24
The Pole and the Hyperborean Region
At this time it is important to consider a peculiar characteristic of the primordial age that allows us to associate with it very specific historical and geographical representations. I have previously discussed the symbolism of the “pole.” This pole is either represented as an island or as terra firma and symbolizes spiritual stability (the seat of transcendent beings, heroes, and immortals) opposed to the contingency of the “waters”; or as a mountain or “elevated place” usually associated with Olympian meanings. In ancient traditions both of these representations were often associated with the “polar” symbolism that was applied to the supreme center of the world and thus to the archetype of any kind of regere in the supreme sense of the word.[1]
In addition to the symbol of the pole, there are some recurrent and very specific traditional data that indicate the North as the site of an island, terra firma, or mountain, the meaning of which is often confused with the location of the first era; in other words, we are confronted by a motif that simultaneously has a spiritual and a real meaning, pointing back to a time when the symbol was reality and the reality a symbol and history and metahistory were not two separated parts but rather two parts reflecting each other. This is precisely the point in which it is possible to enter into the events conditioned by time. Allegedly, according to tradition, in an epoch of remote prehistory that corresponds to the Golden Age or Age of Being, the symbolical island or “polar” land was a real location situated in the Arctic, in the area that today corresponds to the North Pole. This region was inhabited by beings who by virtue of their possession of that nonhuman spirituality (characterized by gold, “glory,” light, and life) that in later times will be evoked by the abovementioned symbolism, founded the race that exemplified the Uranian tradition in a pure state; this race, in turn, was the central and most direct source of the various forms and manifestations this tradition produced in other races and civilizations.[2]
The memory of this Arctic seat is the heritage of the traditions of many people, both in the form of real geographical references and in symbols of its function and its original meaning; these symbols were often elevated to a superhistorical plane, in other words they were applied to other centers that were capable of being considered as replicas of the former. For this reason there is often a confusion of memories, names, myths, and locations, but a trained eye will easily detect the single components. It is noteworthy to emphasize the interference of the Arctic theme with the Atlantic theme, of the mystery of the North with the mystery of the West, since the latter succeeded the original traditional pole as the main seat. We know that owing to an astrophysical cause; that is, to the tilting of the terrestrial axis, in every era there has been a change in climate. According to tradition, this inclination occurred at the specific moment in which the syntony of a physical and a metaphysical event occurred, as if to represent a state of disorder in the natural world that reflected an event of a spiritual nature. When Lieh-tzu described the myth of the giant Kung-Kung who shatters the “column of heaven,” he was probably referring to such an event. In this Chinese tradition we also find other concrete references, such as the following one, though it is mixed together with details that describe later cataclysms:
The pillars of heaven were shattered. The earth shook at its foundations. The northern skies descended lower and lower. The sun, the moon and the stars changed their course [their course appeared changed as a result of the tilting of the terrestrial axis]. The earth’s surface cracked and the waters contained in its belly gushed forward and inundated various countries. Man was in a state of rebellion against Heaven and the universe fell victim to chaos. The sun darkened. The planets changed their course [because of the abovementioned shift in perspective] and the great harmony of heaven was destroyed.[3]
In any event, the freezing and the long night descended at a specific time on the polar region. Thus, when the forced migration from this seat ensued, the first cycle came to an end and a new cycle—the Atlantic cycle—began.
Aryan texts from India, such as the Vedas and the Mahābhārata preserve the memory of the Arctic seat through astronomical and calendar-related allusions that cannot be understood other than through an actual reference to such a seat.[4] In the Hindu tradition the term dvīpa, which means “insular continent,” is often used to designate different cycles by virtue of a spatial transposition of a temporal notion (cycle = island). Now, in the doctrine of the dvīpa we find meaningful recollections of the Arctic seat, even though they are mixed with other things. The above mentioned Śveta-dvīpa (“Island of Splendor”) was situated in the Far North; the Uttara-Kuru are often mentioned as an original Northern race that originated from Jambu-dvīpa, the “polar” insular continent that is the first of the various dvīpa and, at the same time, the center of them all. Its memory is mixed with the memory of the Śaka-dvīpa, located in the “white sea” or “milky sea,” namely, the Arctic Sea. In this place no deviation from the law from above occurred. According to the Kūrma Purāṇa, the seat of the solar Viṣṇu, symbolized by the “polar cross” (the hooked cross or swastika), coincides with the Śveta-dvīpa that the Padma Purāṇa claims to be the homeland, located beyond anything connected with saṁsāric fear and fret, of the great ascetics, the mahāyogi, and the “children of Brahman” (the equivalent of the “transcendent beings” who inhabited the northern regions, according to the Chinese tradition); these “great souls” live by Hari, who is Viṣṇu himself, represented as “blond” and “golden” and living by a symbolic throne “upheld by lions, which shines like the sun and radiates like fire.” These are variations on the theme of the “Land of the Sun.” As a reflection of this, on a doctrinal plane the deva-yāna, which is the way leading to solar immortality and to superindividual states of being—as opposed to the way or a return to the mani or to the Mothers—was called the “Way of the North”: in Sanskrit, north (uttara) also means “the most elevated, or supreme region.” Also, uttara-yāna (northern path) is the “ascending” path followed by the sun between the winter and summer solstices.[5] Among the Aryans from Iran we find more precise memories. Their original seat (Ariyana Vaego), created by the god of light and in which the “glory” dwells and where the king Yima allegedly ṁet Ahura Mazda, was a land situated in the Far North. The tradition of the Zend-Avesta relates that Yima was warned in advance of the approaching of “fatal winters”[6] and that the “serpent of winter,” the pet of the god of darkness, Angra Mainyu, came upon Ariyana Vaego; then “there were ten months of winter and two of summer,” and “it was cold in the waters, on the earth, and frost covered the vegetation.”[7] Ten months of winter and two months of summer: this is the climate of the Arctic regions.
The Nordic-Scandinavian tradition, notwithstanding its fragmentary nature, offers various testimonies that are often mixed together in a confused way. It is possible, however, to find analogous testimonies. The Asgard, the primordial golden seat of the Aesir, was located by those traditions in the Mitgard, which was the “Land in the Middle.” This mythical land was in turn identified both with Gardarike, which is a semi-Arctic region, and with the “Green Island” or “Green Land,” which, though portrayed in ancient cosmology as the first land to arise from the abyss Ginnungagap, is likely to be related with Greenland itself. Greenland, as the name itself suggests, seems to have had a rich vegetation and to have been unaffected by the Ice Age up to the time of the Goths. In the early Middle Ages we still find the idea that the northern regions were the original birthplace of all races and people.[8] Moreover, in the Eddie tales describing the struggle of the gods against destiny (rok), an eschatological struggle that they believed was going to affect their own homeland, it is possible to recognize some data that refer to the end of the first cycle; in these tales reminiscences of past events are mixed with apocalyptical themes. Here, just like in the Vendidad, we find the theme of a terrible winter. The breaking out of the natural elements was coupled with the dimming of the sun. According to the Gylfaginning: “First of all a winter will come called fimbul-winter [mighty or mysterious winter]. Then snow will drift from all directions. There will be great frosts and keen winds.”[9]
In the Chinese tradition the country of “transcendent men” and the country of a “race of beings with soft bones” are often identified with the northern region: an emperor of the First Dynasty was thought to have resided in a country located north of the Northern Sea, in a boundless region spared by inclement weather and endowed with a symbolic mountain (Hu-Ling) and a water spring. This country was called “Far North”; Mu, another imperial type, was said to have been brokenhearted upon leaving it.[10] Analogously, Tibet retains the memory of Tshang Shambhala, the mystical “northern city,” or city of “peace,” also thought to be the island on which the hero Gesar was said to have been “born” (just like Zarathustra was born in the Ariyana Vaego). The masters of Tibetan traditions say that the “northern paths” lead the yogin to the great liberation.
The recurrent tradition concerning the origins that is found in North America, from the Pacific to the region of the Great Lakes, mentions the sacred land of the “Far North,” situated by the “great waters,” whence allegedly came the ancestors of the Nahuatlans, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs. I previously mentioned that the name of this land, Aztlan, just like the Hindu Śveta-dvīpa, denotes the idea of whiteness, or of white land. In the northern traditions there is the memory of a land inhabited by Gaelic races and situated by the Gulf of St. Lawrence called “Great Ireland” or Hvitramamaland, which means “homeland of white people”; the names Wabanaki and Abenaki found among the inhabitants of those regions derive from the word wabeya, which means “white.”
Furthermore, some legends of central America mention four primordial ancestors of the Quiche race who are trying to return to Tulla, the region of light. When they get there they only find ice; also, the sun seldom appears. Then they scatter and move to the country of the Quiche.[11] This Tula or Tullan was the original homeland of the Toltecs’ forefathers, who probably derived their tribal name from it and who eventually called “Tula” the center of the empire they established on the Mexican plateau. This Tula was also conceived as the “Land of the Sun” and was sometimes located east of North America, in the Atlantic; but this is probably due to the interference of the memory of a later location that was destined to perpetuate for some time the function of the primordial Tula (to which Aztlan probably corresponds) when the glacial weather descended upon it and when the sun disappeared;[12] the name Tula, which visibly corresponds to the Greeks’ Thule, was also applied to other regions.
According to Greco-Roman traditions, Thule lay in the sea that derives its name from the god of the Golden Age, namely, the Cronium Sea, which corresponds to the northern region of the Atlantic;[13] a similar location was ascribed in later traditions to what became symbol and metahistory in the form of the Happy Islands, or the Islands of the Immortals,[14] or the Lost Island. This island, as Honorius Augustadumensis wrote, “is hidden from people’s sight; sometimes it is discovered by chance, but when it is actively sought after, it cannot be found.” Thule is confused with both the legendary Hyperborean homeland, situated in the Far North[15] and from which the original Achaean stocks brought the Delphic Apollo, and with the isle of Ogygia, “the sea’s navel” located far away in the vast ocean.[16] Plutarch situated this island north of Great Britain and claimed that it was in proximity of the Arctic region where Kronos, the god of the golden region, is still asleep; in this location the sun sets only for one hour each day, and even then the darkness is not all-enveloping but looks more like a twilight, just like in the Arctic regions.[17] The confused notion of the bright northern night became the foundation of the notion of the land of the Hyperboreans as a place of perennial light, free of darkness. This representation and this memory were so vivid that an echo of it lasted until the end of the Roman civilization. After the primordial land was identified with Great Britain, it is said that the Constantius Chlorus (reigned A.D. 305–306) went there with his legions not so much to pursue trophies and military victories, but rather in order to visit the land that is “most sacred and closest to heaven”; to be able to contemplate the father of the gods (Kronos); and to enjoy a “day without a night,” in other words to be able to anticipate the possession of the eternal light that is typical of imperial apotheosis.[18] Even when the Golden Age was projected into the future as the hope of a new saeculum, we can still find references to Nordic symbolism. According to Lactantius,[19] the mighty prince who will reestablish justice after the fall of Rome will come from the north (ab extremis finibus plagae septemtrionalis); the mystical and invincible Tibetan hero Gesar, who will reestablish a kingdom of justice and exterminate the usurpers, is expected to be “reborn” in the north; Shambhala, the sacred northern city, will be the birth place of Kalki-avatara, the one who will put an end to the Dark Age; the Hyperborean Apollo, according to Virgil, will inaugurate a new golden and heroic age in the sign of Rome;[20] and so on.
After stating these essential points, I will not make further references to the law that connects physical and spiritual causes as it is applied to a plane upon which, between what may be characterized as a “fall” (the deviation of an absolutely primordial race) and the physical tilting of the terrestrial axis (which determined radical changes in climate and periodical natural disasters affecting entire continents), it is possible to have a foreboding of an intimate connection. I will only point out that ever since the polar seat became deserted it is possible to verify that progressive alteration and loss of the original tradition that will eventually lead to the Iron Age, or Dark Age, or Kali Yuga, or ”era of the wolf” (Edda) and, strictly speaking, to modern times.
Footnotes
1. R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chaps. 3, 4. The idea of a magnetic “polar” mountain, often located on an island, can be found in different forms and adaptations in Chinese, medieval Nordic, and Islamic legends. See E. Taylor, Primitive Culture (London, 1920).
2. The hypothesis of an austral rather than a boreal origin can be ascribed to the traditions concerning Lemuria, which, however, is connected to a cycle so ancient that it cannot be adequately considered in this context. [For an interesting discussion of this theme see J. Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival (Grand Rapids, Mich., 1993).]
3. Lieh-tzu, 5. Plato himself associated mythical catastrophes such as the one caused by Phaëthon with a “change in the course of the stars,” that is, with the different appearance of the heavenly vault that resulted from the shift of the terrestrial axis.
4. G. B. Tilak, The Arctic Home in the Vedas: Being Also a New Key to the Interpretation of Many Vedic Texts and Legends (Poona, 1903).
5. In a Hindu rite (anjali), the homage paid to traditional texts is performed while facing north (The Laws of Manu 2.70), as if in memory of the place of origin of the transcendent wisdom contained in them. In Tibet, the north is believed to be the origin of a very ancient spiritual tradition, of which the magical formulas of the indigenous Bön religion allegedly are the degenerated residues.
6. Vendidad, 2.20.
7. Ibid., l.3–4.
8. Jordanes, Historia Gotorum: “Sandza insula quasi officina gentium aut certe velut nationum.”
9. Gylfaginning, 51. The Eddie representation of the North as Niflheim, the “world of mist and darkness,” inhabited by giants and by frost, was most likely developed in a later period by stocks that had already migrated to the South; likewise, the frozen Ariyana Vaego was regarded as the seat of the dark forces of the evil creation of Angra Mainyu, who personally came from the North to fight against Zarathustra. Vendidad, 19.1.
10. Lieh-tzu, 5.
11. The four Quiche ancestors probably correspond to the Celtic idea of the “Island of the Four Lords,” and to the Chinese idea of the faraway Ku-she island, inhabited by transcendent men and by four lords (R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, 71–72). Guénon recalled the division of ancient Ireland into four kingdoms that allegedly reproduced the division proper of “a land situated farther North, today unknown and maybe gone forever” and the repeated occurrence in Ireland of the symbol of the “center” or “pole,” which the Greeks called omphalos. I will add that the black Stone of Destiny, which designated legitimate kings and which was one of the mystical objects brought to Ireland by the race of the Tuatha dé Danaan, who themselves came from an Atlantic or North Atlantic land, had the same value as a regal “polar” symbol in the double meaning of the word.
12. Guénon, in his Le Roi du monde (ch. 10), made some astute observations on the relationship that traditionally existed between Thule and the figurations of the Big Dipper, which is connected with the polar symbolism.
13. Pliny, Historia naturalis, 4.30.
14. According to Strabo (Geographia, 1.6.2), Thule was six days of navigation, north of (Great) Britain.
15. Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo, 4.281; Pliny, 4.89. Around the fourth century B.C., Hecateus of Abdera said that Great Britain was inhabited by “Hyperboreans,” who are identified with the proto-Celts; these people were credited with erecting the prehistoric temple of Stonehenge.
16. Odyssey, 1.50; 12.244. Here too, because of the connections with Zeus’s and the Hesperides’ garden, there are several obvious interpolations with the memory of the later Atlantic seat.
17. Plutarch, De facie in orbe Junae, 26. Plutarch says that beyond other islands, further north, there the seat still exists in which Kronos, the god of the Golden Age, sleeps on a rock that shines like gold and where birds bring him ambrosia.
18. It is possible that Ogygia, composed of the Gaelic roots og (“young” and “sacred”) and iag (“island”), refers to the “Sacred Land of Youth,” to the Tir na mBeo, the “Land of the Living” spoken of in Nordic legends, which in turn corresponds to Avalon, the original seat of the Tuatha dé Danaan.
19. The Divine Institutes, 7.16.3. These emergences continue in the later mystical and hermetic literature. Besides Boehme, G. Postel in his Compendium cosmographicum says that “heaven” (a mystical and theological transposition of the primordial homeland) is found underneath the North Pole.
20. Virgil, Eclogues, 4.5–10.