ATLANTIS AND HYPERBOREA
In Atlantis (June 1929), Paul Le Cour comments on a footnote from our article of last May, [1] in which we maintained the distinction between Hyperborea and Atlantis against those who would conflate them and speak of an 'Hyperborean Atlantis'. In truth, although this expression seems to belong properly to Le Cour, our remarks were not directed only at him, for he is not alone in confusing the two; the same confusion can be found in Herman Wirth, author of an important work on the origins of humanity (recently published in Germany as Der Aufgang der Menschheit), who consistently uses the term 'north-Atlantic' to designate the region from which the primordial tradition emerged. On the other hand, Le Cour is, to our knowledge, the only one who claims that we affirm the existence of an 'Hyperborean Atlantis'. If we did not single him out for this, it is because questions of persons are of little importance to us, our only concern being to put our readers on guard against a false interpretation, whatever its source may be. We wonder how Le Cour reads us; we wonder more than ever, for he now has us saying that the North Pole was originally 'not the one of today, but the adjoining region, it seems, of Iceland and Greenland.' Where could he have found that? We are absolutely certain that we have never written a single word on this matter and that we have never made the slightest allusion to the question, which is in any case secondary from our point of view,
of a possible displacement of the pole since the beginning of our Manvantara. [2] With all the more reason we have never specified its original location, which would be, in any event, on many grounds quite difficult to determine with respect to present-day regions.
Le Cour goes on to say that 'in spite of his [Guénon's] Hinduism, he admits that the origin of the traditions is Western.' We do not admit this at all, quite the contrary, for we say that it is polar, and as far as we know the pole is no more Western than it is Eastern; and we persist in maintaining, as we did in the note just referred to, that North and West are two different cardinal points. It is only in a later epoch that the seat of the primordial tradition, transferred to other regions, was able to become either Western or Eastern-Western for certain periods and Eastern for other; and in any case, the last transferal was surely to the East and already completed long before the beginning of the times called 'historic' (the only times accessible to the investigations of 'profane' history). We should note, moreover, that it is not at all 'in spite of his Hinduism' (in using this word Le Cour probably spoke more correctly than he knew), but on the contrary because of it that we consider the origin of the traditions to be Nordic, and even more exactly to be polar, since this is expressly affirmed in the Veda as well as in other sacred books. [3] The land where the sun 'circled the horizon without setting' must have in fact been located very near the pole if not at the pole itself; it is also said that at a later date the representatives of the tradition were transported to a region where the longest day was twice as long as the shortest, but this already involves a subsequent phase which, geographically, clearly has nothing to do with Hyperborea.
Le Cour may be right in distinguishing between a southern Atlantis and a northern Atlantis, although they must not have been
separate originally; but it is no less true that even the northern Atlantis had nothing hyperborean about it. As we freely acknowledge, what greatly complicates the issue is that over time the same designations have been applied to very different regions, and not only to successive locations of the traditional primordial center, but even to the secondary centers that proceeded more or less directly from it. We pointed out this difficulty in our study The King of the World, where, on the very page to which Le Cour refers, we wrote:
But it is also necessary to distinguish the Atlantean Tula [the original place of the Toltecs, which was probably situated in Northern Atlantis] from the Hyperborean Tula, the latter then truly representing the original and supreme center for the totality of the present Manvantara; it was this that was the 'sacred isle' par excellence, having originally been situated quite literally at the pole.... All the other sacred isles, which everywhere bear names of identical meaning, were only its images; and this applies even to the spiritual center of the Atlantean tradition, which only presided over a secondary historical cycle subordinate to the Manvantara.
To which we added this note:
A major difficulty in determining precisely the meeting-point of the Atlantean and the Hyperborean traditions results from various name substitutions that have given rise to many confusions; but in spite of everything the question is perhaps not entirely insoluble. [4]
In speaking of this meeting-point, we were thinking chiefly of Druidism; and now, precisely on this subject, we find in Atlantis (JulyAugust, 1929) another note that proves how difficult it sometimes is to make oneself understood. On the subject of our June article on the 'triple enclosure', [5] Le Cour writes: 'It limits the scope of this emblem to make it only a Druidic symbol; it is likely to be earlier and to radiate beyond the Druidic world.' Now we are so far from making it only a Druidic symbol that in our article, after having noted the examples Le Cour himself gathered from Italy and Greece, we said:
The fact that this same figure is found elsewhere than among the Celts would indicate that there were, in other traditional forms, hierarchies constituted on this same model [of the Druidic hierarchy], which is perfectly normal.
As for the question of anteriority, it would be necessary first of all to know what precise epoch Druidism dates to, and it probably dates back earlier than is ordinarily supposed, all the more in that the Druids possessed a tradition of which a significant part was indisputably of hyperborean provenance.
We will take this occasion to make a further remark which has its own importance. We say 'hyperborean' to conform with the usage that has prevailed since the Greeks; but the use of this word shows that they, at least in the 'classical' epoch, had already lost the sense of the primitive designation. It would, in fact, suffice to say 'Boreas', a word strictly equivalent to the Sanskrit Varāha, or rather, when it involves an area of land, to its feminine form Varāhā; it is the 'land of the wild boar', which also became the 'land of the bear' at a certain epoch during the period of ascendancy of the Kshatriyas, to which Parashurāma [6] put an end.
To finish this clarification, it remains for us to say a few words on three or four questions that Le Cour raises incidentally in his two notes. The first is a reference to the swastika, which he says we 'make the sign of the pole.' Without the slightest animosity, we will here ask Le Cour not to liken our case to his, for it is necessary to tell things as they are: we consider him a 'seeker' (and this is not in any way to lessen his merit) who offers explanations according to his personal views, which are somewhat adventurous at times; and that is altogether his right since he is not attached to any living tradition and is not in possession of any facts received by direct transmission. We could say, in other words, that he is doing archeology, whereas we are doing initiatic science, two points of view which, even when they touch upon the same subjects, cannot in any way coincide. We do not 'make' of the swastika the sign of the pole; we say that it is and has always been this, and that this is its true traditional meaning, which is an entirely different thing, for this is a fact that neither Le Cour nor we ourselves can change. Le Cour, who evidently can provide only more or less hypothetical interpretations, claims that the swastika is 'only a symbol related to an ideal lacking loftiness'; [7] that is his way of seeing things, but it is nothing more than that, and so we are all the more reluctant to discuss it in that it represents only a sentimental opinion; 'lofty' or not, an 'ideal' is to us something rather empty, and in reality it is a question of things that are much more 'positive', as we would readily say if this word were not so abused.
Le Cour, on the other hand, does not appear satisfied with the note we devoted to an article by one of his collaborators who wished to see at all costs an opposition between East and West, and who
showed, with regard to the East, an altogether deplorable exclusivism. [8] He writes some astonishing things concerning this:
René Guénon, who is a pure logician, can only investigate the purely intellectual side of things, concerning the East as well as the West, as is proven by his writings; he demonstrates this again in declaring that Agni is sufficient unto itself (see Regnabit, April 1926), and in ignoring the duality Aor-Agni, to which we will often return, for this duality is the cornerstone of the edifice of the manifested world.
Although we are ordinarily indifferent to what is written about us, we cannot let it pass that we are a 'pure logician' when on the contrary we consider logic and dialectic to be simple expository instruments, as such useful at times, but of an entirely external character and without any interest in themselves. To repeat, we adhere only to the initiatic point of view, and the rest, that is to say all that is only 'profane' knowledge, is entirely without value in our eyes. Although we often do speak of 'pure intellectuality', it is only because this expression has a completely different meaning for us than it does for Le Cour, who seems to confuse 'intelligence' with 'reason' and who even envisages an 'esthetic intuition', whereas there is no genuine intuition other than 'intellectual intuition', which is of a suprarational order. There is here, moreover, something formidable in quite another way than can be conceived by one who clearly has not the least suspicion of what 'metaphysical realization' might be, and who probably imagines that we are only a kind of theoretician, which proves once more that he has scarcely understood our writings, which, strange to say, nonetheless appear to preoccupy him.
As for the fable of Aor-Agni, of which we are not in the least 'ignorant', it would be good once and for all to make an end of these reveries, for which Le Cour is moreover not responsible: if 'Agni is sufficient unto itself, it is for the good reason that in Sanskrit this
term designates fire in all its aspects, and those who claim the contrary demonstrate their total ignorance of Hindu tradition. We did not say anything other than this in the note in our Regnabit article, which we believe it necessary to reproduce here:
Knowing that among the readers of Regnabit there are some who are acquainted with the theories of a school whose works, though very interesting and quite admirable in many respects, nonetheless invite certain reservations, we must say here that we cannot accept the use of the terms Aor and Agni to designate the two complementary aspects of fire (light and heat). The first of these two words is in fact Hebrew, while the second is Sanskrit, and one cannot associate in this way terms borrowed from different traditions, whatever may be, among such traditions, the real concordances and even the fundamental identity hidden under their diversity of forms; we must not confuse 'syncretism' with true synthesis. Moreover, if Aor is exclusively light, Agni is the igneous principle envisaged integrally (the Latin ignis being exactly the same word), and therefore light and heat together; the restriction of this term to the second aspect is entirely arbitrary and unjustified.
We need hardly add that in writing this note we in no way had Le Cour in mind; we were thinking solely of Hiéron de Paray-le-Monial, to whom the invention of this bizarre verbal association properly belongs. We see no reason to give any attention to a fantasy issuing from Sarachaga's too fertile imagination, entirely lacking in authority and without the slightest value from the traditional point of view, to which we strictly confine ourselves. [9]
Finally, Le Cour takes advantage of these circumstances to affirm once again the anti-metaphysical and anti-initiatic theory of Western 'individualism', which is after all his own concern and involves only himself; and he adds, with a note of pride indicating quite well that he is hardly free from individual contingencies: 'We maintain
our point of view because we are ancestors in the domain of knowledge.' This claim is truly a little extraordinary-does Le Cour then believe himself to be so ancient? Not only are modern Westerners not the ancestors of anyone, they are not even legitimate descendants, for they have lost the key to their own tradition; it is not 'in the East that there has been deviation,' whatever might be said by those who are ignorant of everything pertaining to the Eastern doctrines. The 'ancestors', to take up Le Cour's word, are the effective holders of the primordial tradition; there could not be any others, and, in the present age, these will certainly not be found in the West.