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (669 - 626
BCE) and unearthed during the nineteenth century, the Sumerians had
also understood the precession of the equinoxes, and therefore knew
about the zodiac. x
Indeed Wilson came
to believe that a scientific knowledge of the universe existed on
earth as far back as 64,000 years ago, if not far longer.
The remains of countless similar stone circles,
menhirs and troy towns are scattered throughout Europe, the
Americas, Eurasia and the Pacific lands, memorials to great
crisscrossing migrations of peoples, all loyal to the same axial
principle that relates earth to the heavens.
He suggested they had strong
links to the works of the Celts and the Scythian tribes, as also to
the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany, and that they represented a
Pillar cult that had its beginnings long ago in the Trans-Himalayas
of Inner Asia. xii
Bryant, a noted expert in Homeric Troy, published an encyclopaedia of ancient mythology in which he claimed the Trojans were descended from a very old "Atlantean" race that had long ago settled across the whole of Eurasia. xiii
If the first troy towns were built in Central Asia,
could the universal Pillar religion also have had its beginning
there?
A remnant of this
belief-system survives in the legend of Jacob's Ladder in the Hebrew
Book of Exodus, in which we learn that on this Ladder angels ascend
and descend between heaven and earth.
The World Ash Yggdrasil was declared to be the greatest of all trees and the best; its limbs spread over the world and above the heavens, its shaft the pivot of the ever-revolving sky.
At the
foot of that tree the laws were first brought into being by the Aesir, the Norse gods, and Yggdrasil was worshipped as the source of
all higher knowledge. xv
A prominent researcher on this subject says that in the text of the Sumerian Enuma Elish,
In ancient Egypt, the land of the Hamitic peoples, the city of An or Anu, which was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, originally meant Pillar City. xvii
As a commentator has pointed out, this fact may
shed light on the mysterious djed pillar, the "backbone of Osiris,"
often associated with Heliopolis. xviii
In ancient Crete he was a familiar adjunct to the temple rituals of the Great Mother Demeter; in Siberia, Mongolia and the Americas, he was the magician and wise man of his tribe.
Beating his drum and climbing the central pole of his yurt, the symbolic pillar by which he communed with the sky spirits above, the shaman thus brought down healings, prophesies and advice from the ancestors to the people of his community.
The Mongol-Turkic shamanic tradition with its
Sky God Tengri and its World Tree still survives over a vast area of the
planet, although its roots are lost far back in the mists of the
Paleolithic age.
Even though Delphi was regarded as the centre of the Greek world, its god Apollo and his sister, the goddess Artemis, were acknowledged to be originally deities of this secret land far to the north, where stood the cosmic axle that the Greeks called Helice, "That Which Turns."
Many Greek historians as well as later scholars located this northern paradise in Scythia or the Altai, and as having its source in the shamanism that grew up around the semi-mythical magicians and pole-lords of Altai.
But research and
sacred tradition both suggest its origins go further back still to
north-eastern Asia within the Arctic Circle, to a society that
flourished on the shores of the Siberian Sea.
In The Interpretation of Radium, the acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated his belief that some of the beliefs and legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be,
There may have been, he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world when civilized men lived,
On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilization with a highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in existence in the Arctic Circle. xxi
Until lately Hapgood's finds, presented in
Earth's Shifting Crust (1958) and
Maps
of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), have been largely ignored in
scientific circles, even though they elicited support from the great
physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in them is mushrooming
among a growing number of highly accredited investigators.
Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others, possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west.
The latter has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded the remains of what was once a great sunken landmass. xxiii
(In support of this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola
have long had a tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles,
a well-known earthquake zone, were once connected by a single
landmass, before a great cataclysm about 15000 years ago submerged
the connection and left only the known island fragments). xxiv
There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who "came from the east", destroyed the earth in a great flood.
Later, after a man and a woman survived by taking refuge in a floating box,
Wilson cites many such instances in
which flood stories about the Hyperboreans and their salvation of
our race are to be found in both the Old World and the New.
The Atlantean Tula, says Guénon, must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, the supreme Holy Land, "which latter represents the first and supreme centre for the entire current Manvantara, and is the archetypal "sacred isle."
Plato himself notes this hierarchical distribution: the Atlantean empire, he said, was only one nexus established by the gods in a greater network of Centers whose capital was elsewhere "at the centre of the Universe." xxvii
Thus the Eurasian heartland, Guénon says in his brief but ground-breaking work, The Lord of the World, has indeed become that "centre of the Universe," the authentic "supreme country" which,
However, this still does not tell us why the location in Central Asia was chosen as the Hyperboreans' primary destination?
Guénon's response to this question is cryptic in the extreme. He admits he is dealing with proscripted material he is not permitted to divulge, but goes so far as to reveal that Mt. Meru, the "polar mountain" stands in the centre of the "supreme country" - and Mt. Meru, as is now generally understood, symbolizes the mysterious World Axis or World Tree of esoteric tradition.
In other words, Central Asia was
chosen because the World Axis was there; that was the real goal of
the migration. The World Axis was, and is, the "centre of the
Universe"; it is the World Axis that renders its geographical
location a Holy Land - a fact which is only now being elucidated in para-scientific circles.
John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, is one of the first modern researchers to throw light on the meaning of this and much other Hyperborean lore that Guénon was unwilling or unable to discuss.
Beyond referring to the senior race
as "the guardians of Earth's sacred mysteries," Guénon's initiatory
vows kept him silent.
The records
of most of the Bronze age nations have a legend that an unknown race
of Elders gave us kingship and civilization and that they came from
the gods and understood the most powerful secrets of our planet
–secrets that have since been lost.
G.I. Gurdjieff spoke of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little more is known about them.
Did they really exist?
All that can
be said with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence
moving inscrutably in the background of virtually all the
prehistoric traditions of our race.
When a great catastrophe towards the end of the
Ice Age, around the twelfth millennium BCE, threatened us with
extinction, these sons and daughters of the gods instituted the hieros gamos, a genetic science that mingled their genes with ours
and so bred a superior human stock with a greater survival potential
that spread gradually from the heart of Asia on one hand, and
Atlantis on the other, to the rest of the world. xxix
Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and
coastal flooding to vast areas of the globe xxx and a severe threat
to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought
another response from the senior race.
In their migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which Plato's Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the Atlanteans.
Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE., also from Catal Hüyük, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE. xxxi
The Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body of wisdom originally centered on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know today, as well as all our higher learning.
Its spread heralded the dawn of peaceful,
egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in Neolithic towns
and villages around the world wherein the feminine principle was
dominant and strife little known. xxxii
According to Stephen Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah's Flood and was the greatest of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium. xxxiii
It caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe
earthquakes, and also desertification of the interior of the land
masses, and civilization disappeared. Once again the species was
threatened with a reversion to savagery, and once again salvation
appeared from Inner Asia.
It was a patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilization.
Everywhere the
stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the Pole Star,
like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further thousand
years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on the
Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.
At the same time, pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted as enmity grew for the powerful new faith.
Indeed Arkaim
may have been the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that
period, and the fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after
two hundred years of operation may well have been caused by that
same internecine conflict between the old order and the new.
According to the murals they have left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race.
The Solar priesthoods withdrew
behind barricades, and a spiritual division opened up in society
that had never before existed.
While bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across
the globe to sow the seeds of civilization once more, a nucleus of
the senior race withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia
that surround the
Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact
with the outside world.
High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy Land and the Land of White Waters.
Whatever its current name,
almost all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this
vast, mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge,
to the legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the
Ancient Wisdom for the present World Age.
Sufis, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians,
Taoists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Neo-Platonists and others who have been
hidden from the profane world by long chains of initiatic
transmission have never failed to find sanctuary in that specially
blessed protectorate, where everything began.
...are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia to the very centre of world attention.
Yet the questions they pose remain unanswered.
Endnotes
2009
René Guénon's assertion, culled from ancient esoteric sources, that in the remote past humanity's first civilization arose in an ice-free Arctic zone is not without geological support.
According to the well-known researcher J.S. Gordon,
He points out that the great Ice Age that lasted about two million years, ending about twelve thousand years ago, was made up of thirty or so minor Ice Ages, with warm intervals of polar deglaciation in between them, each creating periods of thousands of years of temperate conditions at the poles.
Any one of these warm intervals would have been hospitable to a
circumpolar civilization.
He derived his theory from cartographic research conducted on ancient portolans or seafaring maps, one of which had been in the possession of a 16th-century Turkish admiral, Piri Re'is.[2]
...and that in the case of the Antarctic
Circle rivers and mountains had been mapped in such detail that the
land must have been inhabited - and by a people who understood
spherical trigonometry.
All body forms would have been considerably lighter in weight and of a more plastic nature, the skeleton still not having hardened by then; and accordingly human beings could have been less affected by gravity and as much as twenty feet or more taller than they are today.
She believed that
over vast ages there have been several violent changes in earth's
climatic conditions, with corresponding diminutions of human
stature, accompanied by many variations in human civilization and
culture.[4]
Swanscombe man from England is a quarter of a million years old, while Vertesszollos man from Hungary, equally modern in type, dates to an amazing four hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand years old.[5]
Such dates leave ample room in our
human record for many modifications of climate and variations in
physical stature, cultural development and living conditions.
The information given in the Book of Genesis regarding the Sons of God, the giant-sized Elders who once lived on earth - "mighty men of old, men of renown" - was derived by Hebrew scribes from the scriptures of older surrounding races, such as the Indian Vedic texts, the Vedas and Puranas, and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.
In the Sumerian illustrations of the doings of the gods it can readily be seen that the relative height of the Elders and ordinary humans was that of adult and child: in one such instance, a god is holding a human on his lap as though nursing an infant.
The Egyptians also created statues of god-kings of enormous
height juxtaposed to little figures of normal human stature; and
while these statements in stone may have been intended symbolically
the alternative possibility exists that an entirely realistic
rendition was intended, as more than one researcher has suggested.
The other outstanding characteristic imputed to the Elders, whom Blavatsky called the Kumaras, was their huge skulls.
Although there is less evidence in the ancient texts to support this legend, it is an astonishing fact that several such enormous skulls, relative to the size of the face, have been unearthed in Peru: one is on display in the museum in Lima.[7]
According to report, others of similar immensity have been found in and around Egypt and Tibet.[8]
Furthermore, carved busts of the family members belonging to the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten of the eighteenth dynasty demonstrate the same anomalous feature, including equally huge ears.
Found in the underground desert ruins of Tel el Amarna in Egypt, little known statues of this strange family, which included Nefertiti, Akhenaton"s wife, and their daughters, exhibit other unusual features, including great body height.
The body of a statue of Nefertiti is described below:
This in fact is an equally good description of her husband's famously strange appearance.
The carved or painted likenesses of Nefertiti's daughters, down to the youngest, a mere toddler, show exactly the same peculiar characteristics of enormous hairless skulls, high waists, skinny calves and huge ears.
These Elders, also known as the beni ha-elohim, the godlike Sons of God or Sons of the Fire Mist whom the Sumerians claimed had brought civilization to humanity, are a perennial mystery.
G.I. Gurdjieff regarded them as Paleolithic shaman adepts, men and women whose evolution due to their superior spiritual practices put them far in advance of their fellows.
But occult tradition goes a great deal further, contending the Elders were a wise and powerful race that came from the stars - possibly, say some, from the giant star Sirius.
In the ancient Egyptian tradition they are called the "Watchers of Pe", divine Intelligences who watch over and guide humanity, their progeny, from celestial heights.
Alternatively,
If the latter were the case,
Until recently such questions about the Elders could not profitably be asked except in the context of a closed initiatory society.
Even stranger, until recently the rest of the world was not even aware that such questions entailed proscribed temple material that had been forbidden to the outside world for thousands of years.
As already mentioned in the first Part of this article, René Guénon, one of the foremost esotericists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, struggled as far as he dared against this occult embargo, believing that the time was fast approaching when humanity would be in need of a higher level of anthropological, cosmological and metaphysical understanding than was possible in his day.
Yet much
knowledge regarded as too arcane or too dangerous for the profane
populace would, Guénon was convinced, soon have to be released into
the public domain. And it would seem he was right.
The removal of the occult embargo, allied
to an explosion of new scientific discoveries and hypotheses, makes
it possible to approach the subject in an entirely new way.
Nevertheless, the old system of four kingdoms, based on an intuitive deductive vision of the truth and seen as an example of the Perennial Philosophy, is still entrenched in most of the western esoteric schools that have emerged since medieval times:
...and others.
Medieval philosophers included this fifth category as that of the angelic hierarchies, and Anthroposophy (Rudolph Steiner) does likewise with somewhat greater clarity, calling the fifth a trans-human category.
Rosicrucians cling to the four-kingdom format, referring vaguely to a fifth category as the "Pure Spirit" of will and imagination.
Theosophy
calls the fifth a post-human stage of spiritual evolution; Teilhard
de Chardin calls it Omega, the divinized transhuman stage; and the
Indian sage, Sri Aurobindo, calls it the divinized supramental
stage.
In their depiction of the neters, or gods, undergoing spiritual resurrection, they show a row of animal-headed human figures marching along a horizontal base line, a red oval - the "egg of metamorphosis" - above each head, until suddenly the base line turns by 90 degrees to the vertical and one figure swings into ascension along it.
Achieving "a rapid biological change into a different life form," he has transformed into the royal fifth kingdom: armed with what appears to be the staff of spiritual authority and lacking the oval over his head, which has been absorbed into his being, he has metamorphosed into a king.[12]
From
being a collective being of a lower order, he has become a royal
singularity.
We have not adequately understood that a fifth kingdom consummates the fourth, that it is our true evolutionary goal and our key to all those questions we have never been able to answer.
The inclusion of a fifth kingdom in the natural order turns the fourth kingdom that we humans presently inhabit into a mere corridor of becoming, a transitional episode in which we are driven forward in a process of transformation from the animal state behind us to that of the true human ahead, as indeed Gautama Buddha recognized.
Life, human life, he said, is
never-ending change and the suffering of change - and indeed it is
if viewed as a journey of relentless development of consciousness
into the truly human kingdom, the fifth, wherein alone lies repose
well earned.
But what the ancient mystery temples through to modern
esoteric teachers like Guénon have been reluctant to disclose is
that the fifth kingdom is not a future potential but a presently
existing reality, a supremely enlightened human state beyond our
own, which, like the other four kingdoms of nature, has and always
will extend back into the illimitable past and forward into an
equally illimitable future, with its own archetypal place in the
cosmos.
Gordon speaks of the fourth, fifth, sixth and even the seventh kingdom of our planetary Nature.
Given such a perspective, many possibilities open up that were not
previously viable in our philosophy.
Freed by their advanced development from the limiting conditions of transitional fourth-level humanity, the universe was open to them, for fifth-kingdom spacetime is said to possess multiple dimensions incomprehensible and inaccessible to the lower kingdoms.
These so-called gods could travel between the stars on supramundane energy currents unknown to us, incarnating on other
stellar bodies or on planet Earth as the need arose, and withdrawing
as they chose into dimensions invisible to their charges on Earth.
But not only is our past implicated in this new perspective; our future is equally involved. As we ascend with increasing rapidity into higher states of consciousness and hence into proximity with the fifth kingdom, we find the Elders in their various otherworld guises descending to meet us.
As a part
of the great human order, they are our future as well as our past.
In other
words, as with increasing speed we approach in consciousness the
threshold of the spiritual world, it is highly probable we will
discover a fifth domain not of gods but our own kin already
established in majesty and power - already, like the Egyptian
priest-kings of old, free to traverse the cosmic pathways at will as
Lords of the Universe.
The secret teachings of
the very earliest sages of which we have cognizance claim that all
life, all wisdom and creative power is transmitted to the earth
plane via a spiritual energy flowing from the heavenly higher
planes, and that it is by ascending this sacred current, symbolized
as a Pillar or a World Tree connecting earth to heaven, that
humanity comes to its most sublime perfection.
The well-known British author Trevor Ravenscroft likens the Tree of Life to,
The crown of the tree, he says,
The Tree is thus intended as a
metaphor for the archetypal structure of the cosmos in which every
element of it is part of a living functional whole, one in which
humanity, by ascending the Tree and thus uniting the earth plane to
the heavenly, plays a crucial evolutionary role.
This idea of returning home to the
Source above is implicit in all the tribal totem systems found in
early shamanic societies around the world, but was more fully
realized in its religious form when the idea of kingship - of
hierarchical rule from above - seized neolithic societies at the end
of the last Ice Age.
And indeed Guénon's rendition of prehistory, as we have seen, implies that such a universal egalitarian accord was maintained when the Hyperboreans first migrated southward, bifurcating into Central Asia on one hand and into the southern Atlantic continent on the other.
But in time the Pillar ideology of
the two cultures deviated more and more from their common root and
planet-wide conflict developed as a consequence. These events were
eventually to be mythologized in the biblical story of the Tower of
Babel.
Bearing with them their hierarchical Sun cult with its royal dynasties, warlike bull cult and defensive, concentric city planning, they were opposed by the indigenous population.
Thereafter, kingship - rule from above -
became the cause of bitter ideological wars, which in a sense have
still not ceased to rupture the peace of our planet.
It was in that period, says Guénon,
that the Solar mystery religions and secret Sun societies began to
proselytize more widely and the cult of the sacrificed and
resurrected god-king took hold of communities in every land.
But briefly, it can be said that according to the Solar teachings of the Pillar religion, kingly authority and the power to rule wisely rests on the royal initiate's ability to ascend the axis mundi or World Tree to the divine centre of creation at the zenith of the heavens.
There, and only there, he will find deification; there he will be able to access the heavenly powers from which all impulses of rulership, creativity and wisdom emanate; there he will become godlike.
John Major Jenkins, a leading researcher of ancient cosmology, says:
Such a monarch stands as far more than an exemplary figurehead or an administrative symbol at the heart of his kingdom. He has become, by virtue of his conquest of the World Tree, a way-shower into a new order of being for the whole of his society.
In the same way, so
Jenkins believes, at certain critical junctures of the Earth's
history, this odyssey of transformation up the cosmic Pillar to the
divine Centre at the zenith is possible for the race as a whole,
which thereby advances further towards its next evolutionary goal -
the supernal kingdom, the fifth.
Although it would be natural to
assume it is synonymous with the earth's north-south axis of
rotation, such is not the case. According to Guénon, there have been
several successive locations of the World Axis on the surface of the
globe that distinguish it from either the north-south axis of
rotation or the magnetic axis.
But the esoteric reality, expressed long ago in the Pillar teachings, is that the earth incorporates a principle that connects it at all times to a greater spiritual world in the same way that a mirrored reflection is intrinsically connected to the reality.
By virtue of this fact, the earth is hyper-dimensional in structure - as indeed the physicist David Bohm has proposed in his theory of an implicate universal order lying behind the explicate physical order as its energetic template - and this radically modifies everything we can say about the planet, in the way we can measure and describe it.
Opening up the secret
scientific tradition, Guénon asserts that basically nothing less
than a new model of the world is needed if we are to understand the
true nature of the World Axis.
The planet was regarded as a living organism with its own hierarchy of elemental intelligences at work in the manifold organization and running of the whole, and which we call today the work of Nature.
The World Tree, in India known as Mt. Meru, was
believed to be at the very heart of this great dynamic complex, a
channel of evolutionary energy, a planetary path of psychospiritual
transformation of the same order as the seven-fold spinal path of
consciousness in human beings.
These nodes were clairvoyantly perceived as a
succession of gateways up the trunk of the Tree leading into higher
planes of existence, and the final entrance to the Cosmic Centre was
therefore called the North Gate.
His theory states that behind the physical body of the earth lies its spiritual template, a permanent pre-physical or etheric web of forces delineating the planetary structure in its essential form.
In this inner light body - or, as Vedic cosmology calls it, the vajra body - is located the World Axis, the etheric source and intelligent regulator of all the energies of the planet.
At the beginning of
each great temporal cycle - and by that Guénon means at the very
least one round of the Zodiac, one Sidereal Year of 25,920 years -
the two bodies are in virtually perfect alignment, but as the cycle
proceeds a separation occurs and the physical body falls
increasingly out of alignment with its spiritual template - (a
change that corresponds to Blavatsky's image of a tilting of the
axle of the zodiacal Wheel).
The two bodies, the spiritual archetype and its physical reflection, will not again achieve alignment until the end of the temporal cycle.[16]
From this
circumstance comes all the suffering of becoming, all the so-called
evil, of our earthly existence.
But although the spiritual world of pure Being is changeless, the natural state of its reflection, holographically projected onto a lower plane, even at its least displaced is to become off-centre in relation to it and therefore in perpetual compensatory motion.
This is the biblical "fall" of mankind without which there would be no evolutionary process.
With the separating
out of the physical plane, motion is created and the suffering of
change begins, for the process of increasing differentiation of the
physical body from its spiritual background inflicts on the planet
and all its life-forms a local disturbance, the angst of movement,
of disequilibrium, of continual adjustment to new conditions and new
evolutionary demands - but also the possibility of attaining a
greater state of being.
Today the World Axis has apparently relocated southward and
is situated in Middle Asia, where it has been for many thousands of
years.
He calls the World Axis the evolutionary axis, by implication a third terrestrial axis presently unknown to science. Clairvoyantly visible, this great current of psychospiritual intelligent energy is thought to run through the planet between (roughly) latitudes 45 to 50 degrees north, emerging north of Kashmir, possibly in the Pamirs.[17]
It is in that
vicinity, at the foot of the World Tree, that the peoples of Central
Asia have traditionally located the hidden kingdom of the Elders
known as Shambhala, an initiatory centre accessible on both a
physical, an etheric and an
astral plane.
Thus the North Gate, he contends, can be viewed as analogous at a cosmic level to the pineal gland in the human system, which is the most interior and creative centre in man and,
He sees
the Cosmic Centre at the head of the World Axis as fulfilling the
same function in a planetary context.
Thousands of years ago, he says, priest-astronomers realized that approximately every 6,450 years the North Gate was aligned with the galactic centre, and that such times offered a priceless evolutionary opportunity for the whole race.
Gordon too observes that the earth is subject to celestial seasons of about 6,480 years,
It is an astronomical fact, says Jenkins,
Jenkins equates the spiritual evolution of humanity with this periodic alignment of the Earth with the galactic plane and the Galactic Centre.
The idea that it stimulates consciousness on this
planet is, he says, "an intriguing and profound concept" that finds
echoes in Mayan, Vedic and Egyptian cosmology.
Even as the yogic consciousness ascends the spinal system, so
activating a sequence of seven hierarchically ordered chakras or psychospiritual energy vortices which alter in subtle ways the
entire spectrum of consciousness, so the ascension of the racial
soul up the World Tree at certain precessional intervals of c.6,450
(or c.6,480) years corresponds with the opening up of a succession
of celestial gateways.
It is a
moment of supreme evolutionary importance, a collective initiation
perhaps best conveyed by the teachings of the Mithraic mystery
religion.
Seven planetary spheres were opened up to the seeker through the seven grades of Mithraic initiation; allowing him ultimately to ascend to the highest, the Father (Saturn).
However, beyond the seventh level was a secret teaching revealing an eighth and ninth level or "house" where the Hypercosmic Sun was located.
This hypercosmic luminary, this "Star of stars," as the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of Alexandria called it, was identified with the Galactic Centre, to which access was gained only through the eighth and the ninth celestial "doorway" above that of Saturn.[21]
This secret
means of escape from Earth's gravity into the freedom of the
universe has been closely guarded by occult tradition and is still
not fully unveiled to our understanding.
...when the divine light of the Milky Way Centre pours down through the opened valves of the World Axis and irradiates the earth and all its inhabitants for a certain interval of time.
It is in that critical
interval that the great evolutionary mutations take place,
civilizations are overthrown and reinstated in radically new forms
and the potential exists for the fifth kingdom to be realized by at
least some members of fourth-kingdom humanity.
Indeed, by now millions of
people are watching and waiting for
the end-of-the-world Mayan date
of 2012
CE, believing it to be the beginning of a new World Age… a
further stage on the journey towards the fifth kingdom.
I remember well the report in
the media, because immediately a cry of distress and foreboding went
up right across India; for it was known by most Hindu astrologers
that this rare stellar event, occurring only four times in the precessional cycle of 26,000 years, does indeed foreshadow great
floods and catastrophic climatic changes.
To esotericists generally the conjunction signified a new World Age and an impending psychospiritual initiation of collective humanity, with all the social and ideological tumult such an event implied.
And confirming
John Major Jenkins' later theory to the hilt, the conjunction was
seen by some star-gazers as the first sign of a coming revolution in
geo-political world affairs, with the rise of Asia and the decline
of the Western powers' hegemony.
But nearly fifty years on, the events presaged in 1962 are now crystallizing as post-millennial realities. Ominously, the ice caps and glaciers are melting, the seas rising, earth's resources shrinking; the Anglo-American world order, built on predatory economic corporations, is unraveling, Asiatic power inexorably rising.
A
transformation in human consciousness is well
underway; and there is increasing evidence that the vast natural,
socio-political and consciousness changes we are seeing are now
irreversible, for good or ill.
Included in this growing Eastern bloc is Russia which, since the collapse of the Soviet regime, is increasingly turning away from Western Europe and towards Asia in its quest for identity, and is thus rediscovering its Slavic roots and its deep Mongol/Turkic connections.
Across the steppes, where for countless centuries a melting pot of peoples, religions and empires from every quarter has traded and warred and sunk beneath desert sands, a spirit of renaissance, of ecumenical reform, is taking hold.
A countervailing force that can be identified with the invisible spiritual powerhouse in the heart of High Asia is stirring throughout the region.
Claiming to be in
response to the militaristic Anglo-American colonization that has
long dominated it, this new regional climate bodes well for the
rebalancing of the globe's spiritual, cultural and economic forces.
It
seeks instead to recapture the ancient Arctic accord and to set
forth new terms for a viable future for humankind.
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