25
The Northern-Atlantic Cycle
As far as the migration of the Northern primordial race is concerned, it is necessary to distinguish two great waves, the first moving from north to south, the second from west to east. Groups of Hyperboreans carrying the same spirit, the same blood, and the same body of symbols, signs, and languages first reached North America and the northern regions of the Eurasian continent. Supposedly, tens of thousands of years later a second great migratory wave ventured as far as Central America, reaching a land situated in the Atlantic region that is now lost, thereby establishing a new center modeled after the polar regions. This land may have been that Atlantis described by Plato and Diodorus; the migration and the reestablishment of a center help to explain the transpositions of names, symbols, and topographies that I have discussed in reference to the first two ages. In regard to this, it is fitting to talk about a Northern-Atlantic people and civilization.
From this Atlantic seat the races of the second cycle spread to the American (hence the previously mentioned memories of the Nahuatlans, Toltecs, and Aztecs concerning their original homeland), European, and African continents. Most likely these races reached the borders of western Europe in the early Paleolithic. These races supposedly corresponded to, among others, the Tuatha dé Danaan, the divine stock that came to Ireland from Avalon and who were led by Ogma Grian-aineach, the hero with a “sunny countenance,” whose counterpart is the white and solar Quetzalcoatl, who came with his companions to America from the “Land situated beyond the Waters.” Anthropologically speaking, these races correspond to Cro-Magnon man, who made his appearance toward the end of the glacial age in the western part of Europe (especially in the area of the French Cantabric civilization of Abri La Madeleine, Gourdain, and Altamira); Cro-Magnon man was clearly superior, both culturally and biologically, to the aboriginal Mousterian man of the Ice Age, so much so that somebody recently nicknamed the Cro-Magnon “the Greeks of the Paleolithic.” As far as their origin is concerned, the similarity between their civilization and the civilization of the Hyperborean, which is found even in the vestiges of the people of the Far North (civilization of the reindeer), is very significant. Among other prehistoric traces of the same cycle are those found on the Baltic and Frisian-Saxon shores; in the Doggerland, in a region that has partly disappeared—the legendary Vineta—a center of this civilization was eventually established. Besides Spain, other migratory waves landed on West African shores;[1] later on, between the Paleolithic and the Neolithic and probably in conjunction with races of direct Northern descent, other people moved through the continents from northwest to southeast toward Asia, into the area many believe to be the cradle of the Indo-European race, and then further on, all the way to China;[2] other waves followed the North African shoreline all the way to Egypt or went by sea from the Balearic Islands to Sardinia and to the prehistoric sites in the Aegean Sea. More particularly, in Europe and in the Near East, the origin of the megalithic civilization of the dolmen and the so-called battle-axe people, which remains as enigmatic as that of Cro-Magnon, is very similar. This migration occurred in separate waves, through fluxes and refluxes, interbreeding, and conflicts with aboriginal or already mixed races. Thus, from north to south and from west to east, through diffusion, adaptation, or domination there arose civilizations that originally shared, to a certain degree, the same matrix, and often strains of the same spiritual legacy found in the conquering elites. Encounters with inferior races, which were enslaved to the chthonic cult of demons and mixed with the animal nature, generated memories of struggles that were eventually expressed in mythologized forms that always underline the contrast between a bright, divine type (an element of Northern origins) and a dark, demonic type. Through the institution of traditional societies by the conquering races a hierarchy was established that carried a spiritual, ethnic, and racial value; in India, in Iran, in Egypt, and even in Peru we find rather evident traces of this in the institution of the caste system.
I have said that originally the Atlantic center was supposed to reproduce the “polar” function of the Hyperborean seat and that this second center occasioned frequent confusion in traditions and in memories. This confusion should not prevent us from detecting in a later period, yet still falling within remote prehistory, a transformation of civilization and spirituality and a differentiation leading from the first to the second era (from the Golden Age to the Silver Age) that eventually prepared the way for the third era, the Bronze Age or Titanic Age; this age should be characterized as the “Age of Atlantis,” considering that the Hellenic tradition regarded Atlas as related to the Titans by virtue of being Prometheus’s brother.[3]
Anthropologically speaking, we must consider a first major group that became differentiated through idio-variation, or variation without mixing: this group was mainly composed of the migratory waves of a more immediate Arctic derivation and it made its last appearance in the various strains of the pure Aryan race. A second large group became differentiated through miscegenation with the aboriginal Southern races, with proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races, and with other races that probably represented the degenerated residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria.[4] The second group includes the red-skinned race of the last inhabitants of Atlantis (according to Plato’s mythical account, those who forfeited their pristine “divine” nature because of repeated unions with the human race); these people should be regarded as the original ethnic stock of several newer civilizations established by the migratory waves from west to east (the red race of Cretan-Aegeans, Eteicretes, Pelasgians, Lycians, Egyptians, Kefti, etc.),[5] and of the American civilizations. These latter people in their myths remembered the country of origin of their ancestors who had come from the divine Atlantic land “situated on the great waters.” The name Phoenicians means “the Red Ones,” and most likely it is another memory of the first Atlantic navigators of the Neolithic Mediterranean.
Two components must be considered both from an anthropological and from a spiritual point of view (the Northern and the Atlantic components) in the vast material concerning traditions and institutions found in this second cycle. The first component is immediately related to the Light of the North, and it retained for the most part the original Uranian and “polar” orientation; the second component reveals the transformation that occurred as a result of the contacts established with the Southern populations. Before considering the meaning of such a transformation, which constitutes the first alteration or, so to speak, the inner counterpart of the loss of the polar residence, it is necessary to emphasize another point.
Almost every people retains the memory of a catastrophe that ended the previous cycle of mankind. The myth of the Flood is the most frequent form employed to describe this memory; it is shared by many people: from the Persians and Mexicans to the Mayas, from the Chaldeans and Greeks to the Hindus and to the people who inhabited the Atlantic-African coastline, to the Celts and to the Scandinavian people. Moreover, its original content is a historical event; according to the tale of Plato and Diodorus it essentially represented the end of an Atlantic land. The center of the Atlantic civilization, to which its colonies were subordinated for a long time, sank into the sea in an era that by far predates the time that according to Hindu tradition, inaugurated the Dark Age; according to some traces of chronology built into the myth, this is what indeed happened. The historical memory of that center gradually disappeared in the civilizations that derived from it but in which elements of the ancient heritage were retained in the blood of the dominating castes, the roots of various languages, and also in social institutions, signs, rituals, and hierograms. In the Hebrew tradition, the theme of the tower of Babel, with the ensuing punishment represented by the “confusion of the various languages” (Gen. 11:7), may refer to the period in which the unitary tradition was lost and the various forms of civilization were dissociated from their common origin and could no longer understand each other after the catastrophe of the Flood ended the cycle of Atlantic mankind. The historical memory was often preserved in myth, that is, in metahistory. The West, in which Atlantis was located during its original cycle (when it reproduced and perpetuated the much older “polar” function), very often represented a nostalgic reference point for the fallen ones. By virtue of a transposition onto a different plane, the waters that submerged the Atlantic land were called “waters of death,” which the following postdiluvian generations, consisting entirely of mortal beings, must cross through initiation in order to be reintegrated with the divine state of the “dead,” namely, with the lost race. On this basis, the well-known figurations of the “Island of the Dead” could be understood in a similar sense as transformations of the memory of the sunken insular continent.[6] The mystery of paradise and of places of immortality in general was reconnected with the mystery of the West (and in some instances, of the North too), and thus it formed a body of traditional teachings the same way the theme of “Those Who Are Rescued from the Waters” and of ”Those Who Do Not Drown In the Waters”[7] shifted from the real, historical sense (that referred to the elites who escaped the catastrophe and went on to establish new traditional centers) to a symbolic meaning and appeared in the legends of prophets, heroes, and initiates. Generally speaking, the symbols proper to that primordial race surface again in enigmatic ways until relatively recent times, wherever traditional conquering kings and dynasties made their appearance.
Moreover, the Greeks often discussed the exact spot of the divine garden (θεŵν κήπος), which was the original dwelling of the Olympian god Zeus,[8] and of the Garden of the Hesperides, “beyond the river Ocean”; according to some, the Hesperides were the daughters of Atlas, the king of the Western Island. It was precisely this garden that Heracles was supposed to find in that symbolic feat that has often been associated with his winning Olympian immortality, and having had Atlas as a guide, who alone “knows the dark depths of the sea.”[9] Generally speaking, the Hellenic equivalent of the Northern, solar way or of the Indo-Aryan deva-yāna, was a western path or “Zeus’s way,” which led from the fortress of Kronos, located in the Island of the Heroes on the faraway sea, to the peaks of Mount Olympus.[10] According to the Chaldean tradition, it is in the West, “beyond the deep waters of death, which have no ford and which have not been crossed for the longest time” that the divine garden is to be found, in which the king Shamashnapishtim, the hero who escaped the Flood and who still retains the privilege of immortality, still reigns; this garden was reached by Gilgamesh who followed the western path of the sun in order to receive the gift of life.[11]
It is significant that the Egyptian civilization did not have a “barbaric” prehistory: it arose all of a sudden, so to speak, enjoying from the start a high level of sophistication. According to tradition, the first Egyptian dynasties were formed by a race that had come from the West, also known as the race of “Horus’s companions” (shemsu Hero), or of those marked by the “sign of the first among the inhabitants of the western land,” namely, Osiris. Osiris himself was believed to be the eternal king on “Yalu’s Fields,” in the “land of the sacred Amentet,” beyond the “waters of death,” which was thought to exist “in the far West,” and which sometimes has been associated with the idea of a great insular land. The Egyptian funerary rite carried on the symbolism and the ancient memory: in this rite the ritual formula was “To the West!” and it included the crossing of the waters and a procession carrying the “sacred ark of the sun,” that is, the ark of those who had been “rescued from the waters.”[12] Moreover, the Chinese and Tibetan traditions mention the existence of a “western paradise” with trees bearing golden fruits, like the Hesperides’ garden. There is also a frequent image of Mi-tu with a rope and the inscription: “He who draws [the souls] to the West.”[13] On the other hand, the memory that was transformed into the myth of paradise is also found in Celtic and Gaelic sagas concerning the “Land of the Living,” the Magh-Mell (“The Pleasant Plain”), or Avalon, which were otherworldy regions located in western lands. Avalon was believed to be the place in which the survivors of the race “from above,” of the Tuatha dé Danaan, King Arthur himself, legendary heroes such as Conan, Oisin, Cuchulainn, Loegaire, Ogier the Dane, and others came to enjoy eternal life.[14] This mysterious Avalon is the equivalent of the Atlantic “paradise” described in American legends; it is the ancient Tlapallan or Tullan; it is the “Land of the Sun,” or the “Red Land” to which both the white god Quetzalcoatl and legendary heroes such as the Toltec priest Huemac (“Great Hand”) mentioned in the Codex Chimalpopoca, returned, as did the Tuatha to Avalon, thus disappearing from people’s sight. According to Jewish folklore, Enoch went to a western place, “to the far end of the earth,” in which there are symbolical mountains and divine trees guarded by the archangel Michael; these trees give life and salvation to the elect but are barred to mere mortals until the time of the Last Judgment.[15] The last echoes of this myth were kept secret until the Christian Middle Ages; the navigator monks of the monasteries of Saint Matthias and of Saint Albaeus allegedly found in a mysterious Atlantic land a golden city, which was believed to be the dwelling place of Enoch and Elijah, the prophets “who never died.”
On the other hand, in the myth of the Flood the disappearance of the sacred land separated from continental land by a mare tenebrosum—the “Waters of Death”—may also assume a meaning that connects it to the symbolism of the “ark,” to the preservation of the “germs of the Living”—the “Living” in an eminent and figurative sense;[16] the disappearance of the legendary sacred land may also signify the passage of the center, which retains in an unadulterated way the primordial nonhuman spirituality, into the invisible, the occult, or the unmanifested. Hence, according to Hesiod, the beings of the first age, “who never died,” would continue to exist as humankind’s “invisible” guardians. Thus, the legend of the subterranean people or of the subterranean kingdom[17] is often the counterpart of the legend of the sunken land, island, or city; this legend is found among several populations.[18] When impiety began to run rampant on the earth, the survivors of previous eras moved to an “underground” location (in other words, they acquired an ”invisible” existence) that is often situated in the mountains as a result of transpositions with the symbolism of the “heights.”[19] These beings continue to exist on those mountain peaks until a new manifestation is made possible for them as the end of the cycle of decadence approaches. Pindar said that the road leading to the Hyperboreans can be found “neither by ship nor by marching feet,”[20] and that only heroes such as Perseus and Heracles were admitted to it. Montezuma, the last Mexican emperor, may enter Aztlan only after performing magical operations and undergoing a transformation of his physical body. Plutarch relates that the inhabitants of Northern regions could commune with Kronos (the king of the Golden Age) and with the inhabitants of the Far Northern region[21] only in their sleep. According to Lieh-tzu (2), those marvelous regions he mentions that are connected to the Arctic and the Atlantic seat, “you cannot reach by boat or carriage or on foot, only by a journey of the spirit.”[22] According to the Tibetan lamas’ teachings, Shambhala, the mystical Northern seat, is within everyone. This is how the testimonies concerning what once was a real location inhabited by nonhuman beings survived and assumed a metahistorical value, providing at the same time symbols of states beyond ordinary life, that can only be reached through initiation. Besides the symbol, we find the idea that the original center still exists in an occult and usually unreachable location (similar to what Catholic theology said about the Garden of Eden): only a change of state or of nature can open its doors to the generations living in the last ages.
This is how the second great transposition of metaphysics and history was established. In reality, the symbol of the West, just like that of the “pole,” may acquire a universal value beyond all geographical and historical references. In the West, where the physical light that is subject to birth and to decline becomes extinguished, the unchanging spiritual light is kindled; there the journey of the “Sun’s ship” toward the Land of the Immortals commences. And since this region lies where the sun disappears beyond the horizon, it was also conceived as subterranean or as underwater. This is straightforward symbolism directly inspired by natural observations and thus used by various populations, even by those that have no relation with Atlantic memories. This, however, does not mean that such a theme, situated within given limits determined by concomitant testimonies such as the ones I have presented, may not also have a historical character. What I mean is that among the countless forms assumed by the mystery of the West, a group may be isolated for which it is legitimate to assume that the origin of the symbol did not consist in the natural phenomenon of the course of the sun, but rather, by virtue of a spiritual transposition, in the distant memory of the disappeared Western land. In this regard, the surprising correspondence between American and European myths, especially Nordic and Celtic ones, constitutes a very decisive proof.
Secondly, “the mystery of the West” always marks a particular stage in the history of the spirit that is no longer the primordial one; it corresponds to a type of spirituality that cannot be considered to be primordial and therefore it is defined by the mystery of transformation. It is characterized by a dualism and by a discontinuous passage: a light is kindled, another fades away. Transcendence has gone underground. Supernature, unlike the original state, is no longer nature: it is the goal of an initiation and the object of a problematic quest. Even when considered in its general aspect “the mystery of the West” appears to be typical of those more recent civilizations, the varieties and destinies of which I will examine in the next chapter. It is connected to the solar symbolism rather than to the polar one; we have now entered the second phase of the primordial tradition.
Footnotes
1. This is the legendary kingdom of Uphaz and, in part, the prehistoric African civilization as it was imagined by Frobenius; by confusing the partial center with the original seat of which Uphaz was probably a colony, he identified it with the seat of the Platonic Atlantis. See L. Frobenius, Die atlantische Götterlehre (Jena, 1926).
2. In China there have been recent discoveries of the vestiges of a great prehistoric civilization, similar to the Egyptian-Minoan, which was likely created by these migratory waves.
3. While on the one hand the legend of Atlas holding the world on his shoulders depicts the sentence of the Titan Atlas, who according to some (Servius. Ad Aeneidem, 4.247) participated in the conflict against the Olympian gods, on the other hand it may represent a symbol indicating the function of “pole,” support, and spiritual axis the Atlanteans inherited from the Hyperboreans. In his exegesis, the Christian theologian and Church father Clement of Alexandria wrote: “Atlas is an impassible pole; it may even be an immobile sphere, and maybe, in the best of cases, it alludes to the state of unmoved immortality.”
4. See the works of H. Wirth for the attempt to utilize the researches on blood types in order to define the two races that emerged from the original stock.
5. A. Mossa, Le origini della civilita ‘ mediterranea (Milan, 1910).
6. See D. Merezhkovsky, Das Geheimnis des Westens (Leipzig and Zurich, 1929), in which there are several valid references to what the rituals and the symbols of the Atlanteans might have been.
7. See for instance Yama, Yima, Noah, Deucalion, Shamashnapishtim, Romulus, the solar hero Karṇa in the epic Mahābhārhata, and so on. Just as Manu, son of Vivasvat, the heir of the solar tradition who survived the Flood and created the laws of a new cycle (The Laws of Manu) had for a brother Yama (compare with the Iranian Yima, the solar king who escaped the Flood too), who was “the god of the dead”; likewise Minos, whose name corresponds etymologically to Manu, often appears as the counterpart of Radamant, who is the king of the “Island of the Blessed” or of the “Heroes.”
8. According to some (Piganiol, Les Origines de Rome [Paris, 1899]) the appearance of the Olympian gods next to the feminine deities of the earth was the result of the mixture of the cults of northern origin with the cults of southern origin.
9. Hesiod, Theogony, 215.
10. W. Ridgeway, The Early Age of Greece (Cambridge, 1901), correctly pointed out that the belief in western dwellings of immortality was typical of those people who used the essentially Northern-Aryan ritual of cremation and not merely of burial.
11. Gilgamesh, 10.65–77; 11.296–98.
12. Just as among the Hellenes the localization of the dwelling of the immortals alternated between the North and the West, likewise in some ancient Egyptian traditions the Fields of Peace and the Land of Triumph that the deified soul of the deceased reached by first going through an existing passage in the “mountain,” were also thought to be located in the North.
13. See Lieh-tiu (3) concerning the journey to the West made by the emperor Mu, who reached the “mountain” (Kuen-Luo) and met Si Wang Mu, the “Mother-Queen of the West.”
14. Alan of Lille (Prophetia anglicana Merlini) compared the place where King Arthur disappeared with that in which Elijah and Enoch disappeared and from which they will return one day. In regard to the land of the Hyperboreans, classical antiquity believed in the existence of beings (often kings such as Kroisos) who were taken there by Apollo.
15. Enoch, 24.1–6; 25.4–6.
16. In the Chaldean redaction of the myth, the gods ordered Atrachasis to rescue the sacred writings of the previous era from the flood by “burying them”: they were conceived as the “residual seeds” from which everything else will grow again.
17. According to the Iranian tradition, King Yima built a refuge (vara), which is often portrayed as “subterranean,” in order to save the seeds of all living things. Vendidad, 2.22.
18. See R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chaps. 7–8.
19. In the Irish sagas some of the Tuatha, after their defeat by the Milesians, withdrew to the “western paradise” of Avalon, others chose underground dwellings beneath mounds or hills (sidhe), hence the name Aes Sidhe, “the people of the hills.” According to a Mexican tradition, in the caves of Chapultepec lies the entrance to the subterranean world into which King Huemac II disappeared and from which he will emerge one day in order to rebuild his kingdom.
20. Pindar, The Pythian Odes, 10.29.
21. Plutarch, De facie in orbe lunae, 26. In antiquity sleep was believed to neutralize the physical senses and to awaken the inner senses, thus naturally creating the conditions for contacts with the invisible dimension.
22. The Book of Lieh-tzu, trans. A.C. Graham (New York, 1960), 34.