26

North and South

In the first part of this work I pointed out the relationship between the solar symbolism and several traditional civilizations; this symbolism naturally occurs in a number of traces, memories, and myths connected to the primordial civilization. When considering the Atlantic cycle, however, we can distinguish a typical alteration and differentiation of the polar symbolism from the symbolism relating to the previous Hyperborean civilization. The Hyperborean stage may be characterized as that in which the luminous principle presents the characteristics of immutability and of centralism, which are, so to speak, typically “Olympian.” These are the same characteristics proper to the Hyperborean god Apollo, who unlike Helios, does not represent the sun following its patterns of ascent and of descent over the horizon, but is rather the sun itself, the dominating and unchanging source of light. The swastika and other forms of the prehistoric cross that are found approximately at the beginning of the glacial period like the other very ancient prehistoric solar symbol of the circle with an inner center that was sometimes represented by the colossal dolmen), originally seem to have had a connection with this early form of spirituality. In fact, the swastika is a solar symbol inasmuch as it represents a rotary movement around a determined and unmovable pivot corresponding to the center of another solar symbol, the circle.^[1] There are different kinds of solar wheels and swastikas: circles, crosses, circles with crosses, and radiating circles; later on; there are axes with a swastika, double axes, and axes and other objects made with aeroliths arranged in a circular pattern; and then images of the “solar ship,” associated with the axes or with the Apollonian Hyperborean swan and reindeer; all of these symbols are the traces of the original stage of the northern tradition.

There is also a different spirituality connected to the polar symbolism, though it emphasizes the relationship with the year (the year-god) and thus with a law of mutation, ascent, descent, death, and rebirth. The original theme, therefore, is distinct from what may be characterized as a “Dionysian” phase; here we find the influences proper to another principle, another cult, another stock of races, and another geographical region. We notice a differentiating transposition.

In order to classify this type of transposition we may consider the most significant point in time for the symbol of the sun as the “sun god,” the winter solstice. Here a new element acquires an ever greater relevance; it is that element into which the light seems to disappear and from which it seems to rise again, almost by virtue of renewed contact with the original principle animating its own life. This symbol does not appear in the traditions of pure boreal stock, and if it does, it appears only in a very subordinated way; conversely, in the southern civilizations and races this symbol is predominant and it often acquires a central meaning. It is the feminine, telluric symbol, which is portrayed as the Mother (the Divine Woman), the Earth, or the Waters (or Serpent); these three characteristic expressions are equivalent to a great degree and are often related to one another (Mother Earth; the generating Waters; the Serpent of the Waters). The relationship established between the two principles (the Mother and the Sun) is what gives meaning to two different redactions of the symbolism, the first of which still retains traces of the “polar” tradition, while the second characterizes a new cycle, namely, the Silver Age, and a mingling (which is already a degeneration) of North and South.

From an abstract perspective, in those places in which solstices are celebrated there still is a connection with the “polar” symbolism (the vertical axis running from north to south), while the symbolism of the equinoxes is connected with the longitudinal (east-west) direction so much so that the predominance of either one of the two symbolisms in different civilizations, in and of itself, allows us to characterize whatever in them refers to either the Hyperborean or Atlantic heritage. In what may be more properly characterized as an Atlantic tradition and civilization, however, we find a mixed form. Here, together with the presence of the solstice symbolism, we still have a “polar” element; but in the predominance of the theme of the solar god who changes, and in the appearance and ensuing predominance of the figure of the Mother or of similar symbols during the solstices, we may detect the effects of yet another influence and of another type of civilization and spirituality.

Therefore, when the center consists of the solar male principle conceived of as life that arises and declines and that goes through winter and spring, or death and rebirth (as in the case of the so-called vegetation deities), while the identical and immutable principle is identified with the Universal Mother and with the Earth conceived as the eternal principle of every life, as the cosmic matrix and the inexhaustible source and seat of all energy—then we are truly confronted by a decadent civilization and by the second era, which is traditionally under the aegis of the water or of the moon. Conversely, wherever the sun continues to be conceived of in terms of uncreated and unprecedented pure light and “spiritual virility” following the lines of an Olympian meaning; and wherever people’s attention focuses on the luminous and heavenly nature of the fixed stars, since they appear to be exempt from the law of rising and setting, which in the opposite view affects the sun as the year-god himself—then what we are witnessing are instances of the highest, purest, and most ancient spirituality (the cycle of the Uranian civilizations).

This is a very general and yet fundamental scheme. Generally speaking, we can distinguish between a Southern and a Northern Light; in the amount in which such an opposition has relatively well-defined traits within the mixed matter of what is historical and traceable back to very distant ages, it is possible to distinguish between a Uranian and a lunar spirituality, between “Arctic regions” and “Atlantis.”

Historically and geographically, Atlantis does not correspond to the South, but to the West. The South corresponds to Lemuria, which I mentioned in passing, and some Negroid and Southern populations may be considered the last crepuscular remnants of this continent. Since until now, however, I have essentially followed the trajectory of the decline of the primordial Hyperborean civilization, I will discuss Atlantis only in reference to a phase of this decline; moreover, I will only consider the South in relation to the influence it exercised on primordial races and on Northern civilizations during the Atlantic cycle (but not only in it, provided we do not give to this expression a general, typological meaning) or in relation to intermediate forms, which have the double meaning of an alteration of the primordial heritage and of the elevation to higher forms of the chthonic and demonic themes typical of the southern aboriginal races. This is why I did not simply say “South,” but “Southern Light,” and why I will use the term “lunar spirituality” to characterize the second cycle, in reference to the moon as a bright and yet nonsolar symbol, which is almost similar to a “heavenly Earth,” namely, to a purified land (South).

Because of numerous elements, there is no doubt that the themes of the Mother or Woman, the Waters, and the Earth all trace their origins to the South and are also recurrent, through transpositions and interpolations, in all the ensuing “Atlantic” traces and memories; this has misled some into thinking that the cult of the Mother was typical of the Northern-Atlantic civilization. According to a well-established idea, there is a connection between Mouru—one of the “creations” that, according to the Zend-Avesta,^[2] came after the Arctic seat—and the “Atlantic” cycle, and therefore, Mouru should be equated with the “Land of the Mother.”^[3] Moreover, if some have attempted to see in the prehistoric Magdalenian civilization (of an Atlantic origin) the original center from which a civilization—in which the Mother Goddess enjoyed such a predominant role that some could say that at the dawn of civilization the woman radiates such a bright light through religion that the male figure is confined to the shadows—spread throughout the Neolithic Mediterranean; and if some have claimed to have discerned in the Hiberic-Cantabric cycle the same characteristics of the lunar, Demetrian mystery that is dominant in the pre-Hellenic Pelasgic civilization—undoubtedly there must be some truth in this. After all, the name Tuatha dé Danaan, which is found in the Irish cycle and characterizes a divine race from the West, means “the people of the goddess Dana.” The legends, the memories, and the metahistorical transpositions according to which a western island was the residence of a goddess, a queen, or a priestess-ruler, are numerous and very revealing. I previously mentioned some of these references. The custody of the golden apples (which may represent the traditional heritage of the first age and the symbol of the spiritual states proper to it) located in Zeus’s western garden, according to the myth, became the responsibility not only of women, but of the daughters of Atlas, the Hesperides. According to some Gaelic sagas, the Atlantic Avalon was ruled by a regal virgin; also, the woman who appeared to Conall in order to lure him to the “Land of the Living” implied through symbols that this land was inhabited only by women and by children.^[4] Hesiod declared that the Silver Age was characterized by a very long period of “infancy” under maternal tutelage;^[5] this is the same idea, conveyed through the same symbolism. Even the designation “Silver Age” is a reminder of the lunar light and of a lunar, matriarchical era. In Celtic myths we find the recurrent theme of the woman who bestows immortality on the hero in the Western Island.^[6] This corresponds to (1) the Hellenic legend of Calypso, daughter of Atlas, queen of the mysterious island of Ogygia, a divine woman who enjoyed immortality and gave it to those whom she chose;^[7] (2) the theme of the “virgin who sits on the throne of the seas” along the western path followed by Gilgamesh, and who is the goddess of wisdom and the guardian of life—a virgin who tends to be confused with the mother goddess Ishtar; (3) the Nordic myth of Idunn (“Land of the Ever Young”) and of its apples that grant and renew eternal life; (4) the Far Eastern tradition concerning the “western paradise,” in the aspect in which it is also called “Land of the Western Woman”;^[8] and finally, (5) the great Mexican tradition relative to the divine woman, mother of the great Huitzilopochtli, who remained the ruler of the sacred oceanic land of Aztlan. These are echoes that, directly or indirectly, refer to the same one idea; they are memories, symbols, and allegories that need to be dematerialized and regarded as universal references to a “lunar” spirituality, to a regere, and to the participation in a life that is not ephemeral, all of which have shifted from the solar and virile aegis to the lunar and “feminine” aegis of the Divine Woman.

It would probably be possible to reach the same conclusions through the Hellenic myth of Aphrodite—a goddess who in her Asiatic variations characterizes the Southern component of the Mediterranean civilizations—since according to Hesiod, Aphrodite was born from the foam that gathered about the severed genitals of the primordial heavenly deity Uranus, who some believe to represent both the Golden Age (like Kronos) and the Northern center. According to the tradition of the Elder Edda, the appearance of the feminine element (“of the three strong daughters of the giants”) marks both the end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the first struggles between divine races (Aesir and Wanen), and later on between divine races and giants; these struggles, as we shall see later on, reflect the spirit of later epochs.

Considered in her elementary chthonic aspect, the woman, together with the earthly demons, was really the main object of the Southern aboriginal cults; this will be the source of the great Asiatic-Southern chthonic goddesses and of those goddesses who represent the monstrous steatopygic female idols of the early megalithic period. This goddess of the Southern Hemisphere, who is transfigured and reduced to a pure and almost Demetrian form, as exemplified in the Brassampouy caves inhabited by Aurignacian man, was introduced and became dominant in the new civilization of Western-Atlantic origin. Along the path of Atlantic colonizers, from the Neolithic to the Minoan period and from the Pyrenees to Egypt, we encounter female idols almost exclusively, while in the cult there were more priestesses than priests, or quite often, effeminate priests. The same motif is present in Thracia, Illyria, Mesopotamia, and even in some Northern and Celtic stocks all the way up to the time of the Germanic tribes, and especially in India where it has been preserved in some Southern forms of the Tantric cult and in the prehistoric traces of the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro; not to mention the most recent forms, which I will discuss later on in greater detail.

This is but a brief reference to the primordial chthonic roots of the Southern Light, which can be associated with the Southern component found in those civilizations, traditions, and institutions that emerged in the wake of the great migratory tides that moved from west to east; this is a disaggregating component, opposed to the original Olympian and Uranian type of spirituality connected with the races of a more immediate Northern descent (Northern-Atlantic) or with those races that were capable of retaining or of rekindling the fire of the primordial tradition even in an environment far removed from the influences of the original one.

By virtue of the occult relationship that exists between what takes place on the visible plane (which is apparently shaped according to external conditions) and that which conveys a deep and even spiritual meaning, we can refer to environmental and climatic factors in order to explain analogically the differentiation that occurred. The experience of the sun, of light, and of fire itself naturally acted in the Northern races as a liberating spirituality, especially during the long glacial winter; Uranian and solar, Olympian, or fiery figures also played a major role in the sacred symbolism of these races. Moreover, the rigorous climate, barren soil, and need for hunting as well as the need to migrate across unknown seas and continents naturally shaped those who innerly retained this spiritual experience of the sun, bright sky, and fire into warriors, conquerors, and navigators, and thus furthered that synthesis of virility and spirituality, the characteristic traces of which were retained in the Indo-European races.

In relation to this, it becomes easier to understand another aspect of the previously mentioned symbolism of sacred stones. The stone or the rock is an expression of the hardness, the sacred and ironlike spiritual firmness of those who are “Rescued from the Waters.” The stone represents the main characteristic of those who eventually dominated in later times and who established the traditional centers following the Great Flood in places where the sign of the “center,” the “pole,” and “God’s house” often reemerged in the symbolic stone as a variation of the omphalos. ^[9] Hence, the Hellenic theme of the second race, born from “stone” after the flood;^[10] the idea that Mithras was believed to have been born from stone; that stones were believed to point out true kings or that they are found at the beginning of the Via Sacra (see the Roman lapis niger, or black stone); that sacred stones were the material from which fatal swords are made; and finally, that meteorites, or “stones from heaven,” or “thunderbolts,” were often turned into axes, the weapon and the symbol of prehistoric conquerors.

Conversely, it was only natural that in the South the object of the most immediate experience was not the solar principle, but rather its effects displayed in the luscious fertility of the Earth, and that the center shifted toward Mother Earth portrayed as Magna Mater while the symbolism shifted to chthonic deities or beings, to gods and goddesses of vegetation and of vegetal and animal fertility, while fire, once perceived as a divine, heavenly, and beneficial reality, eventually came to be perceived as something “infernal,” ambiguous, and telluric. The favorable climate and the natural plentiness eventually induced most people to seek peace and rest and to cultivate the feeling of contemplation and of getting lost in nature, rather than an active pursuit of affirmation and self-transcendence.^[11] Therefore, even in the order of what can be affected to a certain degree by external factors, while the Northern Light goes hand in hand, through solar and Uranian symbols, with a virile ethos and a warrior spirituality consisting of a harsh will to establish order and to dominate, conversely, in the Southern traditions the predominance of the chthonic theme and of the pathos of death and resurrection corresponds to a certain propensity to promiscuity, escapism, a sense of abandonment, and a naturalistic pantheism with sensual or mystical and contemplative overtones.^[12]

In every historical epoch that follows the descent of the Northern races it is possible to detect the action of two opposing tendencies that can be traced, one way or another, back to the fundamental polarity of North-South. In every civilization that emerged later on it is possible to recognize the dynamic outcome of either the encounter or the clash of these two tendencies, which generated more or less lasting forms until the advent of forces and of processes that ushered in the later Bronze and Iron Ages. Not only within every single civilization but even in the struggle between various civilizations and in the advent of one tendency and in the demise of the other, deeper meanings will often surface; it will also be possible to notice again the advent or the demise of forces that are inspired by either one of these spiritual poles, with a greater or lesser reference to the ethnic lines that originally either knew the “Northern Light” or fell under the spell of the Mothers and of the Southern ecstasies.

Footnotes

1. See R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chap. 2. From an analysis of the geographical distribution of the swastika on the earth prepared by T. Wilson (The Swastika: The Earliest Known Symbol in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1896), while it seems that this sign was not proper only to the Indo-European races as it was supposed at first, nevertheless we find a distribution that largely corresponds to the Northern-Atlantic migrations to the west (America) and to the east (Europe).

2. Vendidad, 1.4.

3. This was the opinion of H. Wirth. The term mu is often found in the Maya civilization, which may be considered a residue of the Southern cycle. The seat of this cycle was a very ancient continent that included Atlantis and perhaps stretched to the Pacific. It seems that in the Mayan tablets of the Troana Codex, mention is made of a certain Mu, a queen or divine woman who traveled west as far as Europe. Ma or Mu was also the name of the main Mother goddess of ancient Crete.

4. Joyce, Old Celtic Romances, 108.

5. Hesiod, Works and Days, 130–32.

6. In the medieval legend of monks who found a golden city and the prophets who never died in the middle of the Atlantic, mention is made of a statue of a woman in the middle of the sea, made of “copper” (Venus’s metal) pointing the way.

7. Odyssey, 1.50; 7.245, 257; 22.336. We may connect this with what Strabo wrote (Geographia, 4.4.5) concerning the island close to Britain in which the cult of Demeter and Core was as predominant as in the Pelasgic Aegean basin. While Ovid made of Anna an Atlantean nymph, Anna or Anna Perenna is but a personification of the food that bestows immortality (in Sanskrit: anna), which is often associated with the western Elysium.

8. The royal Mother of the West also appears in connection with the “mountain” Kuen-Lun; she possesses the elixir of immortality and according to the legend she bestows immortal life to kings such as Wang-Mu. In this Chinese view we find a contrast between two components; the pure western land, the seat of the mother, and the kingdom of Amitabha, from which women are rigorously excluded.

9. R. Guénon, Le Roi du monde, chap. 10. The Hebrew term baithel or bethel, which corresponds to omphalos, means “the house of God.”

10. Arnobius, The Case Against the Pagans. 11.5.

11. ”To teach with kindly benevolence, not to lose one’s temper and avenge the unreasonableness of others, that is the virile energy of the South that is followed by the well-bred man. To sleep on a heap of arms and untanned skins, to die unflinching and as if dying were not enough, that is the virile energy of the North that is followed by the brave man.” Chung-yung, 10.4.

12. Having suggested that the symbolism of the solstices has a “polar” character, while the symbolism of the equinoxes is referred to the western and eastern direction and to the “Atlantic” civilization, I think it is interesting to consider the meaning of some equinoctial feasts in relation to the themes typical of Southern civilizations; in this regard the exegesis of Emperor Julian (Hymn to the Mother of the Gods, l73c–d; l75a–b) is very significant. When an equinox occurs, the sun seems to escape from its orbit and law and to get lost in the unlimited; at that time the sun is at its “antipolar” and “anti-Olympian” peak. This tendency toward evasion and escapism corresponds to the pathos of the promiscuous feasts that some people celebrated during the spring equinox in the name of the Great Mother; these feasts were sometimes connected with the myth of the “castration” of her solar son-lover.