Index to the whole series
2. Lemuria
3. Atlantis
4. Egypt
This is an alternate history of man. A survey of primordial history. A history of Hyperborea, Lemuria, Atlantis, et cetera.
This is “complementary history”. History not taught in the Academy. The sources we have used are essays, not fiction; we have employed traditional and other documents.
The very early stage of history we will, here at the beginning, summarize quickly. -- For the origin of all, that is God, see Borderline. For the origin of man 6 million years ago in Lyra, Vega system, see Sheldan Nidle, Your First Contact (2000). For the early history of man in Inner Earth, see the Gnostic document Origin of the World. For an indicium that Paradise was in Inner Earth, see Olaf Hansen's The Smoky God (1908), where the rivers of Paradise (Euphrates, Pison, Gihon, and Hiddekel) are said to exist in Inner Earth.
After "Inner Earth" primordial man then lived on Hyperborea. This is the theory we have.
The following blog series will take a view at man's development on Hyperborea -- and, of what followed after that era. In other words, the series will be about three legendary lost continents mentioned above: Hyperborea, Lemuria, and Atlantis. They all play some role in man’s past, they all carry a lot of meaning – ethical, mythical, esoteric. This examination will not be exhaustive. However, for the record, this triad must be outlined to paint the alternative historical picture we believe is a valid one – that of these lands and cultures having once existed.
First and foremost, we maintain that these three lands were separate – for, sometimes, they are mixed up. Like Swedish scholar Olof Rudbeck (1630-1702) confusing Hyperborea with Atlantis (and placing them both in Sweden, which also is wayward speculation). We also have the myth of Apollo going to Hyperborea for rejuvenation; we believe he went to Agartha (= Inner Earth), not the circumpolar Hyperborean land.
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This chapter treats Hyperborea. And a lot has been said about this mythic land. We can’t go into everything that is maintained about the existence, history, and meaning of Hyperborea. We will focus on this hypothesis: that indeed a polar continent called Hyperborea existed up and until about some 50,000 years ago. And in this we will maintain that the end of it, of it sinking and the polar climate suddenly becoming inhospitable, depended on an alleged tilt of the Earth axle, from perpendicular to the ecliptic to the 23.4-degrees inclination it now has.
And, it seems that the case of this tilt, from straight to leaning, explains a lot of the fate of Hyperborea, a case that neither Tilak nor Evola, authors having Hyperborea as a linchpin in their systems, give any consideration to at all.
So, let’s propose that Earth in its infancy had a rotational axis perpendicular to the ecliptic. Then it tilted. But when? We here suggest that it took place somewhere in antediluvian times, somewhere well before the “flood,” before the fall of Atlantis, let’s say, in the span between 100,000 and 50,000 BCE. That would be in the Paleolithic Era, in its last interglacial period. – Was the “Lucifer Experiment” on Atlantis (more on this later) involved in this, was it due to some cosmic catastrophe? This we don’t know. However, if indeed Earth in days of old, in the Golden Age of myth had a perpendicular rotational axis then this explains the supposed mild climate of that age: with no inclination of the axis the planet lives in perpetual spring, there are no seasons. Thus, there will be no ice caps on the poles either. (And conversely, with an axle tilt of the current 23.4 degrees we have seasons and we have polar ice caps.)
According to Kjellson (1984) a major indicium for a tilted Earth axis can be found in legends of a disturbance in the star constellations, told of by the Azteks of America and, also, in the fifth Sibylline book of the Romans. These tales of a disrupted night sky might indicate an axle tilt. Then we have downright legends of such a tilt having occurred (legends Kjellson found in Axel Olrik’s Om Ragnarök, 1902), like the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands east of India telling of “Earth capsizing” in the days of their forefathers.
Also, the Eskimos say that when the heaven fell down Earth capsized. And the Samis say: once the North Star held up the sky, but during the end of days Fatoua hit it with his bow whereby the heaven fell down and crushed the Earth. Even the Celts are by Kjellson said to have a myth of the Earth becoming askew.
And this is not all. Leaving Kjellson we can go to the Older Edda where we find the “Grottasöngr” aka. “The Song of Grotti” which tells of this event in a mythologized way. Two slave girls are bought in Sweden by the Danish King Frodi. The girls are set to grind an old, magic stone mill, the type with a circular, movable stone above a stationary stone, like the ones used to grind grain in olden times. This, however, is also a magic mill that grinds wealth and this the girls do, they grind wealth to the king, enabling the “Frodi peace” (Swedish, Frodefreden, a symbol of the golden age). But the King treats the girls roughly and they, in response, conjure up an enemy army, using the magic mill. In their anger the girls grind even harder, the shafts of the mill-frame snap and soon the whole mill is rent asunder. The poem ends with the enemy army approaching and the girls saying to the King that they are done milling.
This can be interpreted as: in ancient times the Earth axis was vertical and then the golden age ruled. Then the axis tilted and that was the end of the golden age.
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Hyperborea, as imagined in a rather unique Mercator map of 1595 (see illustration above), was a circumpolar continent. It had four rivers streaming into the middle – a middle that might be the entry to “Inner Earth”. That specific realm aside, a middle continent with four or five rivers “falling into Hel” (= Inner Earth) is intimated in the Older Edda, in “Grimnismal,” verse 28.
Further, in the Prose Edda (“Gylfaginning”) Midgard is told of as being perfectly circular with the sea all around it. The giant sea snake Midgard Serpent is said to circumvent it with its long, slim, elongated body. Thus, Hyperborea would have been equal to the fabled Middle Earth of the Edda, Midgard, the land of the middle, das Reich, a circumpolar land centered on an entry into Inner Earth, the entry being the supposed hole of the polar patch.
The hole being the entry to Inner Earth can mythically be viewed as Ginnungagap, according to “Gylfaginning” having one north-facing and one south-facing part – that is, one hole by the north pole and one hole by the south pole. Mythically, from the southern hole sparks and dust flew from Muspelheim; would these sparks, then, be the southern light...? Also, according to “Gylfaginning,” the gods built a castle in “the middle of the world, called Asgard” – is this the same as the fabled Inner Earth realm of Agartha? Asgard, Agartha; do you see the similarity?
At the end of “Gylfaginning” is told of Ragnarök, the Downfall. That is, the downfall of Midgard, of it sinking beneath the waves (because mythically the fabled Midgard Serpent went ashore for a final scuffle with Thor, who killed the serpent and then died). Even the Older Edda tells of the downfall, with the gods dying in the cosmic battle and the Earth then being devoured by the sea (“Voluspa,” verse 57). That is, Midgard-Hyperborea is sunk. We also have the mentioning of the “Fimbul Winter” = a severe winter, which could be interpreted as the then approaching ice age, the last glacial. That is, the tilt of the Earth’s axis by this time ends the perpetual spring.
Then, in verse 59 of “Voluspa” the Earth rises again, other lands than Midgard seeing light of day. According to the meta-theory presented in this study Atlantis, for example, was around by then (by the end of the last glacial) and probably also Eurasia. That landmass, either already there or (as “Voluspa” intimates) now rising above the waves, might be the realm fleeing Hyperboreans migrated to when their land was no more.
The Eddas are not clear-cut scientific documents, they shroud a lot in myth. However, it is wrong to see them as nothing but myth. Myth can contain a solid core of historical reality. The Eddas may give clues to Hyperborea and maybe even of Inner Earth.
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A man with a keen eye for the Hyperborean myth was Julius Evola (1898-1974). In The Mystery of the Grail, in search for Hyperborea, Evola discusses Arthurian legend in some detail, like referring to a “revolving island” which could be seen as a “… polar land that spins around its axis and carries along the world in its rotating motion.” [p 34] Sounds like the circumpolar Hyperborea to me...
Evola goes even deeper into the Hyperborean theme in his magnum opus Revolt Against the Modern World. Its Chapter 24 delivers a pertinent overview, somewhat more elaborate than the one given in the book you’re now reading, with sources worth checking up for the dedicated Hyperborea student.
Evola tells of Hyperborea, a northern land of golden age qualities then being visited by a catastrophe and having to be abandoned. It must be noted: he isn’t focused on writing a chronicle; instead, he wants to extract the spiritual-metaphysical meaning of the Hyperborean era (and in his view it was an elevated, patriarchal, solar culture, bequeathing its heritage to bronze age India and imperial Rome with its dharmarājas, “responsible men,” and male gods). Anyway, in giving historical pointers to this culture Evola relies on ancient Persian and Indian documents; for instance, he refers to a study by B. G. Tilak (1856-1920), entitled The Arctic Home in the Vedas (orig. 1903, this reading is based on the 2011 Arktos edition) which we now will look at. Apart from mythical pointers Tilak’s research is based on geology, archaeology, linguistics, paleontology, and astronomy. A wide, holistic outlook indeed.
It is true that Tilak neither mentions “Hyperborea” nor the above intimated “Earth axle tilt”. But he does indeed speak of a lost ancient civilization located at the North Pole. The mythic land where Aryan man originated, sketched by Tilak, is the same as the legends of Hyperborea tell of. The name of the land aside, Tilak for instance says this as a kind of coda:
[T]he Aryans were autochtonos neither in Europe nor in Central Asia, but had their original home somewhere near the North Pole in the Paleolithic times, and they migrated from this place southwards in Asia and Europe, not by any ‘irresistible impulse,’ but by unwelcome changes in the climatic conditions of their original home. [Tilak p. 26]
This is a pointer for the case of Aryan man and his origins which we note for the record. Further, our point is: Tilak, in giving support for a northern home of the Indian Aryans, the people who invaded northern India in the second millennium BCE (or earlier), for instance notes how the Indian Aryan document of the Rig Veda has rather many hymns to the dawn (Tilak, Chapter Three). In this, Tilak maintains that these hymns could not have been written in India because dawn there comes quickly; it is a quickly passing event, nothing spectacular as such. It is different in the polar north, as he shows us in Chapter Three – and, with the theory of the Earth axis having once been perpendicular, it becomes even more credible because then every day has a very long dawn (and a very long sunset) – day in, day out, the whole year around having the same day/night proportion, a perpetual spring equinox, as it were.
As intimated Tilak doesn’t mention the case of “the once straight Earth axis”. However, it might be that this occurrence, the axle tilt, strengthens his case of a polar land once inhabited by Aryan man. For if the end of Hyperborea comes about because of an Earth axle tilt, then this explains the freezing over which indeed is mentioned by Tilak. And it might explain how scientists in northern Russia have found mammoths frozen into solid blocks of ice. It is as if, sometime during the Paleolithic Era, the northern climate changed in an instant. An instantaneous axle tilt would explain that.
As intimated, Tilak does mention mythical evidence for a polar original home. For example, it is the story in the Persian Avesta about the destruction of this land, “Airyana Vaejo,” by snow and ice [Tilak, p. 246]. This, together with evidence of the temperature being mild and temperate before the last glacial, gives his meta-theory some credibility – that of a Polar, golden age-era origin for the Aryans.
The order of things would then be (dates very approximate): (1) about 100,000 BCE, the last interglacial period having an erect Earth axis, meaning perpetual spring, the Golden Age in Hyperborea and Lemuria – (2) axis brought askew by “some cosmic occurrence,” Hyperborea sunk, iced over, and abandoned – (3) 50,000 BCE, Silver Age in Lemuria and Atlantis – (4) 10,000 BCE, last glacial ends, the melted ice mythologized as “the Deluge” which also drowns the last remains of Atlantis, meaning end of Silver Age and beginning of Copper Age. In other lingo, this would be late Paleolithic occurrences – and then we have the following era, Mesolithic, starting 10,000 BCE, fully in accordance with the pattern given previously.
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The modern era author pioneering the Hyperborea thesis was Madame Blavatsky (1831-1891). It is true that Blavatsky as a writer might be criticized for this and that, like not noting the sources on which her magnum opus The Secret Doctrine (1888) was based. However, when reading a summary of her Earth history as given in that book [source, Wikipedia, "Root Race"] it seems that she had taken into account that the ancient Hyperborea was a paradise with a tropical climate “because Earth had not yet developed an axial tilt,” as the summary says.
This is now noted for the record. Further, Blavatsky’s Earth chronicle deserves closer examination due to another theory: that of the earliest planetary epochs having a decidedly ethereal nature. It is a bit of an “astral” epoch, a pre-material age. Intelligent beings and maybe even man existed but he hadn’t gained full, solid material shape yet.
Thus, Blavatsky speaks of a first epoch (actually, “root race,” but let’s call them epochs) called “Polarian”. It was a region by the north pole of Earth, with a species merely ethereal, only composed of etheric matter: “They reproduced by dividing like an amoeba. Earth was still cooling at that time. The first mountain to arise out of the stormy primeval ocean was Mount Meru.” [ibid]
This theory must be kept in mind to give perspective on the ancient realities. As we all know, the metaphysical concept of successively higher, more advanced, more “real” levels of reality, is a fundament of esotericism. Without it, secret history becomes just a melodrama of “galactic war, aliens, secret societies”... Thus, it must be noted that primeval Earth history only saw intelligent beings of an ethereal, not solid or physical kind. With continued development solidification set in.
Blavatsky then proposes a second era, the Hyperborean proper, with golden-hued people living on the above intimated, circumpolar Hyperborean continent, the place with the mild climate due to the Earth axis not having tilted yet. (For the record, we note that next in her system comes the Lemurian and Atlantean epochs; Rudolf Steiner, her otherwise somewhat deviating follower, has the same cosmology in his doctrine of Anthroposophy). – According to Blavatsky, the Hyperborean human species reproduced by budding. This again gives some perspective to the nature of early history and Hyperborea specifically. It was not some ancient style warrior society, some bronze-age type Āryāvārta as some romantics of today tend to see it. Even the Aryan-minded Miguel Serrano stresses the ethereal, different nature of the Hyperborean era of man, its earliest stages being of an essentially proto-material kind.
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The following we now propose regarding the “Hyperborean complex,” a kind of summation and tying up of loose ends: as intimated by Tilak and others (Blavatsky, Serrano, Nidle) there was in the last interglacial a polar land commonly named Hyperborea. Men lived on it, conducting an elevated spirit science, a high culture radiating light and spirituality for all the epochs to come. Because of an axle tilt the weather got colder, and due to sinking of the lands Hyperborea had to be abandoned – so its inhabitants ventured south and became Cro-Magnon man, Aryan man – eventually, sometime after the last glacial, about 5,000 BCE (Mesolithic Era-Neolithic Era), re-inhabiting the north and, also, migrating to Spain, Italy, Greece, Iran, and India. This might not be a central story of the study you are now reading but it is indeed important for the early history of man at large.
The history and meaning of Hyperborea has been distorted and concealed. Now, with both the means of modern science and spirit science, the true role of Hyperborea might emanate from the shadows.
In the next chapter we will go to Lemuria.
Sources
Evola, Julius. The Mystery of the Grail. 1997
Kjellson, Henry. Teknik i forntiden. 1984
Nidle, Sheldan. Your First Contact. 2000
Tilak, B. G. The Arctic Home in the Vedas. 2011
Related
Chapter Two: Lemuria
Timeline
Borderline
Rig Veda 10.129
Primordial History in Swedish
