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Arkaim: Russia’s Ancient City and the Arctic Origin of Civilisation
Posted by admin on December 7, 2012
By VICTORIA LEPAGE | New Dawn
—
Vast shadowy forces are moving in Central Asia – or rather in the
greater region we call Eurasia – which may change the face of our global
society and civilisation forever.
Even as the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting inexorably in
favour of the Eurasian superpowers – principally Russia, China, the
Central Asian states and India – a new spiritual wind is blowing out of
Inner Asia and its many hidden mystical schools, promising to sweep the
new entente into unprecedented heights of international power,
politically and culturally. The immensity of the coming turbulence
occasioned by this shift from West to East is incalculable, the outer
symptom of a global revolution of consciousness.
Already the transformation of consciousness accompanying this
hemispheric shift is creating both exaltation and unease in all people
sensitive to evolutionary change. As the West moves through increasing
economic and geopolitical tumult towards what many regard as a birthing
into a new World Age, pressing questions are being asked. What are we
mutating into and what kind of social realities will replace those we
know? The mystery and the terror is not so much the speed of change as
its unknown destination. Where are we heading? To what precipice sheer
and awful, or to what blessed landfall?
Striving to answer such questions, many leading esotericists today
have turned to certain very ancient traditions to throw light on the
crisis of our times. Increasingly heeding the overwhelming evidence for
their thesis, they suggest that the key to humanity’s future lies in its
distant past, in the heritage of an unknown antediluvian race that
lived in a time so remote that its existence has been erased from racial
memory.1
A Forgotten Race
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great
star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a
temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions
changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile,
paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic
race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of
primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences
and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised
state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving
immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a
civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still
faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:
The entire surface of the earth is marked with the
traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a
once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar
magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy.
Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth
in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths.
All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a
system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural
forces across the entire earth.2
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of
prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body
of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can
guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists,
this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly
accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species
continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of
the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being
unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject,
especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the
descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a
mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works
on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central
and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains
and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories
of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder
race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that
are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.
Arkaim: A Bronze Age Town in the Southern Urals
In 1987, in the middle of the Russian steppe, a team of Russian
archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a fortified town called Arkaim,
causing great excitement in scientific ranks and a surge of neo-pagan
and nationalist enthusiasm among Russian intellectuals. The region was
known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse cultures, ranging
from every epoch and every direction of the compass, but Arkaim was the
first clear evidence of an ancient advanced culture flourishing on
Russian soil.
Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with
about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement
was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of
Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and
adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four
intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of
enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central
square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned
ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several
celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an
observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious
centre.
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about
3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean
civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian
and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than
Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled.
Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down
and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an
advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter
and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the
timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued
with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can
still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road
paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well,
cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The
oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as
well as to fire pottery.
Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty
fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim
Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With
Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of
Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first
concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilisation in southern Russia,
confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and
northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an
important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.
A possible light was thrown for the first time on the development,
nature and wide migratory pattern of early Indo-European culture, and
stimulated all sorts of theories in Russian circles about the Aryan
roots of the Slavic people.3
This, however, has been only the beginning of the quest for a new
ethnic, cultural and religious identity in a small but influential
Russian minority since the demise of the Soviet Union. Increasingly
rejecting the American and European vision of a global hegemony rooted
in Western Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their
Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the
Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain. Many, especially among the young, are
already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community
cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or
Islam. Arkaim has become a ready focus for these ideals, a symbol of the
future basis for world peace.
Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex
Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place
where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual
are inseparable.
The East and the West are fused here. Today, in Russia,
we feel that Mankind is faced by the necessity to choose Oneness.
Western culture must come into unity with Eastern wisdom. If this can
happen, the harmony that once reigned supreme in the Land of Cities will
be restored.4
In fact, it is doubtful whether peace and harmony existed in the
period of Arkaim, since it and the surrounding fortified settlements
were obviously geared to warfare or at least to heavy defensive measures
in a hostile environment. It is noteworthy that the cult of Tengri, the
Mongol/Turkic Sky God who plays a prominent part in Central Asian
religion, fosters a fierce competitive nationalism rather than peaceful
relations with neighbours. However, Sparkey is right to emphasise the
principle of harmonious accord implicit in the Arkaim ideology, pointing
as it does to the settlement’s inheritance of a once more peaceful
culture.
The head of the archaeological team observed:
A flight above Arkaim on board a helicopter gives you an
incredible impression. The huge concentric circles on the valley are
clearly visible. The town and its outskirts are all enclosed in the
circles. We still do not know what point the gigantic circles have,
whether they were made for defensive, scientific, educational or ritual
purposes. Some researchers say that the circles were actually used as
the runway for an ancient spaceport.5
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in
Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan
Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in
Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim
finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric
circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said
was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard,
the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the
Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have
the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as
neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this
undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as
we shall see.
In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the
ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King
Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again
become the centre of the world.6 However, the
discovery of the settlement has opened a historical aperture onto far
more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European
people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands,
where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe. What the
Land of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above
all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples – a past of such
enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it solves.
Built in the unique architectural mould of nordic Asgard, the most
sacred shrine of the Aesir of which the Prose Edda relates that “men
call it Troy,” Arkaim may have been a shrine dedicated to the Aryan Sun
religion, yet the roots of its dedication would have lain ultimately in
the far older cult of the Pole star. Essentially, this was the religion
of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and other wonder-workers in
touch with the spirits of nature.
Thus the swastika, thought to be the exclusively Aryan symbol of sun-worship misappropriated by the Nazis,7 and
found depicted on many of the clay pots unearthed in Arkaim, is an
older religious and metaphysical symbol than that attached to the Aryan
Sun God, its roots lying in totemic shamanism. René Guénon, the eminent
French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolising eternal
motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar
symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult,
originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the
Great Bear. This centre, Guénon stresses, “constitutes the fixed point
known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which
the world rotates…” The swastika is therefore known world-wide as the
‘sign of the pole.’8
In short, it would be a mistake for Russian ethnic pride to train too
narrow a focus on Arkaim’s Aryan background, for the town was heir to a
great civilising force that existed in the Eurasian corridor long
before there were Indo-Europeans. One universal feature of troy towns is
missing in Arkaim – presumably because it has been destroyed over the
centuries – and that is the altar pillar in the central square.
Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late expression of a megalithic Pillar
religion that once reigned universally in every corner of the globe,
among nearly all peoples, whatever their ethnic type, and which became
associated with troy towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and
goes back to the most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as
revolving around the axis of the Pole Star.
Only later did the Sun, as the centre of the revolving stellar
system, replace the Pole Star as the supreme deity of the Pillar cult
and lead to the elevation of the Sun God of the Indo-European peoples.
It led to their greater intellectual development, to complex
civilisations, to advanced arts and sciences and the transcendence of
nature.
Troy towns like Electris – and Arkaim – were built as stellar
observatories. Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos
above according to the principle of “as above so below” by means of a
central axis symbolised by a stone pillar. Thus Diodorus Siculus of the
first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the
sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres,
by which he meant an astronomical design similar to that
of Stonehenge and other ancient sun temples, in which the scheme of the
heavenly spheres or astral shells surrounding the earth was represented
diagrammatically by a series of concentric circles marked by walls,
ditches or moatsaround a central pillar-stone.9
These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of
the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their
families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the
ramparts. The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced
astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when
hunter-gatherers still roamed the land. Colin Wilson, a highly
accredited investigator, in answer takes us back to the Sumerians of
ancient Mesopotamia, a people who almost certainly had their origin in
Central Asia, as the Bible states: “As men migrated from the east, they
found a plain in the land of Shinar [Sumer] and settled there.” Sumer is
regarded as the site of one of the first true civilisations in human
history.
Wilson points out that the Sumerians were accomplished astronomers
who had compiled tables of the motions of all the planets, including
Uranus and Neptune, as early as five thousand years ago, long before the
existence of Arkaim. He adds that according to the library of clay
tablets compiled by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (669 – 626 BCE) and
unearthed during the nineteenth century, the Sumerians had also
understood the precession of the equinoxes, and therefore knew about the
zodiac.10
Further revelations of the Sumerians’ sophisticated astronomical
science convinced Wilson that the Chaldaean astronomers understood our
solar system as well as Isaac Newton did.11 Indeed
Wilson came to believe that a scientific knowledge of the universe
existed on earth as far back as 64,000 years ago, if not far longer.
Evidently Arkaim was a Wisdom Centre in a network of such Centres
that once related all the prehistoric peoples of the earth to each other
under the spiritual aegis of the Pillar religion and its priestly
elites. The remains of countless similar stone circles, menhirs and troy
towns are scattered throughout Europe, the Americas, Eurasia and the
Pacific lands, memorials to great crisscrossing migrations of peoples,
all loyal to the same axial principle that relates earth to the heavens.
As to the cradle of this great diaspora, the mystical Russian painter and explorer NicholasRoerich
saw thousands of such megalithic pillar-works in the highlands of Tibet
and believed them to be older than any found elsewhere. He suggested
they had strong links to the works of the Celts and the Scythian tribes,
as also to the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany, and that they
represented a Pillar cult that had its beginnings long ago in the
Trans-Himalayas of Inner Asia.12
This proposed Eurasian cradle of the troy town phenomenon is
reinforced by the researches of one Jacob Bryant in 1776. Bryant, a
noted expert in Homeric Troy, published an encyclopaedia of ancient
mythology in which he claimed the Trojans were descended from a very old
“Atlantean” race that had long ago settled across the whole of Eurasia.13 If the first troy towns were built in Central Asia, could the universal Pillar religion also have had its beginning there?
As I have said, various versions of the cult of the World Pillar as
it spread around the world were once known from the Americas to northern
Africa, where the blond Tamahu worshipped the Magna Mater and her
spouse the Heaven-Bearer, as did their cousins in Brittany and Spain. In
Hindu India the World Axis, Mt. Meru, ascended into the revolving
heavens above through the centre of the three worlds, and in the Canary
Islands the Cro-Magnon Guanches, now extinct, worshipped with sacrifices
the god of the World Pillar whom they called “the God who Holds the
Heavens,” and who thus prevented the collapse of the foundations of the
world.”14 A remnant of this belief-system
survives in the legend of Jacob’s Ladder in the Hebrew Book of Exodus,
in which we learn that on this Ladder angels ascend and descend between
heaven and earth.
Each race has considered a certain tree as symbolic of the World
Pillar and therefore sacred. In the Voluspa, the song of the Old Norse
prophetess, the tree on which the god Odin hung in order to receive the
sacred runes was called Yggdrasil, the heaven-pole or world axis. The
World Ash Yggdrasil was declared to be the greatest of all trees and the
best; its limbs spread over the world and above the heavens, its shaft
the pivot of the ever-revolving sky. At the foot of that tree the laws
were first brought into being by the Aesir, the Norse gods, and
Yggdrasil was worshipped as the source of all higher knowledge.15
To the inhabitants of Sumer, whose language is unknown – being
neither Indo-European nor Semitic – the Pillar was a dominant religious
feature: thus Nippur, one of Sumer’s chief cities, as long ago as 3800
BCE had the meaning of “Bond of Heaven-Earth.” A prominent researcher on
this subject says that in the text of the Sumerian ‘Enuma Elish’, “clues to the purpose of Nippur were found in references to a heavenward tall pillar reaching to the sky.”16 In
ancient Egypt, the land of the Hamitic peoples, the city of An or Anu,
which was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, originally meant Pillar
City.17 As a commentator has pointed out, this
fact may shed light on the mysterious djed pillar, the “backbone of
Osiris,” often associated with Heliopolis.18
Like others of the Pillar fraternities, the totemic shaman too
dedicated his life and calling to the vision of the marriage of heaven
and earth achieved by means of a heaven-bearing Tree of Life. In ancient
Crete he was a familiar adjunct to the temple rituals of the Great
Mother Demeter; in Siberia, Mongolia and the Americas, he was the
magician and wise man of his tribe. Beating his drum and climbing the
central pole of his yurt, the symbolic pillar by which he
communed with the sky spirits above, the shaman thus brought down
healings, prophecies and advice from the ancestors to the people of his
community. The Mongol-Turkic shamanic tradition with its Sky God Tengri
and its World Tree still survives over a vast area of the planet,
although its roots are lost far back in the mists of the palaeolithic
age.
The mystery of Arkaim is indeed the mystery of the Pillar religion.
Who brought to all the primitive peoples of earth this knowledge of the
Polar Axis, uniting them for many thousands of years in a common
planetary culture? Who taught them the astronomical secrets of the solar
system, the zodiac and precession of the equinoxes at a time in
prehistory when human intelligence was not supposed to be evolved enough
to have developed that knowledge alone? And what part did Arkaim play
in that dissemination?
Tracing the Arctic Origins of Civilisation
The Babylonians believed in a mysterious paradise in “the far north”
where a race of great sages lived; and the ancient Greeks too extolled a
northern Elysium in which they believed the Hyperboreans, a wise,
peaceful and long-lived race, lived in great splendour and prosperity.
Even though Delphi was regarded as the centre of the Greek world, its
god Apollo and his sister, the goddess Artemis, were acknowledged to be
originally deities of this secret land far to the north, where stood the
cosmic axle that the Greeks called Helice, “That Which Turns.” Many
Greek historians as well as later scholars located this northern
paradise in Scythia or the Altai, and as having its source in the
shamanism that grew up around the semi-mythical magicians and pole-lords
of Altai. But research and sacred tradition both suggest its origins go
further back still to northeastern Asia within the Arctic Circle, to a
society that flourished on the shores of the Siberian Sea.
How long ago, or for how long, this circumpolar culture may have existed no-one knows: possibly 200,000 years or more. In The Interpretation of Radium, the
acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated that some of the beliefs and
legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be “evidence of a
wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilisation of which all other
relic has disappeared.”19 There may have been,
he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world
when civilised men lived “in a past possibly so remote that even the
very atoms of civilisation literally have had time to disintegrate.”20
On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New
England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago
as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilisation with a
highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in
existence in the Arctic Circle.21Until lately Hapgood’s finds, presented in Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958)and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966),have
been largely ignored in scientific circles, even though they elicited
support from the great physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in
them is mushrooming among a growing number of highly accredited
investigators.
René Guénon appeals to the oldest and most authentic esoteric
traditions in claiming that long before the Indo-European races arose,
at a time when a hunter-gatherer humanity was still at a primitive stage
of development, the tropics were differently distributed and a great
Hyperborean culture flourished around the Arctic Circle, “in the Islands
of the Blest on the shores of the Ocean where the great maelstrom
whirls.”22
Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did
this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others,
possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west. The latter
has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands
beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded as the remains of what was
once a great sunken landmass.23 (In support of
this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola have long had a
tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles, a well-known
earthquake zone, were once connected by a single landmass, before a
great cataclysm about 15,000 years ago submerged the connection and left
only the known island fragments.)24
Leaving aside Guénon’s oblique reference to the two southern refuges
of the Hyperboreans being in Russia and Central America, he suggests
that in both cases the two groups brought with them advanced
mathematical and astronomical knowledge and the seeds of arts and
sciences that would eventually be passed on to our brute ancestors to
become the basis, about eight thousand years ago, for our own
civilisations.
Both Sumer in the Middle East and Central America have flood stories
written down long before the biblical account of Noah’s flood, and in
all these stories the salvific activity of the Elder race is pivotal.
There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by
the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early
American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who “came from the east,”
destroyed the earth in a great flood. Later, after a man and a woman
survived by taking refuge in a floating box, “Virachocha recreated the
peoples of the earth, and gave each one his own language and songs.”25 Wilson
cites many such instances in which flood stories about the Hyperboreans
and their salvation of our race are to be found in both the Old World
and the New.
Guénon is emphatic, however, that of the two primary locations, both
of which have at times borne the name of Tula (known to the Greeks as
Thule), that of Central Asia was the elder. The Atlantean Tula, says
Guénon, must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, the supreme
Holy Land, which latter represents the first and supreme centre for the
entire current Manvantara, and is the archetypal “sacred isle.”
All the other “sacred isles,” although everywhere
bearing names of equivalent meaning, are still only images of the
original. This even applies to the spiritual centre of Atlantean
tradition, which only governed a secondary historical cycle, subordinate
to the Manvantara.26
Plato himself notes this hierarchical distribution: the Atlantean
empire, he said, was only one nexus established by the gods in a greater
network of Centres whose capital was elsewhere “at the centre of the
Universe.”27 Thus the Eurasian heartland, Guénon says in his brief but ground-breaking work, The Lord of the World, has indeed become that “centre of the Universe,” the authentic “supreme country” which,
According to certain Vedic and Avestan texts, was
originally situated 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.28
However, this still does not tell us why the location in Central Asia
was chosen as the Hyperboreans’ primary destination? Guénon’s response
to this question is cryptic in the extreme. He admits he is dealing with
proscripted material he is not permitted to divulge, but goes so far as
to reveal that Mt. Meru, the “polar mountain” stands in the centre of
the “supreme country” – and Mt. Meru, as is now generally understood,
symbolises the mysterious World Axis or World Tree of esoteric
tradition. In other words, Central Asia was chosen because the World
Axis was there; that was the real goal of the migration. The World Axis
was, and is, the “centre of the Universe”; it is the World Axis that
renders its geographical location a Holy Land – a fact which is only now
being elucidated in para-scientific circles.
As we shall see in the second part of this article, the earth’s
esoteric structure is a subject that has been veiled in secrecy for
thousands of years, and this applies especially to the mystic’s Mt. Meru
or World Axis. John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, is
one of the first modern researchers to throw light on the meaning of
this and much other Hyperborean lore that Guénon was unwilling or unable
to discuss. Beyond referring to the senior race as “the guardians of
Earth’s sacred mysteries,” Guénon’s initiatory vows kept him silent.
Who, then, were these mysterious Hyperboreans – or as we might
perhaps better call them, these Elders, these early Masters of Wisdom
who understood the importance of the World Axis? The records of most of
the Bronze age nations have a legend that an unknown race of Elders gave
us kingship and civilisation and that they came from the gods and
understood the most powerful secrets of our planet – secrets that have
since been lost.
The Elders have been known as the Nephilim, the Sons of God, the
Anunnaki, the Watchers and many other appellations; G.I. Gurdjieff spoke
of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of
humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers
as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little
more is known about them. Did they really exist? All that can be said
with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence moving
inscrutably in the background of virtually all the prehistoric
traditions of our race.
These souls from Sirius, say the ancient texts, descended down the
World Axis and incarnated on earth long ago in order to aid our
fledgling species. When a great catastrophe towards the end of the Ice
Age, around the twelfth millennium BCE, threatened us with extinction,
these sons and daughters of the gods instituted the hieros gamos, a
genetic science that mingled their genes with ours and so bred a
superior human stock with a greater survival potential that spread
gradually from the heart of Asia on one hand, and Atlantis on the other,
to the rest of the world.29
The climate changed again around the ninth millennium BCE, which is
widely regarded as the date of the demise of Atlantis and the enforced
dispersal of its people both westward to Central America and eastwards
to Europe. Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and coastal flooding to
vast areas of the globe30and a severe threat to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought another response from the senior race.
Although the Elders had gone, their dynastic descendants, a long line
of neolithic priest-kings, began a new evolutionary programme. In their
migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with
establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which
Plato’s Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the
Atlanteans. Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE,
also from Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE.31 The
Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body
of wisdom originally centred on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the
primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the
fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know
today, as well as all our higher learning. Its spread heralded the dawn
of peaceful, egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in
neolithic towns and villages around the world wherein the feminine
principle was dominant and strife little known.32
Arkaim and the Sun Gods
Modern historians have found that three great floods seem to have
occurred in the known span of human history. According to Stephen
Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the
fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah’s Flood and was the greatest
of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium.33 It
caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe earthquakes,
and also desertification of the interior of the land masses, and
civilisation disappeared. Once again the species was threatened with a
reversion to savagery, and once again salvation appeared from Inner
Asia.
In the third millennium BCE, so the Chinese Celestial records tell
us, the Sons of the Sun – also known as the Sons of Heaven – fanned out
across the world from their homeland in the Karakorum Range at the
western end of the Trans-Himalayas, bearing with them the higher
revelation of the Sun religion.34 It was a
patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of
metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilisation.
Everywhere the stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the
Pole Star, like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further
thousand years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on
the Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.
This innovation, however, was not without inter-faith warfare, since
many ethnic groups, such as the Mongol/Turkic peoples of the eastern
steppes, remained loyal to the Pole Star cult. At the same time,
pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in
dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted
as enmity grew for the powerful new faith. Indeed Arkaim may have been
the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that period, and the
fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after two hundred years of
operation may well have been caused by that same internecine conflict
between the old order and the new.
The pictorial evidence contained in the ‘Enuma Elish’shows
that the Sumerians understood full well that the Elders they revered so
much were “from the gods” – not gods themselves but human beings, though
far more advanced in consciousness. According to the murals they have
left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities
were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress
of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the
increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of
darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race.
The Solar priesthoods withdrew behind barricades, and a spiritual
division opened up in society that had never before existed.
As the historian Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out in Hamlet’s Mill, from then onthe
enlightened understanding of our forbears began to descend into
mythology and superstition as small pockets of secret wisdom called temples shone out in a sea of darkness, and a mystique of gods replaced the cosmological knowledge of an earlier age.35 While
bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across the globe to sow
the seeds of civilisation once more, a nucleus of the senior race
withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia that surround the
Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact with the outside
world.
Ever since, the whole Eurasian heartland, from the Urals to the Gobi
and including southern Siberia, has borne the stamp of a special
sanctity. High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of
peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the
Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy
Land and the Land of White Waters. Whatever its current name, almost
all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this vast,
mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge, to the
legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the Ancient Wisdom
for the present World Age.
The legend of the Sons and Daughters of God has thus never
died, though it has gone underground. Inner Asia, thought to be the
immemorial cradle of shamanism as well as of all yogic and religious
systems, is believed by many to be still spiritually efficacious, still a
holy land which, under a single governing Hierarchy, nurtures without
fear or favour arcane schools and brotherhoods persecuted elsewhere.
Sufis, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Jews,
Neo-Platonists and others who have been hidden from the profane world by
long chains of initiatic transmission have never failed to find
sanctuary in that specially blessed protectorate, where everything
began.
From being hidden in shadows for thousands of years, today the region
is being illuminated by an intense spotlight from every possible angle.
The discovery of Arkaim is only one such angle. The highly publicised
row between China and Tibet is another; the ever-worsening struggle
between the US and Russia for military dominance over the oil- and
gas-rich provinces of Central Asia; the increasing commitment of Russia,
China, Iran and India to a Eurasian geopolitical bloc, in tacit
opposition to the Western powers; and at the same time the awakening of
interest in the West to the mysterious spiritual wealth that can be
glimpsed in the place, are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia
to the very centre of world attention. Yet the questions they pose
remain unanswered.
What is the secret of the Holy Land? Who really were the Elders who
gave us civilisation? Are they still guiding our evolution in discarnate
form? What is the secret of the World Axis? Do we as yet understand the
archetypal principles that shape our planet? And why are we only now
beginning to ask such questions?
1. Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals, Bear & Co., Vermont, 2006.
2. John Michell, The View Over Atlantis, Sphere Books, London, 1975, 117.
3. V.A. Shnirelman, Archaeology and Ethnic Politics: the Discovery of Arkaim, Unesco, 1998.
4. Alex Sparkey, The Ancient Land of Arkaim, from Spirit of Ma’at: Russia: Land of Living Mysticism, Vol. 3, No. 9, 3.
5. Pravda.Ru, An Ancient Aryan Civilisation, 16/07/2005.
6. Shnirelman, op. cit., 38.
7. Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Souvenir Press, London, 1960, 188.
8. René Guénon, The Lord of the World, Octagon Press, U.K., 1983, 9.
9. Victoria LePage, Shambhala, Quest Books, Illinois, USA, 1996, 197, citing Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1936 – 67.
10. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 32.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala: In Search of the New Era, Inner Traditions International, 1930, 221.
13. Jacob Bryant, A New System or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, T. Payne, P. Elmsly, B. White and J. Walter, publishers, London, 1776.
14. Jurgen Spanuth, Atlantis of the North, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 123 – 24.
15. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, 121.
16. Alan F. Alford, Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996, 261.
17. Ibid., 261
18. Ibid., 261
19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium and the Structure of the Atom, Putnam, New York, 1922, quoted by Colin Wilson, op. cit., 292.
20. Ibid., 292.
21. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 2.
22. Hesiod [Works], R. Lattimore, trans., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959, 172 – 3.
23. Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Rider, London, 1926; cited by Geoffrey Ashe, Atlantis, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, 21.
24. Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1992, 66.
25. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 91.
26. René Guénon, op. cit., 56.
27. Plato, Timaeus and Critius, Desmond Lee, trans., Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983, 145.
28. René Guénon, op. cit., 50.
29. Ibid, 56.
30. Stephen Oppenheimer, Eden in the East, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, 30 – 41.
31. Anne Baring & Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, Penguin, 1993.
32. Ibid., 50 –56.
33. Oppenheimer, op. cit., 35.
34. Andrew Tomas, Shambhala: Oasis of Light, Sphere Books, London, 1976, 26.
35. G. Santillana & H. Von Deschend, Hamlet’s Mill, Gambit International, Boston, 1969.
.
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Posted by admin on December 7, 2012
By VICTORIA LEPAGE | New Dawn
—
Vast shadowy forces are moving in Central Asia – or rather in the
greater region we call Eurasia – which may change the face of our global
society and civilisation forever.
Even as the balance of geopolitical forces is shifting inexorably in
favour of the Eurasian superpowers – principally Russia, China, the
Central Asian states and India – a new spiritual wind is blowing out of
Inner Asia and its many hidden mystical schools, promising to sweep the
new entente into unprecedented heights of international power,
politically and culturally. The immensity of the coming turbulence
occasioned by this shift from West to East is incalculable, the outer
symptom of a global revolution of consciousness.
Already the transformation of consciousness accompanying this
hemispheric shift is creating both exaltation and unease in all people
sensitive to evolutionary change. As the West moves through increasing
economic and geopolitical tumult towards what many regard as a birthing
into a new World Age, pressing questions are being asked. What are we
mutating into and what kind of social realities will replace those we
know? The mystery and the terror is not so much the speed of change as
its unknown destination. Where are we heading? To what precipice sheer
and awful, or to what blessed landfall?
Striving to answer such questions, many leading esotericists today
have turned to certain very ancient traditions to throw light on the
crisis of our times. Increasingly heeding the overwhelming evidence for
their thesis, they suggest that the key to humanity’s future lies in its
distant past, in the heritage of an unknown antediluvian race that
lived in a time so remote that its existence has been erased from racial
memory.1
A Forgotten Race
Perhaps 100,000 years ago or more, so the hypothesis runs, a great
star-gazing Ice Age people lived in the Arctic region, at that time a
temperate zone, before migrating south to Inner Asia as conditions
changed and the great ice sheets melted. There, in a fertile,
paradisaical land, these unknown sages became the core of a Ural-Altaic
race that continued to evolve over the millennia, improving the stock of
primitive humanity by intermarriage, developing cosmological sciences
and political structures that sowed the seeds of our present civilised
state, migrating across the earth and then disappearing, leaving
immortal legends about itself behind.
The British author John Michell cites the massive evidence for such a
civilisation, which he regards as essentially magical, and still
faintly visible across the earth for those who care to look:
The entire surface of the earth is marked with the
traces of a gigantic work of prehistoric engineering, the remains of a
once universal system of natural magic, involving the use of polar
magnetism together with another positive force related to solar energy.
Of the various human and superhuman races that have occupied the earth
in the past, we have only the dreamlike accounts of the earliest myths.
All we can suppose is that some overwhelming disaster… destroyed a
system whose maintenance depended upon its control of certain natural
forces across the entire earth.2
Michell is one voice among many claiming that in the archives of
prehistoric peoples a forgotten race has left traces of an advanced body
of knowledge, seemingly both spiritual and technological, which can
guide us, if we will, into a viable future.
Despite being ignored by mainstream historians and anthropologists,
this theory is being ever more insistently put forward by highly
accredited researchers as evidence for the enormous age of our species
continues to be found not only in the legends of races in every part of
the planet but also in the thousands of technological anomalies being
unearthed in unlikely geological strata.
The ancient Greek historians had much to say on this subject,
especially concerning the legends of Asia Minor which told of the
descent thereto, in the depths of the Ice Ages, of the Hyperboreans, a
mysterious race of superior beings from polar regions whose Pillar works
on earth sought to mirror the starry heavens above. Yet it is Central
and Inner Asia further to the east, a vast land of steppes, mountains
and sandy deserts, whose people preserve the most significant memories
of a time beyond telling when cities populated the deserts and an Elder
race walked tall on the earth. And it is these Ural-Altaic regions that
are now taking centre stage as the search continues for the roots of homo sapiens and the path into a viable future.
Arkaim: A Bronze Age Town in the Southern Urals
In 1987, in the middle of the Russian steppe, a team of Russian
archaeologists unearthed the ruins of a fortified town called Arkaim,
causing great excitement in scientific ranks and a surge of neo-pagan
and nationalist enthusiasm among Russian intellectuals. The region was
known to have preserved landmarks of the most diverse cultures, ranging
from every epoch and every direction of the compass, but Arkaim was the
first clear evidence of an ancient advanced culture flourishing on
Russian soil.
Constructed on a circular principle around a central square, with
about sixty semi-dugout houses built within its ramparts, the settlement
was situated in the southern Urals, near the Russian city of
Chelyabinsk. It was defended by two concentric ramparts of clay and
adobe blocks on a wooden frame, and could only be entered via four
intricately constructed passageways that would have made the entrance of
enemies extremely difficult. The inhabitants and the common central
square were thus well protected by Arkaim’s defensive, inward-turned
ground plan. The town was found to be closely aligned to several
celestial reference points, and is therefore believed to have been an
observatory as well as a fortress, an administrative and a religious
centre.
Dubbed “the Russian Stonehenge,” this Bronze age settlement was about
3,600 years old and was contemporaneous with the Cretan-Mycenaean
civilisation, with the Egyptian Middle Kingdom and with the Mesopotamian
and Indus valley civilisations, and older by several centuries than
Homer’s fabled Troy, whose circular layout it so closely resembled.
Arkaim was inhabited for 200 years and was then mysteriously burned down
and deserted.
The Russian team’s explorations showed that Arkaim enjoyed an
advanced technology for its time. It was equipped with a drainage gutter
and storm sewage system and had actually been protected from fire: the
timbered flooring of the houses and the houses themselves were imbued
with a fireproof substance – a strong compound the remnants of which can
still be found in the ruins. Each house gave onto an inner ring road
paved with wooden blocks; and in each house there was a hearth, a well,
cellars, an oven and provision for a cooled food storage system. The
oven was such that it may have been possible to smelt bronze in it, as
well as to fire pottery.
Subsequent to this exciting excavation, more than another twenty
fortified settlements and necropolises were unearthed in the Arkaim
Valley, some stone-built, larger and more impressive than Arkaim. With
Arkaim possibly its capital, the complex came to be called the Land of
Cities and presented scientists with many mysteries. It was the first
concrete evidence of a lost neolithic civilisation in southern Russia,
confirming what had long been believed, that the southern Urals and
northern Kazakhstan, situated at the junction of Asia and Europe, was an
important region in the formation of a complex Aryan society.
A possible light was thrown for the first time on the development,
nature and wide migratory pattern of early Indo-European culture, and
stimulated all sorts of theories in Russian circles about the Aryan
roots of the Slavic people.3
This, however, has been only the beginning of the quest for a new
ethnic, cultural and religious identity in a small but influential
Russian minority since the demise of the Soviet Union. Increasingly
rejecting the American and European vision of a global hegemony rooted
in Western Christianity, Russians, besides their interest in their
Indo-European roots, are turning eastwards to find a connection with the
Turkic/Mongol ethnic strain. Many, especially among the young, are
already embracing the mystique of a united Eurasian people and community
cemented by spiritual bonds far older than those of Christianity or
Islam. Arkaim has become a ready focus for these ideals, a symbol of the
future basis for world peace.
Ar-ka means sky, and Im means earth, says Alex
Sparkey, a Russian writer. He explains that this means Arkaim is a place
where the Sky touches the Earth. Here the material and the spiritual
are inseparable.
The East and the West are fused here. Today, in Russia,
we feel that Mankind is faced by the necessity to choose Oneness.
Western culture must come into unity with Eastern wisdom. If this can
happen, the harmony that once reigned supreme in the Land of Cities will
be restored.4
In fact, it is doubtful whether peace and harmony existed in the
period of Arkaim, since it and the surrounding fortified settlements
were obviously geared to warfare or at least to heavy defensive measures
in a hostile environment. It is noteworthy that the cult of Tengri, the
Mongol/Turkic Sky God who plays a prominent part in Central Asian
religion, fosters a fierce competitive nationalism rather than peaceful
relations with neighbours. However, Sparkey is right to emphasise the
principle of harmonious accord implicit in the Arkaim ideology, pointing
as it does to the settlement’s inheritance of a once more peaceful
culture.
The head of the archaeological team observed:
A flight above Arkaim on board a helicopter gives you an
incredible impression. The huge concentric circles on the valley are
clearly visible. The town and its outskirts are all enclosed in the
circles. We still do not know what point the gigantic circles have,
whether they were made for defensive, scientific, educational or ritual
purposes. Some researchers say that the circles were actually used as
the runway for an ancient spaceport.5
The truth is that Arkaim was a troy town, so-called after the city in
Asia Minor that the Greek king Agammenon destroyed during the Trojan
Wars. Built on the same circular principle as Troy, as described in
Homer’s Iliad, but at least six hundred years older, Arkaim
finds its prototype in Plato’s Atlantis with its three concentric
circles of canals; in legendary Electris, the Hyperborean city some said
was built under the Pole Star by the sea-god Poseidon; and in Asgard,
the sacred city dedicated to the Norse god Odin that is described in the
Icelandic saga, the Edda. All these legendary troy towns have
the same circular ground plan. They have gone down in history as
neolithic Wisdom centres and the seats of ancient god-kings, and this
undoubtedly throws light on the cultic function of Arkaim in its day, as
we shall see.
In Russia’s more mystical quarters there is intense interest in the
ancient town, seeing it as the city temple built by the legendary King
Yama, ruler of the Aryans in the Golden Age, which will once again
become the centre of the world.6 However, the
discovery of the settlement has opened a historical aperture onto far
more than the battles and conquests of an aggressive Indo-European
people waged across Eurasia and south into the Mediterranean lands,
where their war chariots shattered the peace of Old Europe. What the
Land of Cities has revealed in its very structure and history is above
all the still earlier past of the Ural-Altaic peoples – a past of such
enormous antiquity that it presents more mysteries than it solves.
Built in the unique architectural mould of nordic Asgard, the most
sacred shrine of the Aesir of which the Prose Edda relates that “men
call it Troy,” Arkaim may have been a shrine dedicated to the Aryan Sun
religion, yet the roots of its dedication would have lain ultimately in
the far older cult of the Pole star. Essentially, this was the religion
of the shaman, the wizard, the medicine-man and other wonder-workers in
touch with the spirits of nature.
Thus the swastika, thought to be the exclusively Aryan symbol of sun-worship misappropriated by the Nazis,7 and
found depicted on many of the clay pots unearthed in Arkaim, is an
older religious and metaphysical symbol than that attached to the Aryan
Sun God, its roots lying in totemic shamanism. René Guénon, the eminent
French esotericist, points out that the swastika, symbolising eternal
motion around a motionless centre, is a polar rather than a solar
symbol, and as such was a symbol central to the Pole star cult,
originally dedicated to a planetary deity connected to Ursa Major, the
Great Bear. This centre, Guénon stresses, “constitutes the fixed point
known symbolically to all traditions as the ‘pole’ or axis around which
the world rotates…” The swastika is therefore known world-wide as the
‘sign of the pole.’8
In short, it would be a mistake for Russian ethnic pride to train too
narrow a focus on Arkaim’s Aryan background, for the town was heir to a
great civilising force that existed in the Eurasian corridor long
before there were Indo-Europeans. One universal feature of troy towns is
missing in Arkaim – presumably because it has been destroyed over the
centuries – and that is the altar pillar in the central square.
Undoubtedly, in Arkaim we see a late expression of a megalithic Pillar
religion that once reigned universally in every corner of the globe,
among nearly all peoples, whatever their ethnic type, and which became
associated with troy towns. It is the oldest religion known to us and
goes back to the most remote antiquity when men saw the heavens as
revolving around the axis of the Pole Star.
Only later did the Sun, as the centre of the revolving stellar
system, replace the Pole Star as the supreme deity of the Pillar cult
and lead to the elevation of the Sun God of the Indo-European peoples.
It led to their greater intellectual development, to complex
civilisations, to advanced arts and sciences and the transcendence of
nature.
Troy towns like Electris – and Arkaim – were built as stellar
observatories. Their function was to unite earth to the starry cosmos
above according to the principle of “as above so below” by means of a
central axis symbolised by a stone pillar. Thus Diodorus Siculus of the
first century BCE, quoting the historian Hecataeus, described the
sanctuary of Electris as a troy town after the pattern of the spheres,
by which he meant an astronomical design similar to that
of Stonehenge and other ancient sun temples, in which the scheme of the
heavenly spheres or astral shells surrounding the earth was represented
diagrammatically by a series of concentric circles marked by walls,
ditches or moatsaround a central pillar-stone.9
These enclosed and heavily guarded sanctuaries sacred to the gods of
the greater cosmos were inhabited only by initiated priests and their
families, and were forbidden to the wandering nomads beyond the
ramparts. The mystery to archaeologists is how such an advanced
astronomical science can have been pursued at a time when
hunter-gatherers still roamed the land. Colin Wilson, a highly
accredited investigator, in answer takes us back to the Sumerians of
ancient Mesopotamia, a people who almost certainly had their origin in
Central Asia, as the Bible states: “As men migrated from the east, they
found a plain in the land of Shinar [Sumer] and settled there.” Sumer is
regarded as the site of one of the first true civilisations in human
history.
Wilson points out that the Sumerians were accomplished astronomers
who had compiled tables of the motions of all the planets, including
Uranus and Neptune, as early as five thousand years ago, long before the
existence of Arkaim. He adds that according to the library of clay
tablets compiled by the Assyrian King Assurbanipal (669 – 626 BCE) and
unearthed during the nineteenth century, the Sumerians had also
understood the precession of the equinoxes, and therefore knew about the
zodiac.10
Further revelations of the Sumerians’ sophisticated astronomical
science convinced Wilson that the Chaldaean astronomers understood our
solar system as well as Isaac Newton did.11 Indeed
Wilson came to believe that a scientific knowledge of the universe
existed on earth as far back as 64,000 years ago, if not far longer.
Evidently Arkaim was a Wisdom Centre in a network of such Centres
that once related all the prehistoric peoples of the earth to each other
under the spiritual aegis of the Pillar religion and its priestly
elites. The remains of countless similar stone circles, menhirs and troy
towns are scattered throughout Europe, the Americas, Eurasia and the
Pacific lands, memorials to great crisscrossing migrations of peoples,
all loyal to the same axial principle that relates earth to the heavens.
As to the cradle of this great diaspora, the mystical Russian painter and explorer NicholasRoerich
saw thousands of such megalithic pillar-works in the highlands of Tibet
and believed them to be older than any found elsewhere. He suggested
they had strong links to the works of the Celts and the Scythian tribes,
as also to the megaliths of Carnac in Brittany, and that they
represented a Pillar cult that had its beginnings long ago in the
Trans-Himalayas of Inner Asia.12
This proposed Eurasian cradle of the troy town phenomenon is
reinforced by the researches of one Jacob Bryant in 1776. Bryant, a
noted expert in Homeric Troy, published an encyclopaedia of ancient
mythology in which he claimed the Trojans were descended from a very old
“Atlantean” race that had long ago settled across the whole of Eurasia.13 If the first troy towns were built in Central Asia, could the universal Pillar religion also have had its beginning there?
As I have said, various versions of the cult of the World Pillar as
it spread around the world were once known from the Americas to northern
Africa, where the blond Tamahu worshipped the Magna Mater and her
spouse the Heaven-Bearer, as did their cousins in Brittany and Spain. In
Hindu India the World Axis, Mt. Meru, ascended into the revolving
heavens above through the centre of the three worlds, and in the Canary
Islands the Cro-Magnon Guanches, now extinct, worshipped with sacrifices
the god of the World Pillar whom they called “the God who Holds the
Heavens,” and who thus prevented the collapse of the foundations of the
world.”14 A remnant of this belief-system
survives in the legend of Jacob’s Ladder in the Hebrew Book of Exodus,
in which we learn that on this Ladder angels ascend and descend between
heaven and earth.
Each race has considered a certain tree as symbolic of the World
Pillar and therefore sacred. In the Voluspa, the song of the Old Norse
prophetess, the tree on which the god Odin hung in order to receive the
sacred runes was called Yggdrasil, the heaven-pole or world axis. The
World Ash Yggdrasil was declared to be the greatest of all trees and the
best; its limbs spread over the world and above the heavens, its shaft
the pivot of the ever-revolving sky. At the foot of that tree the laws
were first brought into being by the Aesir, the Norse gods, and
Yggdrasil was worshipped as the source of all higher knowledge.15
To the inhabitants of Sumer, whose language is unknown – being
neither Indo-European nor Semitic – the Pillar was a dominant religious
feature: thus Nippur, one of Sumer’s chief cities, as long ago as 3800
BCE had the meaning of “Bond of Heaven-Earth.” A prominent researcher on
this subject says that in the text of the Sumerian ‘Enuma Elish’, “clues to the purpose of Nippur were found in references to a heavenward tall pillar reaching to the sky.”16 In
ancient Egypt, the land of the Hamitic peoples, the city of An or Anu,
which was renamed Heliopolis by the Greeks, originally meant Pillar
City.17 As a commentator has pointed out, this
fact may shed light on the mysterious djed pillar, the “backbone of
Osiris,” often associated with Heliopolis.18
Like others of the Pillar fraternities, the totemic shaman too
dedicated his life and calling to the vision of the marriage of heaven
and earth achieved by means of a heaven-bearing Tree of Life. In ancient
Crete he was a familiar adjunct to the temple rituals of the Great
Mother Demeter; in Siberia, Mongolia and the Americas, he was the
magician and wise man of his tribe. Beating his drum and climbing the
central pole of his yurt, the symbolic pillar by which he
communed with the sky spirits above, the shaman thus brought down
healings, prophecies and advice from the ancestors to the people of his
community. The Mongol-Turkic shamanic tradition with its Sky God Tengri
and its World Tree still survives over a vast area of the planet,
although its roots are lost far back in the mists of the palaeolithic
age.
The mystery of Arkaim is indeed the mystery of the Pillar religion.
Who brought to all the primitive peoples of earth this knowledge of the
Polar Axis, uniting them for many thousands of years in a common
planetary culture? Who taught them the astronomical secrets of the solar
system, the zodiac and precession of the equinoxes at a time in
prehistory when human intelligence was not supposed to be evolved enough
to have developed that knowledge alone? And what part did Arkaim play
in that dissemination?
Tracing the Arctic Origins of Civilisation
The Babylonians believed in a mysterious paradise in “the far north”
where a race of great sages lived; and the ancient Greeks too extolled a
northern Elysium in which they believed the Hyperboreans, a wise,
peaceful and long-lived race, lived in great splendour and prosperity.
Even though Delphi was regarded as the centre of the Greek world, its
god Apollo and his sister, the goddess Artemis, were acknowledged to be
originally deities of this secret land far to the north, where stood the
cosmic axle that the Greeks called Helice, “That Which Turns.” Many
Greek historians as well as later scholars located this northern
paradise in Scythia or the Altai, and as having its source in the
shamanism that grew up around the semi-mythical magicians and pole-lords
of Altai. But research and sacred tradition both suggest its origins go
further back still to northeastern Asia within the Arctic Circle, to a
society that flourished on the shores of the Siberian Sea.
How long ago, or for how long, this circumpolar culture may have existed no-one knows: possibly 200,000 years or more. In The Interpretation of Radium, the
acclaimed physicist Frederick Soddy stated that some of the beliefs and
legends which have come down to us from antiquity may be “evidence of a
wholly unknown and unsuspected ancient civilisation of which all other
relic has disappeared.”19 There may have been,
he suggested, previous cycles in the unrecorded history of the world
when civilised men lived “in a past possibly so remote that even the
very atoms of civilisation literally have had time to disintegrate.”20
On the basis of years of investigation, Charles Hapgood, a New
England professor of history, in 1982 declared that possibly as long ago
as 100,000 years BCE the hub of a worldwide maritime civilisation with a
highly developed level of scientific knowledge must have been in
existence in the Arctic Circle.21Until lately Hapgood’s finds, presented in Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958)and Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966),have
been largely ignored in scientific circles, even though they elicited
support from the great physicist Albert Einstein; but today interest in
them is mushrooming among a growing number of highly accredited
investigators.
René Guénon appeals to the oldest and most authentic esoteric
traditions in claiming that long before the Indo-European races arose,
at a time when a hunter-gatherer humanity was still at a primitive stage
of development, the tropics were differently distributed and a great
Hyperborean culture flourished around the Arctic Circle, “in the Islands
of the Blest on the shores of the Ocean where the great maelstrom
whirls.”22
Only later, after a catastrophic change in geological conditions, did
this senior race migrate southward, some to Central Asia, others,
possibly crossing the Bering Strait, to Atlantis to the west. The latter
has been located by some researchers in the Antilles, two large islands
beyond the Gulf of Mexico widely regarded as the remains of what was
once a great sunken landmass.23 (In support of
this theory, the Caribs and the tribes of Hispaniola have long had a
tradition that many of the islands of the Antilles, a well-known
earthquake zone, were once connected by a single landmass, before a
great cataclysm about 15,000 years ago submerged the connection and left
only the known island fragments.)24
Leaving aside Guénon’s oblique reference to the two southern refuges
of the Hyperboreans being in Russia and Central America, he suggests
that in both cases the two groups brought with them advanced
mathematical and astronomical knowledge and the seeds of arts and
sciences that would eventually be passed on to our brute ancestors to
become the basis, about eight thousand years ago, for our own
civilisations.
Both Sumer in the Middle East and Central America have flood stories
written down long before the biblical account of Noah’s flood, and in
all these stories the salvific activity of the Elder race is pivotal.
There is the Sumerian story of Utnapishtim and his wife, who, helped by
the gods, survived a flood and were made immortal; and likewise early
American accounts tell how the god Viracocha, who “came from the east,”
destroyed the earth in a great flood. Later, after a man and a woman
survived by taking refuge in a floating box, “Virachocha recreated the
peoples of the earth, and gave each one his own language and songs.”25 Wilson
cites many such instances in which flood stories about the Hyperboreans
and their salvation of our race are to be found in both the Old World
and the New.
Guénon is emphatic, however, that of the two primary locations, both
of which have at times borne the name of Tula (known to the Greeks as
Thule), that of Central Asia was the elder. The Atlantean Tula, says
Guénon, must be distinguished from the Hyperborean Tula, the supreme
Holy Land, which latter represents the first and supreme centre for the
entire current Manvantara, and is the archetypal “sacred isle.”
All the other “sacred isles,” although everywhere
bearing names of equivalent meaning, are still only images of the
original. This even applies to the spiritual centre of Atlantean
tradition, which only governed a secondary historical cycle, subordinate
to the Manvantara.26
Plato himself notes this hierarchical distribution: the Atlantean
empire, he said, was only one nexus established by the gods in a greater
network of Centres whose capital was elsewhere “at the centre of the
Universe.”27 Thus the Eurasian heartland, Guénon says in his brief but ground-breaking work, The Lord of the World, has indeed become that “centre of the Universe,” the authentic “supreme country” which,
According to certain Vedic and Avestan texts, was
originally situated 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.28
However, this still does not tell us why the location in Central Asia
was chosen as the Hyperboreans’ primary destination? Guénon’s response
to this question is cryptic in the extreme. He admits he is dealing with
proscripted material he is not permitted to divulge, but goes so far as
to reveal that Mt. Meru, the “polar mountain” stands in the centre of
the “supreme country” – and Mt. Meru, as is now generally understood,
symbolises the mysterious World Axis or World Tree of esoteric
tradition. In other words, Central Asia was chosen because the World
Axis was there; that was the real goal of the migration. The World Axis
was, and is, the “centre of the Universe”; it is the World Axis that
renders its geographical location a Holy Land – a fact which is only now
being elucidated in para-scientific circles.
As we shall see in the second part of this article, the earth’s
esoteric structure is a subject that has been veiled in secrecy for
thousands of years, and this applies especially to the mystic’s Mt. Meru
or World Axis. John Major Jenkins, in his book Galactic Alignment, is
one of the first modern researchers to throw light on the meaning of
this and much other Hyperborean lore that Guénon was unwilling or unable
to discuss. Beyond referring to the senior race as “the guardians of
Earth’s sacred mysteries,” Guénon’s initiatory vows kept him silent.
Who, then, were these mysterious Hyperboreans – or as we might
perhaps better call them, these Elders, these early Masters of Wisdom
who understood the importance of the World Axis? The records of most of
the Bronze age nations have a legend that an unknown race of Elders gave
us kingship and civilisation and that they came from the gods and
understood the most powerful secrets of our planet – secrets that have
since been lost.
The Elders have been known as the Nephilim, the Sons of God, the
Anunnaki, the Watchers and many other appellations; G.I. Gurdjieff spoke
of them as agents of the divine Demiurge from a previous cycle of
humanity. But beyond being credited with great wisdom and magical powers
as well as having giant stature and extremely high craniums, little
more is known about them. Did they really exist? All that can be said
with certainty is that they remain a benign shadowy presence moving
inscrutably in the background of virtually all the prehistoric
traditions of our race.
These souls from Sirius, say the ancient texts, descended down the
World Axis and incarnated on earth long ago in order to aid our
fledgling species. When a great catastrophe towards the end of the Ice
Age, around the twelfth millennium BCE, threatened us with extinction,
these sons and daughters of the gods instituted the hieros gamos, a
genetic science that mingled their genes with ours and so bred a
superior human stock with a greater survival potential that spread
gradually from the heart of Asia on one hand, and Atlantis on the other,
to the rest of the world.29
The climate changed again around the ninth millennium BCE, which is
widely regarded as the date of the demise of Atlantis and the enforced
dispersal of its people both westward to Central America and eastwards
to Europe. Bringing catastrophic earthquakes and coastal flooding to
vast areas of the globe30and a severe threat to the survival of our species, it was a racial crisis that brought another response from the senior race.
Although the Elders had gone, their dynastic descendants, a long line
of neolithic priest-kings, began a new evolutionary programme. In their
migrations from Central Asia, the Ural-Altaic race is credited with
establishing in every corner of the earth its Pillar religion, which
Plato’s Critias vividly describes as also the religion of the
Atlanteans. Stone pillar altars have survived in Malta from c. 5000 BCE,
also from Catal Huyuk, in Anatolia, c. 5800 BCE.31 The
Pillar religion is the earliest known vehicle of a comprehensive body
of wisdom originally centred on the Pole Star, in which the moon is the
primary image of the mysteries of birth, generation and death. It is the
fundamental root of all the religions and esoteric traditions we know
today, as well as all our higher learning. Its spread heralded the dawn
of peaceful, egalitarian, Goddess-loving societies clustered in
neolithic towns and villages around the world wherein the feminine
principle was dominant and strife little known.32
Arkaim and the Sun Gods
Modern historians have found that three great floods seem to have
occurred in the known span of human history. According to Stephen
Oppenheimer in Eden in the East, the third of these, around the
fifth millennium BCE, corresponded to Noah’s Flood and was the greatest
of the three, peaking during the fourth millennium.33 It
caused catastrophic coastal flooding, tsunamis and severe earthquakes,
and also desertification of the interior of the land masses, and
civilisation disappeared. Once again the species was threatened with a
reversion to savagery, and once again salvation appeared from Inner
Asia.
In the third millennium BCE, so the Chinese Celestial records tell
us, the Sons of the Sun – also known as the Sons of Heaven – fanned out
across the world from their homeland in the Karakorum Range at the
western end of the Trans-Himalayas, bearing with them the higher
revelation of the Sun religion.34 It was a
patriarchal and hierarchical belief-system that disclosed new depths of
metaphysical and technological knowledge inducive to civilisation.
Everywhere the stone circles whose central axis was dedicated to the
Pole Star, like Stonehenge in ancient Britain, evolved over a further
thousand years into more sophisticated observatories focused instead on
the Sun and its circling planets, and human culture once more blossomed.
This innovation, however, was not without inter-faith warfare, since
many ethnic groups, such as the Mongol/Turkic peoples of the eastern
steppes, remained loyal to the Pole Star cult. At the same time,
pyramids as well as defensive troy towns like Arkaim sprang up in
dedication to the Sun Gods, whose mystique became more and more occulted
as enmity grew for the powerful new faith. Indeed Arkaim may have been
the seat of one of the Solar mystery religions of that period, and the
fiery holocaust that destroyed the settlement after two hundred years of
operation may well have been caused by that same internecine conflict
between the old order and the new.
The pictorial evidence contained in the ‘Enuma Elish’shows
that the Sumerians understood full well that the Elders they revered so
much were “from the gods” – not gods themselves but human beings, though
far more advanced in consciousness. According to the murals they have
left us, the early Egyptians too knew in some sense that their deities
were really high shaman masters, each masked in the official headdress
of his animal totem. But that understanding was to be occluded with the
increasingly aggressive dominance of the Solar religion, when a kind of
darkness of amnesia fell over the collective consciousness of our race.
The Solar priesthoods withdrew behind barricades, and a spiritual
division opened up in society that had never before existed.
As the historian Giorgio de Santillana has pointed out in Hamlet’s Mill, from then onthe
enlightened understanding of our forbears began to descend into
mythology and superstition as small pockets of secret wisdom called temples shone out in a sea of darkness, and a mystique of gods replaced the cosmological knowledge of an earlier age.35 While
bands of initiate culture-bearers spread out across the globe to sow
the seeds of civilisation once more, a nucleus of the senior race
withdrew deep into the mountain ranges of High Asia that surround the
Takla Makan desert and severed all direct contact with the outside
world.
Ever since, the whole Eurasian heartland, from the Urals to the Gobi
and including southern Siberia, has borne the stamp of a special
sanctity. High Asia in particular has been called by a succession of
peoples and religions Paradesha, the Forbidden Land, the Land of the
Living Gods, Thule, Djong, Uttarakuru, Olmolungring, Shambhala, the Holy
Land and the Land of White Waters. Whatever its current name, almost
all esoteric traditions in the Old World have related this vast,
mysterious Inner Eurasian region, so rich in higher knowledge, to the
legendary Elder race and revered it as the home of the Ancient Wisdom
for the present World Age.
The legend of the Sons and Daughters of God has thus never
died, though it has gone underground. Inner Asia, thought to be the
immemorial cradle of shamanism as well as of all yogic and religious
systems, is believed by many to be still spiritually efficacious, still a
holy land which, under a single governing Hierarchy, nurtures without
fear or favour arcane schools and brotherhoods persecuted elsewhere.
Sufis, Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Jews,
Neo-Platonists and others who have been hidden from the profane world by
long chains of initiatic transmission have never failed to find
sanctuary in that specially blessed protectorate, where everything
began.
From being hidden in shadows for thousands of years, today the region
is being illuminated by an intense spotlight from every possible angle.
The discovery of Arkaim is only one such angle. The highly publicised
row between China and Tibet is another; the ever-worsening struggle
between the US and Russia for military dominance over the oil- and
gas-rich provinces of Central Asia; the increasing commitment of Russia,
China, Iran and India to a Eurasian geopolitical bloc, in tacit
opposition to the Western powers; and at the same time the awakening of
interest in the West to the mysterious spiritual wealth that can be
glimpsed in the place, are yet other factors bringing the heart of Asia
to the very centre of world attention. Yet the questions they pose
remain unanswered.
What is the secret of the Holy Land? Who really were the Elders who
gave us civilisation? Are they still guiding our evolution in discarnate
form? What is the secret of the World Axis? Do we as yet understand the
archetypal principles that shape our planet? And why are we only now
beginning to ask such questions?
If you appreciated this article, please consider a digital subscription to New Dawn.Footnotes:
1. Colin Wilson, Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals, Bear & Co., Vermont, 2006.
2. John Michell, The View Over Atlantis, Sphere Books, London, 1975, 117.
3. V.A. Shnirelman, Archaeology and Ethnic Politics: the Discovery of Arkaim, Unesco, 1998.
4. Alex Sparkey, The Ancient Land of Arkaim, from Spirit of Ma’at: Russia: Land of Living Mysticism, Vol. 3, No. 9, 3.
5. Pravda.Ru, An Ancient Aryan Civilisation, 16/07/2005.
6. Shnirelman, op. cit., 38.
7. Louis Pauwels & Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, Souvenir Press, London, 1960, 188.
8. René Guénon, The Lord of the World, Octagon Press, U.K., 1983, 9.
9. Victoria LePage, Shambhala, Quest Books, Illinois, USA, 1996, 197, citing Diodorus Siculus, The Library of History, Loeb Classical Library, London, 1936 – 67.
10. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 32.
11. Ibid., 32.
12. Nicholas Roerich, Shambhala: In Search of the New Era, Inner Traditions International, 1930, 221.
13. Jacob Bryant, A New System or An Analysis of Ancient Mythology, T. Payne, P. Elmsly, B. White and J. Walter, publishers, London, 1776.
14. Jurgen Spanuth, Atlantis of the North, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1979, 123 – 24.
15. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1984, 121.
16. Alan F. Alford, Gods of the New Millennium, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1996, 261.
17. Ibid., 261
18. Ibid., 261
19. Frederick Soddy, The Interpretation of Radium and the Structure of the Atom, Putnam, New York, 1922, quoted by Colin Wilson, op. cit., 292.
20. Ibid., 292.
21. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 2.
22. Hesiod [Works], R. Lattimore, trans., University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959, 172 – 3.
23. Lewis Spence, The History of Atlantis, Rider, London, 1926; cited by Geoffrey Ashe, Atlantis, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, 21.
24. Eberhard Zangger, The Flood from Heaven, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1992, 66.
25. Colin Wilson, op. cit., 91.
26. René Guénon, op. cit., 56.
27. Plato, Timaeus and Critius, Desmond Lee, trans., Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983, 145.
28. René Guénon, op. cit., 50.
29. Ibid, 56.
30. Stephen Oppenheimer, Eden in the East, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1998, 30 – 41.
31. Anne Baring & Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess, Penguin, 1993.
32. Ibid., 50 –56.
33. Oppenheimer, op. cit., 35.
34. Andrew Tomas, Shambhala: Oasis of Light, Sphere Books, London, 1976, 26.
35. G. Santillana & H. Von Deschend, Hamlet’s Mill, Gambit International, Boston, 1969.
.
VICTORIA LEPAGE has published numerous articles on the new spiritual paradigm emerging in cultures worldwide and is the author of Shambhala: The Fascinating Truth Behind the Myth of Shangri-la, published in ten foreign languages. Her latest book isMysteries of the Bridechamber: The Initiation of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. She lives in New South Wales, Australia, and can be contacted through her website at www.victoria-lepage.org.The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 111 (November-December 2008).
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