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by Jason Jeffrey
February 9, 2000
New Dawn No. 58
January-February 2000
from
NewDawnMagazine Website
Spanish version
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JASON JEFFREY holds
an interest in a wide range of subjects including
geopolitics, the 'New World Order', Big Brother,
suppressed technology, psychic/spiritual development,
ancient civilizations and esotericism.
He can be
contacted at
jasonjeffrey88@gmail.com. |
Far north, somewhere near the icy regions of the North Pole, legend
speaks of an ancient and mostly forgotten civilization .
Mythical in character, the Hyperborean
civilization is said to have flourished in the northern most region
of planet Earth at a time when the area was suitable for human
habitation.
According to certain esoteric systems and spiritual traditions,
Hyperborea was the terrestrial and celestial beginning of
civilization . The home of original Man. Some theories postulate
Hyperborea was the original Garden of Eden, the point where the
earthly and heavenly planes meet.
And it is said Man transgressed
Divine Law in this Golden Age civilization , the ultimate price
being his banishment to the outside world. Man ventured into other
regions of Earth, establishing new civilizations, bringing to an end
this great and glorious Golden Age.
The Golden Age is central to manifold ancient traditions and myths.
Significantly, the Golden Age appears most frequent in the
traditions of cultures stretching from India to Northern Europe -
the area directly beneath the Polar regions.
Joscelyn Godwin, in Arktos,
The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival, says:
The memory or imagination of a
Golden Age seems to be a particularity of the cultures that
cover the area from India to Northern Europe…
But in the ancient Middle East there
is an obvious relic of the Golden Age in Genesis, as the Garden
of Eden where humanity walked with the gods before the Fall. The
Egyptians spoke of past epochs ruled by god-kings.
Babylonian mythology… had a scheme
of three ages, each lasting while the vernal [Spring] equinox
precessed through four signs of the zodiac; the first of these,
under the dominion of Anu, as a Golden Age, ended by the Flood.
The Iranian Avesta texts tell of the
thousand-year Golden Reign of Yima, the first man and the first
king, under whose rule cold and heat, old age, death and
sickness were unknown.1
The most fully developed theory of this
kind, and probably the oldest one, is the Hindu doctrine of the Four
Yugas.
The
four ages in this system are,
...the whole tenfold period making up
one Mayayuga.
The Kritayuga corresponds to the Golden
Age, the Kali Yuga to the current period of time.
Every description of the Golden Age period relates how the 'gods'
walked with men in a perfect and harmonious environment balanced
between the terrestrial and celestial. Humanity suffered no sickness
and no aging in this timeless paradise. After the Fall, man 'fell'
into Time and suffering, forfeiting the gift of immortality.
Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophical Society,
claimed the 'second root race' originated in Hyperborea, before the
later races of
Lemuria and
Atlantis.
The Russian metaphysician Alexandre
Dugin says that it was the home of the "solar people", connected
to what is now northern Russia.
"Solar people," Alexandre Dugin
explains, are a "cultural-spiritual type" who are creative,
energetic and spiritual. They are the opposite of "lunar
people", a psycho-spiritual type who are materialistic,
conservative and wary of change.
The ancient Greeks had a legend of
Hyperborea, a land of perpetual sun beyond the "north wind".
Hecataeus (circa 500 BC) says
that the holy place of the Hyperboreans, which was built,
"after the pattern of the spheres",
lay "in the regions beyond the land of the Celts" on "an island
in the ocean."
According to popular accounts, the God
Apollo's temple at Delphi was founded by individuals from Hyperborea.
The Greek lyric poet Alcaeus (600
BC) sang of the actual or mystical journey of Apollo to the land of
the Hyperboreans:
O King Apollo, son of great Zeus,
whom thy father did furnish forth at thy birth with golden
headband and lyre of shell, and giving thee moreover a
swan-drawn chariot to drive, would have thee go to Delphi…
But nevertheless, once mounted, thou
badest thy swans fly to the land of the Hyperboreans.
The wearing of a star-embroidered robe
by the King and 'Ruler of the World' - the heavenly sphere serving
as a symbol of the earthly one - is a custom that can be traced to
the Hyperboreans.
Embroidered in gold on blue silk were
the figures of the sun, moon and stars.
Such robes were worn by the kings of
Ancient Rome and Julius Ceasar, as well as Augustus and the
Roman Emperors.
Earthenware statuettes found in a grave in Yugoslavia show the
'Hyperborean Apollo' in a chariot drawn by swans. The god wears, on
his neck and breast, yellow figures of the sun and stars; on his
head is a rayed crown with a headband that has a zigzag pattern.
His robe, which reaches to the ground,
is dark blue with yellow designs.
Collapse of
Hyperborea
One of the most popular theories for the collapse of Hyperborea was
a physical inclination (catastrophe) of the Earth's axis.
Man's
transgression of Divine Law caused a shift in the metaphysical
balance, the effect of which was catastrophic on the Earth plane.
Julius Evola, the noted Italian
metaphysician, explains that at this point the first cycle of
history closed, and that of the second, the Atlantean, began:
The memory of this Arctic seat is
the patrimony of the traditions of many people, in the form
either of real geographic allusions, or of symbols of its
function and original significance, often transferred to a
super-historical significance, or else applied to other centers
that may be considered as copies of the original one…
Above all, one will notice the
interplay of the Arctic theme with the Atlantic theme… It is
known that the astrophysical phenomenon of the inclination of
the earth's axis causes a change of climate from one epoch to
another.
Moreover, as tradition tells, this
inclination took place at a given moment, and in fact through
the alignment of a physical and a metaphysical fact, as if a
disorder in nature were reflecting a certain situation of a
spiritual order…
At any rate, it was only at a
certain moment that ice and eternal night descended on the polar
region. Then, with the enforced emigration from that seat, the
first cycle closed and the second opened, initiating the second
great era, the Atlantean Cycle.2
The memory of a Golden Age, although
rendered in an archetypal or mythological form, serves a
super-historical purpose.
This is why the remembrance of the
ancient civilization of Atlantis is sometimes enmeshed with that of
Hyperborea. We cannot expect to 'prove' the physical existence of
these civilizations.
All myths are known to have a historical
basis. Transmitted primarily by oral tradition, they are wrapped in
a catchy and simple tale that ensures their survival and transmittal
down through the ages.
Myth serves an extremely vital function
- a recollection of our beginnings, a knowledge of where we are
heading, and what we are supposed to do.
It is only now in the Kali Yuga that we
have disconnected from tradition, losing the ability to correctly
interpret and understand myths with historical kernels of truth.
Hyperborea
Revived
The legend of Hyperborea revived during the 18th
and 19th centuries when a flurry of books were
published dealing with the idea that civilization had first appeared
not in the Middle East, but somewhere else.
The popular theory of the day postulated that the so-called 'Aryans'
(Europeans) were superior and more intelligent than Semites (Middle
East peoples).
Therefore, logically, civilization could
not have originated in the Middle East and Hebrew was probably not
the first language.
-
The Frenchmen of the
Enlightenment were in no doubt that "Eden" was situated on
higher ground.
-
The Germans similarly, who were
looking for their Aufklarung, also sought to be free
of a history tied to the Mediterranean and Middle East
regions.
-
British and German scholars
studied ancient Indian (Vedic) civilization and leant the
Sanskrit language. Many believed Sanskrit the original
language of the 'Aryans'.
With new sources of knowledge from
ancient Egypt, Chaldea, China and India, researchers were treading
on dangerous ground as far as questioning Man's origins.
Biblical history was still strictly
upheld and moving too far from this historical boundary could have
you silenced.
Writers such as,
-
Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793)
-
the Rev. Dr. William Warren
(1800s)
-
Bal Gangadhar Tilak
(1856-1929)
-
H.S. Spencer (1900s),
...developed out theories,
often borrowing from earlier sources, attempting to prove man's
origins in the Polar region.
Tilak's book Arctic Home (published 1903) begins by stating
the well known fact that warm weather remains in the Arctic regions,
which shows the climate was far different during the interglacial
period.
According to Tilak, scientists do concede the existence, in
the past, of a warm circumpolar continent, and the circumstances
there would not have been nearly unfavorable as imagined.
Tilak was convinced the ancient Indian Vedic texts point
unmistakably to a "realm of the gods" where the sun rises and sets
once a year, showing that their writers could understand the
astronomical conditions at the North Pole.
Tilak, who had a perfect mastery of Vedic language, placed the
original Arctic home existing around circa 10,000 BC, just prior to
its destruction and the beginning of the last Ice Age.
His book had little impact in the West but was popular in India.
When the learned Zoroastrian H.S.
Spencer wrote his book The Aryan Ecliptic Cycle (1965), a
development of Tilak's work, he was able to obtain endorsements from
Sir S. Radhakrishna, then President of India. As well as from
dignitaries of the Theosophical Society in Adyar and the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram in Pondichary.
Spencer's approach commenced not with the Vedic but the Zoroastrian
scriptures, going further than Tilak in tracing the progress of the
'Aryans' from the North to their new homes, and the schisms that
beset them on the way.
Spencer's 'Aryans' made their presence felt after they travelled far
and wide. They molded the religions and cultures of Egypt, Sumeria,
Babylon, and of the Semites, hitherto worshippers of feminine lunar
deities.
However, the search for a terrestrial 'Hyperborea' by many
researchers and the movement of an original 'race' has been
extremely difficult and presumptuous. Proving human habitation
possible at the North Pole somewhere between 8000 and 10,000 BC is
no mean feat, particularly if you were living in the 18th century.
The numerous theories posited offering
contradictory or tendentious 'evidence' has served only to discredit
the whole notion of Hyperborea. The same could be said of theories
attempting to prove the existence of the 'lost continent of
Atlantis'.
The drive to prove the actuality of a
terrestrial Hyperborea has overshadowed its occult and symbolic
importance.
The Spiritual
Pole
In the quest to discover the 'physical' location of Hyperborea, most
writers overlooked the possibility that the mythology served a
special symbolic and spiritual purpose.
What if the truth behind the legend was
esoteric, and not exoteric as some even today still maintain?
Many traditions speak of a supreme spiritual center or 'supreme
country'. The 'supreme country' that does not necessarily lay at a
specific earthly point, but exists in a primordial state, unaffected
by terrestrial cataclysms.
The 'supreme country', commonly regarded as 'polar' in orientation,
symbolically is always represented as being at the 'Axis of the
world' - and in most cases is referred to as a 'Sacred Mountain'.
Rene Guenon in his book
The
Lord of the World says:
Almost every tradition has its name
for this mountain, such as the Hindu Meru, the Persian Alborj,
and the Montsalvat of Western Grail legend.
There is also the Arab mountain Qaf
and the Greek Olympus, which has in many ways the same
significance. This consists of a region that, like the
Terrestrial Paradise, has become inaccessible to ordinary
humanity, and that is beyond the reach of those cataclysms which
upset the human world at the end of certain cyclic periods.
This region is the authentic
'supreme country' which, according to certain Vedic and Avestan
texts, was originally sited towards the North Pole, even in the
literal sense of the word.
Although it may change its
localisation according to the different phases of human history,
it still remains polar in a symbolic sense because essentially
it represents the fixed axis around which everything revolves.3
The Vedic texts say the 'supreme
country' is known as Paradesha, also called the 'Heart of the
World'. It is the word from which the Chaldeans formed Pardes, and
Westerners Paradise.
There is notably another name for it probably even older than
Paradesha.
This name is Tula, called by the
Greeks Thule. Common to regions from Russia to Central
America, Tula represented the primordial state from which
spiritual power emanated.
It is known that the Mexican Tula owes its origin to the Toltecs who
came, it is said, from Aztlan, the 'land in the middle of the
water', which is evidently Atlantis.
They brought the name Tula from their
country of origin and gave it to a center which consequently must
have replaced, to a certain extent, that of the lost continent. On
the other hand, the Atlantean Tula must be distinguished from the
Hyperborean Tula, which latter represents the first and supreme
center. 4
In this case - Tula - representing a center of spiritual authority -
does not remain fixed in a geographical location.
Guenon states that the Atlantean cycle,
successor to the Hyperborean cycle, is associated with Tula. The
Atlantean Tula is an image of the original primordial state situated
in a northern or Polar location. As world cycles progress onward,
the supreme seat of spiritual power regresses further and further
into hiding and obscurity.
This, of course, is deliberate and
predictable as humanity descends into the end of the age (Kali
Yuga), progressively enmeshing itself in the material plane until
the reversal of established world order is imposed.
It should be emphasized here that Tula, or the center of
spiritual authority, constitutes the fixed point known
symbolically to all traditions as the 'pole' or axis around which
the world rotates. Metaphysically speaking, the world rotates around
this seat of power even if it's not geographically North or South.
In the Buddhist tradition 'Chakravarti' literally means "He who
makes the wheel turn", which is to say the one who, being at the
center of all things, directs all movement without himself
participating, or who is, to use Aristotle's words, the "unmoving
mover".
The turning of the world, the 'Pole' and axis, combine to depict a
wheel in the Celtic, Chaldean and Hindu traditions.
Such is the true significance of
the swastika, seen worldwide from
the Far East to the Far West, which is intrinsically the 'sign of
the Pole'.
The Pole and Mystical
Enlightenment
It is in medieval Iran that we find extant literature on the
Spiritual Pole and the experience of mystical ascent to it.
The Iranian Sufis, drawing not only on
Islam but on the Mazdean, Manichean, Hermetic, Gnostic and Platonic
traditions, blended a sacred knowledge said to be 'scientific',
mystical and philosophically practical.
Esoterically… the Persian
theosophers situated their "Orient" neither to the East, nor to
the South, wither they faced in prayer towards the Ka'ba.
"The Orient sought by the
mystic, the Orient that cannot be located on our maps, is in
the direction of the north, beyond the north."
[The Man of Light in Iranian
Sufism by Henry Corbin, 1978]
About this Pole reigns a perpetual
Darkness, says the Recital of Hayy ibn Yaqzan, one of the
visionary recitals of Avicenna (Ibn Sina).
"Each year the rising sun shines
upon it at a fixed time. He who confronts that Darkness and
does not hesitate to plunge into to it for fear of
difficulties will come to a vast space, boundless and filled
with light."
[Ibid]
This Darkness, says Corbin,
is the ignorance of the natural man.
"To pass through it is a
terrifying and painful experience, for it ruins and destroys
all the potencies and norms on which the natural man lived
and depended…"
[Ibid]
But it must be faced consciously
before one can acquire the saving gnosis of the light beyond.
The Darkness around the Pole, annually pierced by the sun's
rays, is at once terrestrial and symbolic. On the one hand, this
is the situation at the North Pole, where there are six months
of night and six of day. It is characteristic of esoteric
tradition that the same image is valid on two or more levels.
But as Corbin and Guenon never tired
of pointing out, the symbolic level is not a fanciful construct
on the basis of hard terrestrial fact: it is quite the other way
round.
In the present case, the mystical experience of
penetrating the Darkness at the Pole is the fundamental reality
and the authentic experience of the individual.
The fact that the set-up of the
material world reflects the celestial geography is what is
contingent. In brief, in this teaching as in Platonism, it is
the supersensible realm that is real, and the material realm
that is a shadow of it.5
The seeker, through deep meditation on
spiritual matters, succeeds in entering a world of mystical
experience, and makes a pilgrimage to Hyperborea that can not be
discovered from maps.
Aristeas, the Greek poet, in
shamanic rapture, is said to have travelled to Hyperborea while
"possessed by Apollo". Mystical soul-travel to Hyperborea is common
in ancient Greek literature.
The journey to this Pole is sometimes illustrated as the ascent of a
column of light, extending from the depths of hell to the lucid
paradise in the cosmic North.
As previously mentioned, the Pole is also a Mountain, called Mount
Qaf in Islamic tradition, whose ascent, like Dante's climbing of the
Mountain of Purgatory, represents the pilgrims progress through
spiritual states.
Guenon, in The Lord of the World, explains,
"the idea evoking the representation
under discussion is essentially one of 'stability', that is
itself a characteristic of the Pole."
The Mountain, referred to as an
'Island', "remains immovable amidst the ceaseless agitation of the
waves, a disturbance that reflects that of the external world.
Accordingly, it is necessary to cross
the 'sea of passions' in order to reach the 'Mount of Salvation',
the 'Sanctuary of Peace'."
Our search for Hyperborea is our desire to return to Paradesha or
Paradise - the primordial spring of Man's original existence.
The importance of knowing the terrestrial location of a lost
civilization at the northern regions is thus overshadowed by its
symbolic relevance.
To seek Hyperborea is to quest for spiritual enlightenment. The
Mountain, the Island, the immovable Rock, fixed in a Polar
orientation, relays a symbolic representation of our search for
Ultimate Reality.
Its immovability anchors us to this
important task.
Footnotes
-
Arktos, The Polar Myth in
Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn Godwin, p. 16.
-
Quoted in Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and
Nazi Survival, p. 58-9, original source Revolt Against the
Modern World by Julius Evola, 1951.
-
The Lord of the World by Rene Guenon, p. 50.
-
Ibid, p. 56
-
Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi
Survival by Joscelyn Godwin, p. 167-8.
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