Hyperborea and the Quest for Mystical Enlightenment
by JASON JEFFREY, New Dawn Magazine No. 58
Far north, somewhere near the icy regions of the North Pole, legend
speaks of an ancient and mostly forgotten civilisation. Mythical in character,
the Hyperborean civilisation 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 civilisation. 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 civilisation, the ultimate
price being his banishment to the outside world. Man ventured into other
regions of Earth, establishing new civilisations, 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
The memory or imagination of a Golden Age
seems to be a particularity of the cultures that cover the area from
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 Krita or Satya Yuga (four units), Treta Yuga (three), Dvapara Yuga (two),
and Kali Yuga (one), 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
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
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
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
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
centres 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 civilisation of Atlantis is sometimes enmeshed with
that of Hyperborea. We cannot expect to ‘prove’ the physical existence of these
civilisations. 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 civilisation 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 (
The Frenchmen of the Enlightenment were in no doubt that “
With new sources of knowledge from ancient
Writers such as Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736-1793), the Rev. Dr. William
Warren (1800s), Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856-1929) and 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 unfavourable
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
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 moulded the religions and cultures of
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 centre 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
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
In this case —
It should be emphasised here that
In the Buddhist tradition ‘Chakravarti’ literally means “He who makes
the wheel turn”, which is to say the one who, being at the centre 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
The Pole and Mystical
Enlightenment
It is in medieval
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 patencies 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
Guenon, in 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 ‘
Our search for Hyperborea is our desire to return to Paradesha or
To seek Hyperborea is to quest for spiritual enlightenment. The
Mountain, the
Footnotes:
1. Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by
Joscelyn Godwin, p. 16.
2. 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.
3. The Lord of the World by Rene Guenon, p. 50.
4. Ibid, p. 56
5. Arktos, The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival by Joscelyn
Godwin, p. 167-8.