26 § The Wild Boar and the Bear
A m on g the Celts the wild boar and the bear symbolised, respectively, the representatives of the spiritual authority and the temporal power, that is, the two castes of Druids and Knights, the equivalents, at least originally and in their essential attributions, of the Brahmins and Kshatriyas in India. As we have indicated elsewhere, [1] this clearly Hyperborean symbolism is one of the marks of the direct attachment of the Celtic tradition to the Primordial Tradition of the present Mahā-Yuga, whatever other elements, from earlier but already secondary and derivative traditions, may have come to be added to this main current and to be, as it were, reabsorbed into it. The point to be made here is that the Celtic tradition could probably be regarded as truly constituting one of the 'links' between the Atlantean tradition and the Hyperborean tradition, after the end of the secondary period when this Atlantean tradition represented the predominant form and, as it were, the 'substitute' for the original centre which was already inaccessible to the bulk of humanity. [2] On this point also, the same symbolism which we have just mentioned can provide some information that is not without interest.
Let us note first of all the importance given to the wild boar by the Hindu tradition, which is itself the direct issue of the Primordial Tradition and which expressly affirms its own Hyperborean origin in the Veda. The wild boar (varāha) not only figures as the third of the ten avatāras of Vishnu in the present Mahā-Yuga, but our entire Kalpa, that is to say, the entire cycle of manifestation of our world is designated in Hinduism as the ShwētavarāhaKalpa, the 'cycle of the white wild boar'. This being so, and considering the analogy which necessarily exists between the great cycle and subordinate cycles, it is natural that the mark of the Kalpa, so to speak, should be found once more at the outset of the Mahā-Yuga; and this is why the polar 'sacred land', seat of the primordial spiritual centre of this Mahā-Yuga, is also called