Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold  

Chapter 4 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

Let us examine some aspects of Russia in its purely Russian, Slavic form, i.e., Russia of the Gardariki (as its northern Scandinavian neighbors called it), or Russia in its purely European borders from the Carpathians to the Urals.

Hyperborean Dacia and the 2 circles of civilization

As the point of departure of our investigation we shall take the extremely interesting data concerning the sacred geography of the southernmost (or, more precisely, the south-western) territorial sector of Gardariki (the Galician principality) gathered in the book Hyperborean Dacia [13] by the Romanian Traditionalist author of a Guenonian orientation, Geticus (Basil Lovinescu). In this work, the author convincingly demonstrates on the basis of sacred toponymies and a deep analysis of Romanian folklore that ancient Dacia (modern Romania and Moldova) was once the sacred center of the Hyperborean tradition, albeit secondary in regards to Polar Hyperborea which was far more original than other indirect spiritual centers of traditional civilizations. In our opinion, the thesis of Hyperborean Dacia looks quite convincing and we would especially like to dwell on the mystery of the Danube delta which, according to Geticus, was the location of one of the main sanctuaries of Hyperborean Apollo.

The author of Hyperborean Dacia notes the following peculiarity of the Danube delta and its cult center: the river Danube flows into the Black Sea on the 45th parallel, i.e., on the belt dividing the entire northern hemisphere in half. Thus, the cult center of Apollo in Dacia was located in the far north for the entire southern half of the northern hemisphere whose establishment has only recently become known to modern historians of civilization. We note that the 45th parallel in general plays an extremely important role for Eurasia and in the far West. In France, two of the most important sacred centers, Lyon (the “city of meadows, i.e., the center of the geographical spiral of the druids as examined in Louis Charpentier’s book The Giants and the Mystery of the Origin [14]) and Grenoble (the “land of the Dauphins” [15] whose solar, Hyperborean symbolism was researched by the scholars Eugene Canseliet – Sevren Bafrue and Guy Beatrice in the book Land of the Dauphin [15]). At the same time in the Far East, in Mongolia, at approximately the same latitude is located the sacred center of Genghis Khan’s empire, the city of Urga. In addition, it is interesting to note that the borders of the Russian Empire also more or less followed this parallel over a gigantic space resembling a sinusoid with a recess in the South in the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and in the Pamir mountains, and a rise in the North in South-Eastern Siberia, Altai, and across the Amur River. In addition to such an important parallel at which the center of the Apollonian cult of “Hyperborean Dacia” was located, what is also extremely important for us is that the longitude of this place was 30 degrees east. It can be said that this meridian, in its northern part, was the axis of the Slavs’ settlement. To its west were the Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, and to its east are the Great Russians. Thus, in addition to the “extremely northern” location of “Hyperborean Dacia” in relation to the mediterranean world, the extreme South of its situation can also be considered in regards to the Slavo-Baltic-Scandinavian world and Gardariki Rus. In fact, the mouth of the Danube was always the southern sacred-geographical pressure point of the “masses” of the Slavic, Russian world to the north.

“Hyperboran Dacia” once formed part of Rus itself as the “Principality of Galicia,” the southernmost of the principalities. Based on the above considerations, some kind of a dual, sacred-geographical map in which Geticus’ “Hyperborean Dacia” serves as a common pole for two opposite circles can be outlined – that is, for the southern, Mediterranean circle and for the northern, “Gardarikian” Slavic-Russian one(together with Baltic and Scandinavian elements). These circles can be placed on our 30th meridian of longitude to the east above and below the mouth of the Danube respectively. The most logical point to take opposite of the Danube delta at 30 degrees would be the intersection of this meridian with the northern polar circle “above” and the tropic of cancer ‘below” as these belts in turn quite naturally mark 14 degrees of the length of the meridian from the southern pole to the equator, that is, where the distance from “Hyperborean Dacia” to the pole and the equator and then back again is halved. Thus, we obtain two circles, the northern one with its pole not far from the Russian city of Velikie Luki (here Charpentier’s work Giants and the Mystery of the Origin should be recalled again since it throughly examines the role of the “god” Lug (meadows) in the sacred geography of the Druids and the phonetically identical Russian word “Luki” and Celtic “Lug”), and the southern circle with its polar point in the Mediterranean Sea whose distance is equal to that between Cyprus and Crete and the Nile Delta and the southern coast of Anatolia.

Yet another important testament in the form of medieval Scandinavian geographical maps which reflect the sacred picture of the world can confirm the sacred validity of the pattern we have drawn out. As a rule, these maps present circles where continents were symbolized by inscriptions rather than portrayed in shape, often bearing recurring graphic symbols when the map is oriented towards the east, towards the west, or, finally, in the case of a sharper northern orientation. The labels on these maps clarify that these graphic signs symbolize the location of three bodies of water, i.e., the two sacred rivers – the Tanais (Dnieper) and the Geon (Nile) – and the Mediterranean Sea which includes the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. It is crucial to note that the Tanais-Dnieper and the Geon-Nile actually flow in one way or another along the meridian at 30 degrees east longitude. The Dnieper flows from the North to the South, and the Nile from the South to the North. This parallelism between the two great sacred rivers gives us every reason to construct two circles of civilizations:

Here we can recall the famous account of Hyperboreans sending gifts to the temple of Apollo on the island of Delos. Delos can be approximately identified with the southern limit of the influence of northern, Hyperborean civilization where the spiritual radiation of the north circle “descended.” In addition, it is worth mentioning the “amber road,” later known as the “path from the Varangians to the Greeks,” from the Baltic to the Greece, along which the northern peoples carried mysterious “gold of the North”, later identified as amber, originally had an entirely different, purely initiatic meaning. Thus, the entire northern circle, including all of “Gardariki,” was Hyperborean and polar symbolism in fact abounds in the the toponyms of Rus, i.e., the naming of Russian cities and the names Slavic peoples. The Apollonian, polar roots “pol,” “appolo,” and “polus,” are preserved in the words “Poland” (the country), “Polanie” (the Slavic people), and “Polotsk” (the city in Russia) just as is identical, according to the laws of sacred linguistics, in the case of how the root “bor” in the Greek word “Borea”, or “North”, can be found in the variations of “Bor” (the city), Borovsk (the city), etc.[16] In addition, place names with the base “mur” are characteristic, such as the city of Murom which, according to Wirth, evidences links with the original cult center “Mo-uru.” Finally, it is impossible not to recall one of the largest ancient Russian cities, Tula, which is identical to the Hyperborean city of “Thule.” It is telling that even among the later coats of arms of this city we find the hieroglyph of the Hyperborean eight-pointed star, albeit stylized in a simplistic, utilitarian way in accordance with the arms industry central to the city.[17]

Besides mere toponyms, a number of other factors suggest that Gardariki Rus and the Balto-Germanic lands adjoining it represented the center of a particular sacred-geographical energy whose traces we find in local folklore, myths, and the peculiar interpretations of Christianity in the solar, northern, bright, and heroic manners. Here it should be mentioned that the first Russian Orthodox saints were Boris and Gleb, the princely brothers the first of whose name, according to the Slavic Nirukta [18] has an obvious Apollonian, Hyperborean character. Boris is a variation of “Borea” and “Apollo.” In addition, in accordance with this “folk” and in fact sacred-linguistic etymology, one should consider the Russian Christmas ritual of eating the pig porosenka and the Slavic name for hog or boar which preserved a clear phonetic relationship with the name of the polar lands in Hinduism, i.e., Varahi (“Land of the Boar”). This link between Christmas (winter solstice) and “Borea” is evident in the iconographic canon of the figures of Boris and Gleb whose characters were also tied to Christmas and the New Year. Boris was always portrayed as older, the “elder,” which is emphasized by his beard (the Russian word for beard, boroda, also has a “Hyperborean” sound [19]), while Gleb was the young, beardless one. Together the saintly brothers represent the essence of symbolism of the Old and New Year unified in the iconic scene under the sign of the “winter solstice.”

Be that as it may, Hyperborean Dacia represented the southern limit of Hyperborean Gardariki Rus which concentrated in itself the sacred energies of the North and distinctly Hyperborean mythological, solar tales. However, its intermediary position between the two circles in fact grants it a special function in “sacred dispensation” and clearly explains the resilience of the Hyperborean line on the land of Romania. As regards the southern, “Egyptian” circle, its role is associated with “Hyperborean Dacia” for sake of the existence of the northern circle which further enhances it, acting as a reservoir for the sacred-geographical impulse covering this point along the ancient “amber route,” the path of the “gold of the North.”

The sacred circle of Gardariki

Let us now consider the northern circle, or Gardariki, and the particularity of its sacred-geographical composition. This circle must have a qualitative structure, and its sacred space must coincide with a temporal cycle. Obviously, the clearest and most impressive temporal cycle is the annual, or yearly cycle. Thus, the Russian circle on the space of Eastern Europe has its seasonal correspondences. It is immediately apparent that this circle is limited by two bodies of water to the North and the South which have expressive symbolic names. In the North, there is the White Sea and in the South there is the Black Sea. In this case the North has a positive, bright, solar coloration for Russian mythological tales and Slavic legends in general. The South, conversely, has a negative, dark, or shadowy tint. The majority of conflicts in Russian history in ancient times were with precisely those residents of the southern steppes, such as the Alans, the Huns, Cumans, Khazars, Tatars,etc. In the North, peace reigned more often than not. Proceeding from this particularity, it is logical to equate the North of our circle – the White Sea – with Summer, and the South and the Black Sea with Winter. In addition, it is important to stress that this line should not be considered one relating to climate, but rather towards “light” and “spiritual” analogies which are in fact specific to the Hyperborean tradition [20]. Meanwhile, the East, as always, is identified with spring, and the West with fall.

It is worth recalling the Greek myth of the birth of Apollo and the goddess Leto, who in Latin is Latona. According to legend, the island on which they were born is located in the far North. It is impossible not to notice the phonetical correlation between the goddess Leto and the Russian word leto (“summer”) which denotes not only the season itself, but also the entire year or the whole annual cycle.

In appealing to Russian myths and legends, one can notice the following peculiarity: the tales of the Russian North abound with references to deer, doe, or stag. In one legend, it is said that “small doe” or “calves’ fall from the heavenly clouds in the North. Deer or elk of some sort are the main motifs in ancient Russian embroideries and are almost always associated in one way or another with the North and summer.

The deer or elk is the sacred symbol of the northern half of the “Russian circle” of Gardariki. This stag is always linked with the sun, light, heaven, or blessing. Here a parallel can be drawn with the H. Wirth’s discoveries of the Nordic roots il, ilu, and ilx as the ancient names for “god” among the northern peoples, and from here the root was passed later to the southern, Semitic tribes. Just like Scandinavian elk and elx, the Russian words olen (“deer”) and los (“elk”) contain the rudiments of this root. It is also notable that in the runic circle, the rune ilx is placed in the mid-summer time of the “year” and its shape represents an ideograph of a deer or antlers. It is quite astonishing that the Orthodox liturgical cycle for the feast of St. Elijah falls on July 20, and in the Russian folk consciousness the prophet Elijah is actually identified with the heavenly light principle, the source of light and blessing [21].

The North of Gardariki finds itself under the sign of the solar deer or elk, summer or mid-summer, and the summer solstice. In the opposite sector, in the southern regions of Rus respectively, “winter” and “winter-solstice” characters associated with darkness, the underworld, chaos, and the chthonic elements are evidnet. In fact, the sayings and myths of the south of Russia often include a wolf, serpent, dog, or dragon. In Ukrainian legends, it is often found that the Serpent lives in the Black Sea from which he assaults the settlements of Rus, kidnaps or demands virgins as tribute, and ruins arable lands, etc. Sometimes, the Serpent is merged with the Wolf, thereby generating such heroes as the “Fiery Serpent Wolf” of the South Slavs. Russian heroes often “descend” or head down South in order to defeat the chthonian “lower” beings and liberate people from oppression. This also accords with the Russian sacred-geographical logic of the cyclical year. The Serpent, Wolf, and Dragon are images of dark forces absorbing the winter sun and preventing it from rising and giving life to the “crown of summer,” the North. The virgin abducted by the Serpent symbolize the “Solar Maiden” and her return thanks to the exploits of the hero is one of the most frequently recurring themes in Russian fables. In fact, this northern-serpentine and Apollonian tale was noted in the sacred geography of the mouth of the Danube by Geticus in Hyperborean Dacia, where he points to the presence of an island with the name “serpentine” in the Black Sea that was associated with the cult of Apollo in the delta itself.

This is applicable on a larger scale to all of Rus. As an example we can take the feat of the Russian hero Ilya Muromets who liberates Kiev from the Serpent, beats it, harnesses it to a plow, and forces him along all the lands of Kiev down to the Black Sea – from which remains to this day the “serpent’s wall” in Ukraine – and drowns him. [22]

It is important at this point to take note of other purely Hyperborean details from the story of Ilya Muromets. Firstly, his very name might be an archaic substitute for “god” or il from the original center of “Mo-uru.” Secondly, the legend stresses that the hero was born in the village Karacharvo, a fact which strangely reminds us of the Buddhist “Kalacharka,” the doctrine of the “cycle” and “salvation” associated with Shambhala and the phenomenon of its king at the end of the cycle. Thirdly, it is important to mention that the hero “sitting” for up to 30 years might symbolize the immobility of the pole. Thus, the once stationary polar Ilya Muromets (Il of “Mo-uru”), who abides in Karacharovo (“Kalacharka” literally means “wheel of time”) decides to leave his central position (the Russia city of Murom is in fact located in the middle of our Russian circle), heads south (he “appears” or “enters into the sphere of change”) where he beats the Serpent (sometimes a Nightingale Robber who kills with a whistle [23]). Chaos is ended and the sacred order of spring and summer is installed (restored).

This “avatar” and “winter-solstice” aspect of the heroic mission is often described in other legends as a battle between the hero and the Serpent on the Kalinov Bridge. “Kalinov Bridge” is also astoundingly similar to the name of the Hindu goddess Kali, the goddess of dissolution and death as well as cold (Hindi kali, Germanic kalt, and Russian kholod have identical Indo-European roots). In addition, the Russian word kalyadki for the ritual of winter holiday celebrations and kalyada for the main character of such can be traced back to the same root. The fight on “Kalinov bridge” or the battle with “King Kalin” suggests the New Years’ mystery of the sun passing through the lower point of the annual cycle, the passage through the center of darkness, cold, and death, i.e., the kingdom of Kali, and the realm of the “bottom” of the South.

We should also recall the Greek legend of Hercules and the snake woman, the first ancestor of the Scythian kings. According to this myth, this woman lived in the kingdom located at the mouth of the Dnieper where she guarded hidden treasures. The mouth of the Dnieper is in fact the point of the extreme South in sacred Russian cosmography!

It is also curious to note the theme of the Wolf. The Wolf is a symbolic synonym for the Serpent. According to Nordic legends, it swallows the sun during winter, steals the light of the world, and fights against the “avatar” hero. Given the cyclical and spatial mappings we have examined, we can solve one of the mysteries that troubles the minds of many “demonologists” along the way. The fact has been noted more than once that stories of vampires spread along clear borders and have one unique center where they appeared: Transylvania. From Transylvania they spread all over Eastern Europe while more or less preserving their originally “Romanian” features. In the old Slavonic language, the word “vampire” was a commonly-used synonym for “ghoul” or “werewolf.” This word originally meant “wolf-man” or “wolf shifter” and this character was symbolic of the winter solstice (hence the fact that wolf costumes were donned for christmas celebrations) as the wolf swallowed or killed the sun. Then, the sun rises again and begins to shine. A merging of the two (sometimes opposing) symbolic figures into one which produces a hybrid image can be noted quite often among archaic peoples. Simultaneously, each symbol itself could have two opposite aspects. Thus, for example, Apollo was called the “patron saint of the wolves”, and wolves in general, while not losing their “winter solstice quality”, could act as “sources of the sun” or “life-giving darkness.” This is the case in Roman history and among the Turkic peoples. Thus, the werewolf-vampire is a figure associated with killing the sun, absorbing the sun, or drinking its blood (sunlight), at which point darkness overcomes light, and is also associated with the subsequent reemergence of the sun. It is striking that legends of vampires (Dracula or the Dragon) originated precisely west of the Danube delta, i.e., from that point of the winter solstice in the sacred Russian sector, the sector characterized as the “darkest” or “most frightening” one over the course of the sun’s descent. It is also characteristic that symbolism of the wolf and dog continue to be quite widespread even when moving from this most southern point of Gardariki to the East, albeit they remain inferior to the image of the falcon or the Scythian falcon (the sun, having passed its critical points, begins to soar into the heavens of summer and towards the North, returning the heavenly reindeer).

Finally, the famous Baba-Yaga from Russian fairy tales is the last sacred character closely associated with the South and the winter solstice. Baba Yaga is an elderly witch who lives in the woods and resides in a hut built of chicken legs. Many students of folklore are bewildered by these “chicken legs” in the home of Baba Yaga. However, if we realize the Southern and chthonic nature of this figure usually blocking the path of a solar hero and preventing him from achieving his goal and, moreover, if we recall that in some tales Baba Yaga lives underground, i.e., in the South, then we can conclude that the point is an image of Mother Earth in her sinister, negative function. It is here that the “hut on chicken legs” suddenly makes sense if one takes into account the fact that one of the oldest hieroglyphs of Mother Earth in Sumerian-Akkadian hieroglyphics appears as the following:

Moreover, this hieroglyph was even pronounced “baba.” The Akkadian variant was “mother” [24]. The “chicken legs” are represented by the two New Year’s runes yr upon which the “abode” of the Great Mother stands.

This is the amazing coincidence between the name Baba Yaga and “baba” in Sumerian.

In the most archaic sayings, the daughters of Baba Yaga, the “Yagishni,” are always present in action similar to Amazons in that they fight in a manly style against a hero. Interestingly enough, the location of the Amazons’ kingdom, the “women’s kingdom” in fairy tales, also corresponds to the South of the Russian circle, the steppes, and the shore zone. This geographical peculiarity logically connects the idea of the “Kingdom of the Mother”, that is, primordial chaos, with the region in which light descends from the heavenly sphere to the earthly order for the summer half of the year and to the dark regions untouched and uncultivated by the influence of heaven and its organizing, potent element which resides in a free state during the winter part of the year.

All of the above considerations which, of course, could be developed further, give us a general impression of the mythological structure of the “Slavic circle” of Gardariki Rus and allow us to locate reference points among the boundless elements of Russian mythology and Russian folklore. What is most important of all is that we can sense in all of this the intricate and native tales of pre-Christian and even Christian Russian themes outlining the Russian person’s unified, global view of sacred geography in his sacred Homeland. This map is reflected in fairy tales, myths, legends, and in some symbolic elements of the Russian Orthodox tradition that have persisted for a very long time among the popular strata. Indeed, this picture can be felt sometimes even today in certain unconscious archetypes which structure the internal space of the Russian, Slavic soul.

The Birthing Mother of Light

One of the fundamental elements of Russian embroideries, and namely the embroideries preserving the most archaic themes, is the depiction of a woman in labor surrounded on two sides by deer (or horses with riders). No other image is repeated with such persistence and with such regularity. Sometimes, the Birthing Mother has zoomorphic features and is depicted with the horns of a stag [25].

In Russian designs, the birthing mother is presented as a prostrate female figure in the shape of a frog or tree between whose legs is either a human, the head of a deer, or even a circle in the shape of the runes “yr.” In his book The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs, B.A. Rybakov correctly discerned that this figure is the “female deity” associated with seasonal symbolism. In addition, he assumed that this was the Slavic goddess known as Lada, the congenial mother of Apollo and Summer. He did not understand, however, that this figure does not only represent “seasons,” “spring,” or the “summer solstice,” etc., but the entire year as a whole. This image is the synchronous symbol of the female-year, the virgin of light, Virgo Solar, the heavenly mother, and the female eon. Interesting enough, Rybakov pointed to the fact that figures of the birthing mother are often found in embroideries dedicated to the feast of the Nativity of the Virgin. What’s more, in some cases the Birthing Mother is depicted in the birthing position inside a church. Thus, in this regard, the pre-Christian virgin of light merges with the image of the Queen of Heaven.

The most typical pattern of the Year of Virgo Solar depicts her with raised hands between two deer antlers. The raised hands and antlers are patterned in the formulation of the runes ilx, the “reindeer rune”, or the symbol of the summer half of the year. The deer on both sides themselves represent the two halves of the year. One is facing upwards towards spring, and the other is faced downwards towards autumn. Sometimes, both of the deer are fused together which stresses the inseparability of the year. Other times, in the most archaic patterns, the deer are replaced by two horses with riders. It is not difficult to recognize here the archetype of Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin which, according to Wirth, also represented the two halves of the year, i.e. four legs correlate with spring (the first horse in Russian embroideries), and the other four to autumn (the second horse). It is characteristic for these horses and deer to often bear the signs of the sun wheels:

In certain patterns, the birthing mothers have their hands and legs in the form of tree branches which refer to the symbolism of the World Tree from which, according to the Norse saga, the first humans were created, Ask (“ash”) and Embla (“willow”). It is important to note that ancient Russian civilization was predominantly “arboreal,” hardened in many of its manifestations during the Hyerborean, pre-stone age phase when worshiping the Tree was a direct reflection of the Axis in the material world connecting earth, people, and the spirit of heaven and extending to all aspects of life from the building of homes or churches to “arboreal writing” through “cuts” and woodcarving, etc. It is indicative that the very figure of the Birthing Mother of Light itself is always symmetrical as if she was split in half by an axis, the Axis of the World, which she herself actually represents.

Virgo Solar, or Lada, has her prototypes in ancient petroglyphs found on the territory of the Russian North. Here is a schematized and extremely simplified depiction:

Here we see between the Birthing Mother’s legs the newborn’s head, which is equivalent to the sun, the light of the world, that is “born” during the great feast of the winter solstice in the heart of winter. When this New Year’s sun, the newborn-sun, or the solar hero begins to grow by leaps and bounds, the pre-Christian Slavs celebrated Maslenitsa, where the main ritual meal was pancakes – “sun disks made from sun-raised bread.” It is extremely interesting to compare the figure of the Birthing Mother of Light to some embroidered calendars which both in Russia and among the Germanic peasants had a sort of sacred relationship to carved runic calendars. On embroidered calendars one sees two summer horns: a strange combination of cross-traits inside the final, 12th star (denoting 12 months). Their unequal distribution gives us the number 66, the “solar” number in symbolism. The year itself, presented in the form of a worm, has 73 divisions, i.e., 73 five-day weeks. This unique feature refers us back to the Herman Wirth’s idea that the people of the primordial tradition measured the year in 5-day weeks corresponding to the five fingers on a hand [26]. Pagan holidays were marked by social signs. The bottom features an inner star, the sign of the sun itself being “born” as in the figure of the Birthing Mother of Light at the moment of the winter solstice.

In addition to a purely annual calendar, the meaning of the Birthing Mother of Light, sometimes represented as a Solar Moose (and it should be noted that the constellation of the Great Bear was once called the constellation of the Moose by Russians!) – can be associated with the space of Gardariki Rus itself. The deer antlers and Virgo Solar thus belong to the Russian North up to Scandinavia and Karelia. The bodies of the goddess and the two elks belong to the center from Prussia to the Urals and, finally, the legs correspond to the Carpathians and the lands between the Azov and the Caspian Sea. Moreover, it should be noted that Hyperborean Dacia, with its cult center of Nordic Apollo, corresponds with precisely the newborn sun of the winter solstice, the child of light, the solar hero, and the secret treasure. Thus, in sacred geography Virgo Solar is identified with Rus itself whose national consciousness is perceived as the Solar Wife, or in the Christian perspective as the Heavenly Queen, the Mother of God venerated as the supreme patroness and secret soul of Russia.

The identifications explored by us are confirmed by yet another important observation. Sometimes, the prostrate Birthing Mother on northern embroideries is substituted by the figure of the double-headed eagle, the official emblem of Russia, in a similar structural composition [27]. The Byzantine double-headed eagle is depicted in the precisely the same form as the Virgo Solar and the depiction of its tail replicates the rune yr, the symbol of the lowest point in the annual motion of the sun that is often found in the classical images of the Birthing Mother. The sacred-geographical meaning of the Russian emblem is obvious: the one head represents the West and the second is the East. Moreover, the emblem of the Western and Eastern provinces are sometimes laid out on each wing respectively, thus rendering the eagle a sort of symbolic map of Rus. By analogy, the eagle’s interchangeability with the Birthing Mother grants the possibility of a geographical interpretation according to the the sacred female figure itself which reinforces what we have already said on this matter.

However, the Apollonian meaning of Hyperborean Dacia in sacred-geographical Russian consciousness can be shifted further south all the way down to Constantinople, from whom the solar and light Christ of Faith came to Rus. The sacred relationship of Rus to Constantinople, Tsargrad, which was always the heritage of the Russian people not only for the enlightened political and religious elite, but also among the ordinary population who preserved the majority of Russian sacred geography’s myths in the form of legends, myths, sayings, songs, and tales, is determined precisely by this. In this perspective, the link between Moscow and Constantinople acquires a purely symbolic character. Constantinople is the South, the New Year’s point of the Russian Circle, that place where the Sun of Faith was born. Moscow is located roughly in the center (slightly east of the center) of the Russian circle, and for this reason was named the Third Rome by the Russians. “There shall be no fourth” as Moscow is the cyclical point in the solar orbit (like Constantinople – the Second Rome), the center of this circle itself, and the heart of the Birthing Mother of Light, the “Wife dressed in the sun.” Being the center, the last Rome lies at the heart of the cyclic transformations enveloping the circle.

The Dnieper vs. the Nile

Having outlined the sacred-geographical circle of Gardariki Rus in general terms, we can once again turn to the Southern “Egyptian” circle with its center in the Mediterranean Sea. One is immediately struck by the fact that this circle encompasses all that might be called the Mediterranean cultural area including the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Northern Mesopotamia, etc. The northern limit of the circle is Hyperborean Dacia. It is characteristic that this area is considered by modern historians to be the source of civilizations known to us, and it is from here that any fundamental civilizational principles – the origins of written language, mythology, religion, etc. – are supposed to be derived and used as reference points. In some sense, one can define this entire area as the sphere of “sacred-geographical Egypt”, as Egyptian cults and the sacred significance of the Nile are in many ways endowed with a special, original nature. We can recall in particular that Scandinavian maps indicated only one graphic point for all the southern rivers, the Great Nile. It should thus be assumed that this sacred-geographical vision was peculiar to the ancient Mediterranean civilizations themselves for whom the northern peoples, i.e. the entire region of Gardariki’s sacred circle, were associated most often of all with barbarity, primitiveness, danger, and the unknown. In the Bible in particular there are the kings of the North – the Kings of Gog and the Magog from the Kingdom of Rosh – and practically the majority of “Japhethian” peoples (according to the Bible, Japheth was the progenitor of the white, northern race) were identified as the enemies of the Semitic Jews and Yahweh [28].

On the other hand, such a fundamental author as Rene Guenon claimed that Middle Eastern and particularly Egyptian sacred forms are post-Atlantic ones entirely remote from even the Primordial Tradition’s secondary branches. In regards to Egypt, Guenon emphasized that this tradition was a combination of Western (Atlantic) and Southern sacred tendencies (the same applies to the Semitic tradition). Undoubtedly, this does not deny the authenticity of this traditional civilization, but it does assign it a subordinate, secondary position in the complex of Tradition as a whole. Moreover, Guenon emphasized the peculiarity of the Egyptian tradition as a tradition immanently cosmological which had lost much of the purity and clarity of Hyperborean, Apollonian metaphysics.

In this context, similarly important is Guenon’s remark in his critique of certain alchemical-hermetic tendencies of the “Brotherhood of Heliopolis” (Fulcanelli and Kansele’s line). Guenon asserted that “Egyptian Heliopolis” was merely a reflection, a substitute for the true, nordic, and Hyperborean Heliopolis and, accordingly, those who looked to Ancient Egypt as a traditional landmark risked reaching an outcome that is completely opposite to true initiation and spiritual realization. Guenon associates this with a truncated from of the Great Pyramid whose apex, in his opinion, was not lost over time but never actually existed seeing as how Egyptian initiates did not regard the mysterious, higher metaphysics of Hyperborea which in any normal case crowned “the building of the sacred cosmos” [29].

Given the symmetry in sacred geography not only between North and South in general but also between our two circles associated with the 30th meridian, it can be suggested that the most direct sacred-geographical antipode of the Semitic-Egyptian circle is the Russian circle, the Birthing Mother of Light of Rus. What is also very important is the link between the Dnieper as the sacred axis of Gardariki and the sacred myths of Tuatha Dé Danann, the “Tribes of the goddess Danu.” The word Dnieper boils down to the Aryan Dan-apru (“Water of Danu”). The Tuatha Dé Danann of the Celtic saga, according to Herman Wirth, were not so much Celtic as they were a proto-Aryan, sacred Hyperborean people who once inhabited the polar regions. Wirth traces the very word “Teutons” or teutschen and deutschen to the word “Thuata.” Having as its central river the “Dan-apru,” the Dnieper, Rus, as the White Land, Sveta Dipa, and “Great Sweden” is opposed to Egypt with its Nile, i.e., the Black Land, or Kemi as the Egyptians themselves called their country. In such a case, if Egypt and the Middle East are used by conscious or unconscious “Semitophiles” as a strategic paradigm, as a Weltanschauung in the cultural, geopolitical, and religious sense, then it is only natural that the supporters of the “Japhethian” line take the Russian circle as the main sacred-geographical landmark.

This can result in a particularly radical revision of the Phoenician theory on the origins of writing and in the development of the Hyperborean, Nordic idea on the emergence of writing as first formulated by Wirth. In this sense, Russian symbolic tales in ornaments, embroideries, architecture, and iconography are invaluable material confirming this theory, as “Russian cuts” and some elements of cyrillic symbolism indicate the existence of an ancient, verbal-ideographic and original Hyperborean character.

The Russian “Avatar”

The Hyperborean complex of Holy Rus, in full harmony with Orthodox soteriology, knew of the necessity of dark times, the existence of the “Black Sea” Serpent, and the inexorable onset of cosmic night and cosmic winter.  At the same time, Russian consciousness is imbued with an absolute conviction that it is precisely during these moments of the seeming victory of “Southern” demonic forces that the Hero, the Savior, the true Tsar, and the true Lord appears from the spiritual, invisible center of Tradition, the sacred cosmos of the Northern Circle.

Footnotes: 

[13] Geticus, La Dacia Iperborea, Parma, 1984

[14]  Louis Charpentier, Les geants et le mystere des origines, Paris, 1975

[15] Severin Batfroi, Guy Beatrice, Terre du Duphin, Paris, 1976

[16] See R. Guenon’s Le Roi du Monde, op. cit., “Les Formes traditionnelles et les cycles cosmiques”, op. cit., and Herman Wirth’s Aufgang der Menschheit, op. cit.

[17] An interesting detail: the hammers on the emblem are gold while the muzzle and blades are silver. This corresponds to the symbolism of the “great mysteries” including the vertical axis, the 2 hammers, and gold, and the “small mysteries” including the horizontal axis, the intermediate axis, the muzzle, the blades, and silver.

[18] Nirukta is the Hindu principle of sacred linguistics which considers not the etymology of words, but their consonance according to mantric phonemes. In many ways, Nirukta is similar in its particular operations to Jewish Kabballah . See R. Guenon’s “Les Formes traditionelles et les cycle cosmiques,” op. cit.

[19] Hence the Russian custom in which a bear distinguishes a “solar” male face from a lunar one which is only “half lit” with rays of hair, i.e., a woman’s face. The symbolism of the beard had deep religious cignifiance and the “Nomocanon” considers shaving one’s beard to be a serious sin with all the ensuing consequences. Such a traditional, sacred attitude towards having a beard is preserved to this day among Russian Old Believers.

[20] See Herman Writh’s Aufgang der Menschheit, op. cit. and A. Dugin’s The Hyperborean Theory

[21] In Novgorod, there existed two churches of Elijah the Prophet, Elijah the Dry and Elijah the Wet. Here, in fact, it is worth recalling the traditional symbolic idea that the sun controls not only heat( and light) but also rain (blessing) which was noted in the presence of the sun in the traditional image of two types of rays, i.e., direct vs. wavy rays, or direct light and heat or wavy water and rain. The word “sun” in Russian, solutes, consists of the same root “il”. It is also curious to note that the Russian Orthodox celebration of Elijah the Prophet falls on the same date as the pagan festival of Perun, the “god” of thunder, in which case the rune “ilx” can be understood as a hieroglyph of “Perun’s arrows,” or lightning. See The Metaphysics of the Gospel, chapter 36 and “The Order of Elijah and Elijah in the calendar of Tradition.”

[22] This feat is sometimes performed by different heroes such as Nikkita-Kozhemyaka, Kozma and Demyan, and in some variants it is even performed by Saints Boris and Gleb.

[23] In some regions in Russia the Duden ceremony of whistling for the summer solstice (the “winter yuletides”) or in funeral ceremonies, i.e. when “a man’s life moves on to the winter solstice.”

[24] See H. Wirth’s Heilige Urshrift der Menschheit

[25] See B.A. Rybakov’s The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs, Moscow, 1981.

[26] The worm-like 72 division recalls the myth of the division of Seth by Osiris into 72 parts, thereby forming the whole year without a single week, i.e., without the five-day divisions corresponding to the sacred time of birth of the “gods’ and “goddesses” during the winter solstice. 72 x 5 + 5 = 365 days in a year. In general, the number 72 is the most important one in cyclical symbolism.

[27] See B.A. Rybakov’s The Paganism of the Ancient Slavs,

[28] The identification of Russia, its people, and its statehood with the Biblical King Gog is extremely widespread in Jewish circles to this day as well as among Protestant fundamentalists, the majority of whom profess the particular doctrine of “Dispensationalism.” According to this theory –  formulated by the English Protestant preacher Darby and then taken up by the Americans, in particular Scofield, the publisher of the most popular “Annotated Bible” in the US which is saturated with Dispensationalist commentary – the Old Testament prophecies that after Christ the Jews and all the rest of Christians will exclusively become the “New Israel”, or the Christian Church, should be taken literally, and not figuratively. Dispensationalists welcomed the establishment of the state of Israel in 1947 and considered this event to be a confirmation of their historical right. Today, they quite seriously expect the fulfillment of the rest of their prophecies, including the beginning of war between Russia (the kingdom of god) and Israel (the “tribulation). Thus, the final defeat of the Russians and the coming of the Messiah is expected and praised by Protestants, who refer to the Jews.

[29] See R. Guenon’s “Les Formes traditionnelles et les cycles cosmiques”, op. cit.

Original interview of Alexander Dugin by Vyacheslav Altukhov

Translator: Jafe Arnold

First translation edition appeared on Fort Russ

The Russian Spring and geopolitical diastole 

Just a year and a half ago, the name of the professor at Moscow State University, the leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, the well-known philosopher and political scientist Alexander Dugin never left the front pages of newspapers and major Russian internet portals, and he and his policies were cited and referred to on television. A year and a half ago, Dugin was one of those in the front ranks who raised the flag of the Russian Spring and led people behind him.

The enemy hated him almost more than they hated the local leaders of the uprising. The West repeatedly imposed sanctions on him and his disciples, and in doing so recognized his contribution to the fight against neo-Nazi Ukraine and American hegemony.

In line with his ideological and moral principles, Alexander Dugin couldn’t agree with the change of the Kremlin’s course. He no longer gave great interviews or appeared on TV screens, and he had is reasons for this. 

After nearly a year of silence, Alexander Gelyevich discussed the current results of the Russian Spring, the war in Syria, and the inevitability of a final battle in Donbass in an exclusive interview with “Novorossiya.”

Alexander Gelyevich, here’s a question for you as the acknowledged ideologist of the Russian Spring: How do you assess the current situation in Novorossiya? What was conceived in the beginning and what has actually come about?

Alexander Dugin: I’ve long refrained from any commentating on what’s happening in Donbass, and there were serious reasons for this. Now, a few cycles of reflection on these dramatic events, which are known as the “Russian Spring”, have passed, and we now have the possibility to have a more balanced, calm, and analytical attitude towards the subject, which for me personally was a colossal, heartfelt, spiritual wound.

The topic of the “Russian Spring” is my direct and living pain. I can not speak about it calmly. It’s not just about the loss of loved ones – it is the deepest strike at the very center of those expectations which I had in regards to Novorossiya and the revival of Russia, its spirit, and its identity. The matter at hand is the reawakening of Russia.

For a long time I couldn’t speak on topics of this kind, refrained from commenting and shied away from assessments due to the deep trauma that I experienced as one of the first enthusiasts of the rebirth of Great Russia, starting with Crimea through to Novorossiya and so on. Now it’s not trauma that is ongoing but, at least, a wound whose severity is healing.

Having given this introduction, I would like to make an analysis of how I see the situation.

Russia is not the Russian Federation. Russia is the Russian World, a civilization, one of the poles of a multipolar world which we ought to be and which we are obliged to become.

The history of Russia is like a heartbeat. Our Russian heart shrinks and expands.

It shrank after the collapse of the USSR and our territory was reduced as happens often in history such as, for example, in 1917, but each time our borders expand again.

At the end of the ’90’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, there was a crisis. As a geopolitician, I follow the pulse of Russian history – this is also my pulse, and my heart pounds exactly in rhythm with the heart of my country and my people. I awaited a diastole.

To make things clearer: the rhythm of a heart includes systoles and diastoles, or contractions and expansions. A diastole, accordingly, is an expansion.

Each time that our heart ceases to contract and begins to expand, so does our Russian civilization once again start to return to its own (natural, continental) forms. In the first place, this return was associated with the integration of the post-Soviet space. The very term “Eurasianism” is this diastole. Eurasianism is when Russia unites all the post-Soviet, and in fact Russian, Imperial, civilizational space, imparting the cultural category of the Russian World with a geopolitical and military-strategic dimension.

And thus I awaited this diastole, but I didn’t simple wait, watching (as people wait for the bus), but I in every possible way promoted this cardiac phase as an ideologist and active practitioner of Eurasianism, of integration processes in the post-Soviet space, and as a consistent apologist for the revival of Great Russia. Greater Russia.

It needs to be said that all the signs of this new expansion were staring us in the face: the beginning of Eurasian integration in the form of the Eurasian Economic Community, and then the creation of the Eurasian Union, the forcing of the pro-Atlanticist regime of Saakashvili to make peace, when we first went beyond the borders of the Russian Federation and didn’t allow the suppression of hotbeds of pro-Russian resistance in the South Caucasus, South Ossetia, and Abkhazia, and, of course, in response to the actions our enemies – the Atlanticists who attempted to take the brotherly Ukrainian people under the control of American hegemony – the annexation of Crimea. In all of this I saw the expansion of the Russian heart, a geopolitical diastole.

Further, Novorossiya logically followed Crimea, and I don’t see any difference between them. I am absolutely sure that, if we lose Donbass, then we will lose Crimea, and then all of Russia, because if we interrupt a diastole, then heart failure, a chip in our historical existence, in our historical rhythm, occurs. Therefore, I fought hard for the Russian Spring and against the betrayal of Novorossiya.

I’ll repeat once more: the Russian Spring is a requirement of our Russian historical existence. Russia will either be great, or will not be at all. Great Russia – this is not only a territory or expansion, as we do don’t need anything else. And I’m not against the existence of a sovereign Ukraine, if only it would be our ally or partner or, in the least, a neutral, intermediate space. We would like to be together in one state, but on this the citizens of Ukraine must decide. But what exactly shouldn’t be allowed is an Atlanticist occupation of Ukraine. This is a geopolitical axiom. Our enemies perfectly understand that Russia can become great again only together with Ukraine, either unified or having built some kind of balanced alliance. There is no other way. The Russian Spring is impossible without a Eurasian pivot in Ukraine, no matter what form, peaceful or not, that it takes.

Ukraine can be an autonomous and independent state exclusively among our allies. If it were to come under occupation, then we are obliged to liberate it or, as a minimum, guarantee the historical existence of the half of its population which is linked with us by faith. Doing this is our duty, our unconditional historical imperative. If we do not fulfill this, then we betray our own people, ourselves, and our history. From the very beginning of the Russian Spring, I spoke openly about this and I have not changed my opinion thus far.

But those at the top insisted that Crimea is ours, but not Donbass – certainly not ours, but it’s unknown whose it is and it has an uncertain future. But…Blood not water, and then children are killed, and finally, the spirit of the Russian spring. The unacceptable price for retarded diplomacy with questionable success. There was nothing particularly “tricky” in this…

Despite this, I believe that criticism of the leadership of the country, which for its conduct in Donbass it fully deserves, is inappropriate now. Although criticism arises (albeit from the patriotic pole), it is immediately picked up by the West in the fight with Russia itself. Criticizing the government, one unwittingly becomes part of the enemy’s ranks. And this is unacceptable and contrary to allegiance to the homeland, which, in fact, is in a state of direct conflict with the main enemy – the US and NATO bloc.

What is left to do? Thank the government for the suppression of the Russian Spring? Stand among the ranks of Russia’s enemy in criticizing the government? Anyway, this government is still continuing the same patriotic rhetoric, albeit a bit empty and sometimes even like a simulation. It’s suppressing not only the best, but also the worst. In each case of half-heartedness, there is that which is hateful towards us, but also that which is hateful towards our enemies. This is the well-known dialectic of the glass half full of water. Half-patriotism is half-liberalism, and the milligrams [of water] on both sides are regulated, so that there would be a balance…Here is why I was silent the whole time. Criticizing the glass, which is half full anyway, we attack not only the void, but also the second half in the name of which we are acting. This is called an epistemological impasse, an aporia.

Has Russia had a heart failure, has the diastole ceased? 

I’ve spoken too much on the topic of Novorossiya, because now two events have happened – big and small.

The first is Syria. The Russian Federation, not carrying out the creation of a perimeter of Great Russia, Greater Russia, and the Russian World to its end, and leaving the bleeding wound of Donbass in the terrible that it’s in, has now spoken out in defense of our geopolitical interests in the Middle East. This is a more distant goal, but not less important. And I, as a geopolitician, can say that our intervention in Syria is absolutely correct, flawless, sound, and an orthodox step in protecting our national interests.

I’ll explain. As we see in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, and even in the North Caucasus, trends towards an increase in the influence of ISIS are growing. And if we were not fighting ISIS in Syria, then we would have to do it in Central Asia and then, perhaps, on the territory of the Russian Federation.

This is the plan of the Americans. Islamic fundamentalism has traditionally been an instrument in the structure of American and Atlanticist geopolitics, and this is an obvious point. The Islamic State is an American special operation directed against the opponents of American hegemony in the Middle East, and this includes (and is primarily) against us.

When we, at the request of Assad, invaded Syria, we once again returned to history, again appealing to the diastole of the Russian heart. This comes after a stupor, Minsk, indecision, hesitation, trade offs, and a dubious tug of war. After a bloody pause.

Look at what is happening now. We are fighting against the essence of the pro-American, crypto-Atlanticist, fundamentalist sect that is ISIS, in order to inflict a blow on it as far away as possible from our borders. Otherwise, we will fight with them here. This indicates the presence of a strategic, geopolitical conscience among the leadership of the country, and this is encouraging. Support for Assad is also a part of the Russian Spring, the assertion of Russia as a subject, not an object of history, a gesture towards strengthening our sovereignty.

The second point is that, no matter what, our border with the republics is controlled by our friends from the LPR and DPR.

Thank God that over this period of time we haven’t given anything up. We didn’t save anything, but we didn’t lose anything. That we didn’t save is very bad, but that we didn’t lose is good (again the strategy of half a glass). The absence of control over the border by the Kiev side is an indicator by which to judge everything. Yes, there is a nightmare there. Yes, we are losing this battle, but we haven’t lost yet so far as the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics control the border. Not everything is lost yet. Much is lost, but not all. And if not all at once, then nothing, as Cuzio Malaparte said. He wrote: “Nothing is lost as long as not everything is lost.”

Another point. The fact of our military support for Assad in Syria, although real and effective, is still without a guaranteed result (the immediate results are generally very impressive and positive). Therefore, the Americans are vitally interested in an escalation of hostilities in Donbass in order to make the whole situation more difficult for us. And anyway, Poroshenko, who received little support in recent elections in Ukraine, is interested in the same. For him, the war is now the only way to maintain power.

The war in Donbass will be imposed on us by Washington and Kiev. Not we, but they, despite the Minsk agreements and our attempts to get out of direct confrontation by any means, will launch hostilities. Accordingly, we return to the point which I interrupted with a commentary on events.

As I predicted, the situation cannot have another solution other than the defense of Novorossiya from the pro-American, neo-Nazi junta, which was a junta and remains a junta, and whose neck it is time to snap. Sooner or later, we will return to Novorossiya. Of course, it’s already late, but not critically late. He who controls the border of the DPR and LPR with Russia controls everything.

We are at the threshold of a new cycle, a new stage. We Russian people have seen many things in history. We’ve seen different Tsars, leaders, different regimes, and we have often retreated and met historical dead ends. There have been stagnations and uncertainties, but we always reached for our horizons, and now I feel a new expansion of the Russian diastole.

This is why I am ready to break analytical silence and more calmly talk on topics which now interest all Russian people, people who all understand and feel that they are also fighting, sacrificing themselves and fighting for our Great Homeland.

Alexander Gelyevich, what do you think of the Minsk Agreements? Is this really a path to peace? After all, there is a number of fundamental contradictions which they have not resolved. 

The Minsk Agreements really haven’t resolved any contradictions. This is just winning time. We and the Ukrainians have tried to take advantage of this delaying of the final fight.

We wanted to demonstrate to Europe that Crimea is ours, but that we were ready to discuss everything else. This was rather immoral, and I’m not sure if it really yielded any result. Nevertheless, we broadcasted this message, and those at the top were tasked with demonstrating our peaceful intentions. The shelling of Donbass cities, the murdered people, the mockery of the people of Novorossiya (not to mention the militia) –  to me this price seems excessive for such a demonstration, so I have always been an opponent of the Minsk Agreements. They cannot be a solution to the situation, and this is obvious. No one on any side believes in them.

We tried to wink at Europe, to show that “we are wonderful” and say “throw out the Americans.” They [the Americans] were the ones who brought the situation to such a critical point. This wasn’t successful and couldn’t be. The influence of the Atlanticist elites in Europe is quite strong, but we still tried to do this.

As regards Ukraine, Poroshenko demonstrated the same thing. This was not a game with America, but with Europe. Poroshenko says: “I’m sitting down with the Russians at the negotiating table. Look how democratic and decent enough we are to be ready even to discuss peaceful agreements with “terrorists,” because we so want to be in Europe.” That is, Poroshenko didn’t want to report before America, but before Europe. We and the Ukrainians competed in a certain diplomatic battle to attract Europe to our side. But this wasn’t successful – they didn’t believe us up to the end, and they didn’t believe us after Crimea, but after Syria this already became clear. It’s all about confidence and power. My declared ourselves a sovereign and strong regional power, and let others understand that now it is necessary to perceive us as such. Not our diplomacy, but our real strength. Historically it has turned out that if we are strong, then they’ll consider us, but if weak, then there will be no consideration. Therefore we didn’t persuade Europe, and we couldn’t convince by such ridiculous negotiations. But then they were convinced by our air strikes on ISIS and other terrorists in Syria.

Poroshenko didn’t convince them, and he couldn’t convince them because Europe, from the very beginning, did not really engage in the Kiev Maidan. The Americans promised that everything in Ukraine would be really fast, and that Europeans wouldn’t incur any responsibility for what’s happening. Moreover, the Americans forced European leaders (especially Hollande and Merkel) to participate in the Maidan. The “young partners,” or, more precisely, the vassals of Washington, naturally don’t have greater freedom of action.

When Europe turned out to be an accomplice of the US and started to impose sanctions, then it realized that deliveries of gas were being put into question. Then Europe shrunk back in horror from the Russians and Ukrainians, preferring that everything be turned back to how it always was. The Normandy Format and the Minsk talks essentially revolved around whether or not it would be possible to turn back, or at least extend the status quo. Now, as long as the Minsk Agreements are recognized by everyone, there is already simply no other exit for Poroshenko and Washington except by breaking them unilaterally and beginning the final battle for Donbass.

For  the Americans, this is a way to distract us from Syria, opening a second front which is the only way by which Poroshenko can maintain power. It’s nothing personal: they’ll impose this war on us.

We will shy away from this war and cling to the Minsk Agreements for the same reasons. We don’t need a second front and need a falling, not strong, Poroshenko so that Ukraine will collapse before Donbass will be once again annexed by the Nazi state. We will shy away from direct conflict, and I can even assume that comments like mine will be censored by major media outlets. But we have seen this and it is such.

Our bet is not to allow the Ukrainians to impose war on us and not give them the opportunity to take control of the border. This is the main indicator: as long as the republics of Novorossiya control the border, the situation can more or less be characterized as normal, but if it’s given up, then this will be a fully fundamental failure.

Much is being decided now and history is again open. We haven’t resolved the issue of Novorossiya, and have merely postponed its resolution. It reminds us of ourselves. Accordingly, the Minsk Agreements, which we will try to hold on to, will be gradually destroyed and abolished in different ways. We will see soon.

Does this mean that an intensification of hostilities is not far off?

It is inevitable. The war can only be delayed for a little while, and Russia is putting certain efforts in this direction. Because now a war isn’t favorable for us, and we are less ready for it than we were a year ago.

Is an Ossetian scenario possible? In the case of a violation of all agreements the Ukrainian side will attack the young republics, then will Russia, as it was with Abkhazia and South Ossetia, bring in troops and recognize their independence in order to force the aggressor to make peace? 

This would be correct. This scenario was highly relevant at the very beginning of the Russian Spring. In fact, in this scenario it was assumed that there will be not only geopolitical control, but that these regions would return to the space of Great Russia, bringing with them a new spirit and awakening a Russian light. This idealistic dimension, extraordinarily important, is now completely lost because of the subsequent trade off of Russian interests. Maybe this trade off was justified, in part, from a diplomatic point of view as a preparation for the final battle. I think not, but I’m ready to allow for such.

But there is another side. Having started haggling, we struck a huge blow at the spiritual dimension of the Russian Spring and at Novorossiya as an idea. This is irreversible. From a tough, tactical and technical point of view, this might be explained with some kind of reasons, but from a spiritual point of view this was a moral crime when we  didn’t go for the Ossetian-Abkhazian scenario at the moment when Ukrainian punitive forces started to bomb the cities of Novorossiya, massively destroying the peaceful population – we’ve all seen the footage. Our response was morally obvious, but we took a different decision. That is, regarding national interests, we still haven’t failed, but we are much worse in terms of values.

In this respect, the Minsk Agreements are an immoral tool, peculiarity of understood interests, but there are no values for any of the sides. This is a purely pragmatic enterprise. There are people for whom history is a technology, but I believe that history is spirit. There are civilizational settings which it is impossible to sacrifice for technical interests, even the most peculiarly understood and controversial.

Consequently, the Minsk Agreements are a morally questionable pause. But we are going to keep them since we started playing the game. If there is a problem with values, let at least interests be realized.

It’s necessary to recognize a simple truth: they won’t leave us alone, and it is best to recognize this immediately. History is always a choice, often a choice in the face of death. The average person runs away from this and tries to barricade himself from problems, but if a government behaves like a layman, then this government is transitory. History begins when the top of the vertical power takes an existential – historic – decision, and this means looking death straight in the face.

It’s possible to try and run away, but history catches up to us no matter what and there are signs that she’s already catching up with us. We at least cannot leave Syria without victory. And if they challenge us and rip up the Minsk Agreements in Donbass, then we will need not one victory but two. And I am sure that we are quite ready for this and we can do it. But we need to give up the politics of half a glass.

Our great people and valiant army have enough strength, fortitude, and courage for great victories. Another thing is whether the political leadership of the country has enough brains, courage, and will. Now all the questions put before them, and we will see how these people respond to their call by history. They think all the rest should bear the responsibility for what is in front of them. This is so. But they will be judged before the court of history. And the court of history is a scary thing. It is like God’s judgement, and it is impossible to bribe it or use an administrative resource.

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 5 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

The symbolism of the four directions and four cycles

The Traditionalists’ (Guenon, Evola, Georgel, etc.) perception of the relationship between the paleo-continents, cardinal directions, and cyclical periods of ancient civilizations boils down to the following [30]: the North was the original orientation whose ancient paleo-continent located at the North pole was Arktogeya, or Hyperborea, with its sacred capital as Thule or Tula (for the Greeks and Aztecs) or Vara in the Zoroastrian Iranian tradition. It is important to note the similarity between the Iranian “Vara” – the northern city, capital of Aryan-Vedj, and the homeland of the Persians’ ancestors – and the Hindu term Varahi (literally “boar”, or “land of the boars”), as well as the Nordic designation of the continent. The Golden Age of mankind, lasting 25,920 years [31] is associated with this ancient, primordial continent. In the ancient tradition, the New Year came at the point of the winter solstice (or winter eclipse), i.e., the most obvious moment in the transition of the sun and light’s movement from descent to ascent. The priority of the northern orientation and celebrations of the New Year on the day of the winter solstice are signs of the Primordial Tradition itself.

The second cardinal direction was that of the South and the southern paleo-continent conventionally called Gondwana. The period of the southern orientation’s predominance falls on the Silver Age lasting 19,440 years. The New Year that falls on the day of the summer solstice corresponds to this orientation. Thus, the initial periods of our cycle, the Manvantara, were moved by way of the main migrations of the sacred proto-peoples along the vertical axis from North to South, which corresponds to the priority of the vertical over the horizontal (the axis of East-West) as a qualitative space in sacred geometry.

The third sacred center was that of Atlantis, the sacred continent located in the West. Atlantic civilization lasted 12,960 years, although the continent itself sunk exactly at the midpoint of this period in the 6,480th year of the third, or Bronze Age. Atlantic civilization continued to exist even later when it manifested itself among waves of peoples’ migrations from the West to the East. This Atlantic cycle corresponds to New Year celebrations on the day of the autumnal equinox and the sacred orientation of this period was that of the West. Finally, the fourth, final center of our human cycle is the East which corresponds to the center of Tradition in the Iron Age. The Iron Age, or the Kali Yuga of the Hindus, lasts just 6,480 years. According to the Traditionalists, we are living at the end of this period. The New Year of the Iron Age is celebrated on the day of the vernal equinox and, according to Guenon, it is precisely such a location of the center of the Primordial Tradition in the Iron Age that explains why paradise was located in the East in traditional doctrines. Such a localization is not absolute insofar as the original and naturally true paradise is the northern, polar, Hyperborean paradise, but, nevertheless, our cyclical period is characterized by precisely this eastern situation of the supreme traditional center which is preserved as a relevant pole for all of the world’s traditions and holds the secrets of the true North.

It is also important to note, however, that such a Traditionalist scheme describes the cyclical situation only in the most general terms. In fact, traditional forms inherent to these or those sacred-geographical centers continue to exist even after the relocation of the supreme center to other regions. But, as a rule, they exist only in reduced, residual states. In the case of a schism or disruption of the historically preexisting center with the actual center, the spiritual influence of this residual center can turn into something negative and even anti-traditional. This was particularly impressed upon the later perversion of the Atlantic tradition narrated in Greek myths which Guenon associates with the sacred events reflected in the Bible under the sign of the global flood.

Schematically, we can visualize the course of the supreme sacred center’s geographical movement in either this sign:    or this sign:  

which yields, among other things, the symbolic loop, an attribute of many “gods” such as Greece’s Neptune, Scandinavia’s Odin, or Hinduism’s Varun, Yama, Shiva, Kali, and Vishnu, etc.

In this case the most important point of all for us is highlighting the eastern regions designated in our times, the Iron Age, as being of absolute priority in the sphere of sacred geography, as the East, or Asia, is uniquely associated with the geographical location of paradise.

The role of Siberia

This special role falls to the lands of Siberia in the general map of sacred geography. If the current center of Tradition is located somewhere in the East and the primordial center was located at the North Pole, then it is precisely Siberia that is the space of cohesion and connection between these two sacred regions. Such a particularity assigned to Siberian lands is quite possibly what contributed to the specific mystery that has surrounded everything connected with the history of this part of the mainland. Siberia (especially the northern part) is perhaps the only area in the Eurasian space which does not draw any special attention from “civilization” in the Kali-Yuga, i.e., that time when practically all other lands in one period or another have become the grounds of aggressive competition between different states and peoples, the reasons for conflicts and wars. Despite the fact that, from a purely natural point of view, Siberia’s lands do not have any particular flaws or obstacles preventing their inhabitance, Siberia remains an historically hidden, unknown, and mysterious land to such an extent that it is as if some kind of special force of fate, some kind of unknown archangel, was guarding it.

At the same time, according to the discoveries of modern archaeologists, in the paleolithic period Siberia was no less inhabited than southern or eastern Europe and the remains of some kind of ancient civilization are being all the more often found in every one of Siberia’s corners today. Thus, Siberia is, in fact, not a virgin territory or a kind of tabula rasa, but quite simply and providentially hidden. It withholds the ancient secrets from unworthy eyes.

It was indeed from Southern Siberia and Mongolia that the so-called “barbarians” proliferated and it was these peoples that moved to Europe via the Caspian and Black Sea steppes and substantially changed the appearance of this area in the first centuries of our era. On the contrary to the opinions of profane historians, these “barbarians” were not primitive or mindless savages later “cultivated” by Greco-Roman civilization. They were the carriers of particular sacred forms, albeit compressed and laconic, but by no means rudimentary. The broad “horizontal” development of traditional principles related to secondary modalities, in fact, is what creates culture [32]. Hence, culture is by no means a guarantor of the completeness or perfection of Tradition as such but, on the contrary, in its “horizontal” development even strips Tradition of its metaphysical side in delving into cosmological and applied fields.

Migrating from Siberia and Mongolia, the “barbarians” carried with them only certain aspects of the ancient Siberian sacrality while the Holy of Holies continued to be hidden from and left behind the aggressive peoples. The geopolitical impulse behind the move from East to West [of these “barbarians”] acted as a sort of preemptive prevention of a possible invasion of the life-giving lands of Siberia by the decadent West.

At that time, as the Aryan tradition of India gradually became linked with southern, Dravidian influences and the Chinese Middle Empire closed itself into isolationist self-sufficiency, narrowing the sacred to more or less local borders, Siberia lived an “uncivilized” yet truly spiritual life. Its pulses and arousing of global impulses of freshness and purity drew the Western civilizations of Eurasia into the dynamic of sacred history. Here it should be recalled that the majority of the aristocratic families in Europe, that is, the European genetic elite, have roots in the Gotho-Germanic, and sometimes Hunnic peoples, i.e., the messengers of the secret Siberian impulse.

The Ecumene of the Turks and Shamanism

The most important center of Siberia was the Altai region, those lands adjoined to the middle of all Asia, the heart of Asia. The Turks were the peoples who remained the bearers of the particularly sacred, indigenous Siberian form. It is very important to note that a number of similarities can be drawn between the ancient cults of the Turks and the archaic, pre-Vedic and pre-Zoroastrian forms of the Eurasian Aryans. On the other hand, certain links existed with the earlier forms of the Chinese and Tibetan traditions.

In his research on ancient, purely Hyperborean and proto-Aryan origins, Professor Herman Wirth discovered a very important testimony of the archaic Eskimo peoples relative to the ancient “ethnos” of the white Eskimos, the “people of the sun,” memory of which lives on in the most distantly remote and disconnected Eskimo tribes. These white Eskimos were called the “peoples of Tanar” and their mythological description can only be related chronologically and phenotypically to the Hyperborean “strangers” who moved from the polar regions to the more southern lands. According to Wirth, the “peoples of Tanar” were representatives of Hyperborean groups who came down to Eurasia not from the West (like the tribes of Tuatha Dé Danann, the North-Atlantic proto-Aryans), but from the East. Wirth traces the origins of the Sumerian tradition  directly back to these “peoples of Tanar.” In particular, this noted in the very name of the Sumerian gods, “Dingir,” “bog” [Russian for “god” – J.A.] being a phonetic form of “Tanar”. For us, the most important fact is that the word “god” among the archaic Turks sounded phonetically identical to “tengri.” In addition, modern archaeologists are now uncovering a number of ornaments, drawings, and hieroglyphs dating back to the neolithic age with similarities to archaic Sumerian writings and sacred symbols on the territory of northern Eurasia and especially in the resettlement areas of the Turkic peoples.

Today, the link between the Turks and Siberia is dated back to more and more distant epochs, and in some cases it is possible to trace a continuity of certain modern Shamanic traditions (particularly those of the Tungus of the Taiga Amur, or the Evenki-Oroqen) back to the sacred compositions of Neolithic complexes that are today revered and visited by representatives of the most ancient faiths. The majority of such Neolithic and even paleolithic tales are in fact identical to the paradigm of the ancient proto-runic calendar described by Wirth as the primordial paleo-epigraphical cult base of all subsequent mythological-symbolic, post-Hyperborean sacred forms. [33].

In considering and comparing the known variations of Shamanism among the peoples of Siberia and Mongolia, one can note that, unlike many other versions of Shamanism (African, American, Australian, etc.), the general and dominant element among Siberian Shamans is their purely Hyperborean symbols and doctrines: The image of the white swan, the raven of the demiurge, the World Tree, the three plans of the cosmos, the polar star (understood as a hole in the sky, a point for exiting beyond the manifested cosmos, or as a place of liberation, Moksha), the elk and deer, the sun wheel (tambourine), and the “Celtic cross.” Both Guenon and Wirth refer to these symbols as primordial or “Apollonian” ones.

He who restored the Eurasian Empire

In 1155, the holy tribe of Alan-Gua, the mother of the “khans by calling” and the “Chosen ones of the Eternal Sky” gave birth to a child not from a father, but from the heavenly spirit which descended through the chimney of the yurt (through a hole in the roof of the traditional dwelling of the Mongols). Prince Temujin thus appeared on earth. Thus recounts The Sacred Tale, the holy book of the Mongols. In 1180, this boy became the Khan of the Ulus (the association of Mongol tribes) and in 1206 at the source of the river Onon in northern Mongolia, Temujin, henceforth named Genghis Khan, was declared the Great Khan of all Mongolia. From this point onward begins the greatest saga of a planetary scale for the next millennium: an attempt to create the Great Eurasian Empire which would unite the continent into one sacred body. “Heavenly energy” allowed Genghis Khan to unite enormous territories stretching from China to the Middle East and Eastern Europe under his rule in an extraordinarily small amount of time.

An extremely important reference concerning the Hyperborean character of Genghis Khan’s mission can be found in the Collection of Annals by the Persian traveller Rashid-al-Din. It is well known that the distinctive features of Genghis Khan’s tribe were blue eyes and red hair. Rashid-al-Din writes: “The tribe of the kiyatboryigin descended from the offspring of Yesugei Baghatur [the father of Genghis Khan]. Boryigin means ‘blue-eyed’ and, oddly enough, the descendants of those who to this day trace their lineage back to Yesugei Baghatur, his children, and the Uighur [clan], are mostly blue eyed and red-haired. This is explained by the fact that Alan-Gua, at the time of her [spiritual] pregnancy said: ‘In front of our eyes at night there suddenly appears a radiance in the form of a human with red-hair and blue-eyes who shall go out. Thus, the eight genealogical branch of Yesugei Baghatur is exhibited by this distinguishing symbol which, according to the Mongols, is a sign of the royal authority of Alan-Gua’s children whom she foretold and whose similar appearance is proof of her words and the validity and obviousness of this circumstance.”

The radiance of the Hyperborean Aryan falls to the holy family of the “khans by chosenness” as an investiture of a the highest initiative polar center. This sacred Nordic pulse drives Genghis Khan to awaken Asia to unify, naturally beginning with Mongolia and Siberia insofar as these lands were the sacred-geographical basis of imperial expansion, the “golden embryo” of the New Empire. Although Genghis Khan and his successors’ empire did not last long, it radically transformed the map of the world both geographically and politically and awakened the Turkic-Mongolian peoples to realize their mission – the mission of the descendants of the Hyperborean “people of Tanar” whose polar and crystal archetype manifested itself in history for the last time in history with all of its clarity and purity in the “white, blue-eyed kings,” i.e., the descendants of Alan-Gua who, under strange circumstances, gave birth to the ruling caste of Eurasia.

After his death, Genghis Khan came to be venerated by the Mongols as the “Mongolian avatar” and a manifestation of the Tengri, the heavenly principle. The cult of Genghis Khan, established by his grandson Kublai Khan (the founder of the Yuan dynasty) in particular emphasized the sacred role of Genghis Khan’s two sacred banners called the “black sulde” and “white sulde” respectively, termed in Mongolian the hara-sulde and tsagan-sulde. In Mongolian, sulde means “soul” or “spirit.” These banners were considered to be symbols of the two aspects of the Mongolian avatar” in its super-temporal and superhuman quality. This symbolism of black and white remains the paradigm of the sacred Hyperborean formula.

Just as Frederick II who, according to the Ghibelline tradition, dwells in a secret mountain cave (or the volcano of Mount Etna) and awaits the final hour of the cycle to return and finish his imperial mission, so do the Mongols believe that Genghis Khan’s lays waiting, entombed in the cave of the sacred Mongol mountain Burkhan-Khaludn, the “willow hill” or, literally, “willow of god.” Here it should be recalled that the Taoist tradition called the “City of Willows” the very primordial center of Tradition, the “place of the undead” or the “center of the world.”

The cult of Genghis Khan liturgically refers to him as the “bearer of the white pledge,” i.e., the “pledge of Hyperborean restoration.” Moreover, Genghis Khan’s genus was preserved even after the collapse of his empire and his descendants continue to exist to this day, towards whom a sacred reverence prevails among the Turks and Mongols. Not only have the ancient Shamanist traditions of the Siberian Tanar peoples preserved this, but so have the other sacred forms such as Islam, Lamaism, and Taoism absorbed this tradition. The institutions of Genghis Khan’s descendants and followers largely parallel the institutions of the Alids and Sayyids in the Islamic world (and especially in Shiite Islam). Interestingly enough, among the Turkish Muslims there are princely families who simultaneously descend from both Genghis Khan and Muhammad, a phenomenon which renders them the heirs of two important traditions at once.

Siberia and Russia

After the Mongol-Tatar conquest of the Russian principalities, Gardariki Rus was included in the Great Empire of Genghis Khan. When this empire began to weaken and decay, it was Rus which, by first centralizing its own political organism, gradually spread a unifying influence to those states which made up the ruins of the empire. After a sufficiently harsh conquest of the “Kazan Khanate,” Rus took over the function of Eurasian empire-building from the Tatars and began ever so gently to spread to the East, to Siberia. It is important to emphasize that, in the eyes of the Turkic peoples of Siberia, the Russians were clearly perceived as the “followers” or “resumers” of the mission of Genghis Khan himself, as the figure of the Russian Tsar, the “White Tsar,” coincided with the image of the “White Mongol,” the “Bearer of the Heavenly Pledge.” In addition, before and during the period of Tatar rule, the Russian aristocracy frequently intermarried with the Turkic aristocracy – with the Cumans during the time of Kievan Rus and with the Mongol-Tatars during the time of conquest, and so on. It can naturally be assumed that in this case aristocratic marriages served not only to establish kinship and ethnic relationships between the Russians and Turks, but also implicitly fulfilled the transfer of the sacred-geographical doctrine of the warlike Turks to the Slavic elite which in turn preserved the memory of its Nordic heritage in various mythological forms. Thus, the Russians’ expansion into Siberia was a sanctioned, sacred development possessing foundations stretching deep into the esoteric teachings of Eurasia. The unification of Siberia with Russia was a development which starkly contrasted to “Western colonialism” and its profane, utilitarian, and proselytizing objectives. On the contrary, it was the restoration of the common heritage and pre-existing unity behind which stood the unified will and common goal of the brothers of the “white pledge.” Of course, such unity and agreement existed on an “elitist,” sacred, and supra-ethnic level, whereas in other cases, on purely political grounds, such could give rise to conflicts and misunderstandings.

Even at the beginning of the 20th century, the sacred role of Siberia and the Far East surfaced not only among esoteric cults and the patriotic intuitions of the “Slavophiles,” but also in concrete political projects seeking to focus Russia on the Far East. In connection with this, Dr. Badmaev [34], a Genghis Khan occultist and doctor from St. Petersburg who practiced Tibetan medicine for Russian aristocrats, should be mentioned. According to certain Lamaist centers in Buryatia and Tibet, Dr. Badmaev developed special geopolitical projects aiming for the political unification of Russia and Mongolia and Russia’s annexation of Xin-Jian for the purpose of confronting the British colonialists. These ideas proposing that Russia actively intervene in Far Eastern geopolitics (especially through the construction of the Transiberian railway) interested Emperor Alexander II himself, and later Nikolai II, so much so that Dr. Badmaev received funds from the state treasury to establish economic ties with China and realize the large-scale Semipalatinsk-Lanzhou railway project. Lanzhou itself, which is the point at which China, Mongolia, and Central Asia are linked, was chosen as the center for Russia’s new geopolitical strategy just as it was precisely at this place from which Genghis Khan began his conquest of China.

It was not without Badmaev’s help that a Lamaist center was opened in St. Petersburg in 1914 and that the close mentor of the 13th Dalai Lama and the official messenger of Lhasa, Hambo Agovan Lobsan Dorchjiev, appeared in the highest political spheres during this critical period for Russia.

Thus the voice of Genghis’ and the Turks’ Siberia once again made itself felt to Russia, urging her to find a geopolitical identification under the sign of “Eurasian restoration” and the “white pledge.”

The Eschatological Mission of the East

In accordance with the shifting trajectory of the supreme center of Tradition, it can be logically said that it is precisely on this line which connects Eastern, subterranean Agartha with the northern pole that the decisive events of the end of the Kali-Yuga, our iron age, should unfold. It is difficult to understand the transformations in the geopolitical space of Russia otherwise than as signs of the times heralding the proximity of this threshold. As always in epochs of global turmoil, the sacred memory of the continent is coming alive in the peoples of these regions in Russia today. People in Russia are all the more often beginning to speak about the “Eurasian factor,” the role of Siberia, and the fate of the Eurasian Empire which, shaking off oblivion in the face of fatal threats posted by the West, is once again faced with a fateful choice. In this situation, it is necessary to offer clear account of the sacred significance of the “white pledge” and all the peoples of Eurasia who, by virtue of their Hyperborean heritage, are the offspring of the great builders of the Eurasian Empire.

Footnotes:

[30] See G. Georgel’s The Fourt Ages of Humanity, The Rhythms in History, J. Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World, R. Guenon’s Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles, and A. Dugin’s The Path of the Absolute, chapter 9.

[31] See Guenon’s Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles and Dugin’s The Path of the Absolute

[32] In the Traditional meaning of the word, culture is Tradition, and not the profane surrogate of unintelligible and perfverted remnants of traditional knowledge that are called “culture” in the modern world.

[33] See H. Wirth’s Die Heilige Urschrifft der Menschheit and A. Dugin’s The Hyperborean Theory

[34] One of Rene Guenon’s main informants on questions of sacred geography, the French diplomat in Poland known by the initials J.C. (who is, as was discovered only recently, Jean Calmel) was in contact with Badmaev in St. Petersburg. This means that Guenone himself drew the elements of his doctrine from a Eurasian, Russian source. The link between Russia and the spirit of Siberia and its secret initiatic center, thus, unexpectedly finds its echoes in even the worlds of Western esotericism.

[35] H. Wirth, Heilige Urshrift der Menshheit

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Book 1 – Part 2 – Chapter 5 of Foundations of Geopolitics (Arktogeya, Moscow: 2000)

1. Alain de Benoist’s Europe of a Hundred Flags

One of the few European geopolitical schools which has preserved an uninterrupted link with the ideas of the pre-war German continentalist geopoliticians is that of the “New Right.” This trend appeared in France in the late ’60’s and is associated with the philosopher and publicist Alain de Benoist, the leading figure of the movement.

The “New Right” sharply differs on practically all matters from the traditional French right consisting of monarchists, Catholics, Germanophobes, chauvinists, anti-communists, conservatives, etc. The “New Right” includes those who support “organic democracy,” pagans, Germanophiles, socialists, modernists, etc. At the beginning, the “left camp” so conventionally, extremely influential in France considered such to be a “tactical maneuver” by typical rightists, but with time the gravity of this evolution was proven and came to be recognized by all.

One of the fundamental principles of the “New Right’s” ideology, analogues of which soon appeared in other European countries, is the principal of “continental geopolitics.” In contrast to the “old right” and classical nationalists, de Benoist believed that the principle of the centralized Nation-State has been historically exhausted and that the future belongs only to “Great Spaces.” The basis of such “Large Spaces” are to be not so much associations of various states in a pragmatic political bloc, but the equal-footed conglomeration of ethnic groups of different scales into a “Federal Empire.” Such a “Federal Empire”  is supposed to be strategically unified, yet ethnically differentiated. Moreover, such strategic unity is to be underpinned by the unity of primordial culture.

The “Large Space” which interested de Benoist most of all was Europe. The New Right believed that the peoples of Europe possess a common Indo-European heritage, a single origin, and the principle of a “common past.” The conditions of the modern epoch, in which tendencies of strategic and economic integration are actively essential for the possession of any real geopolitical sovereignty, dictate the necessity of uniting in even a purely pragmatic sense. Thus, the peoples of Europe are destined for a “common future,” and therein de Benoist draws the conclusion that the thesis of a “United Europe of a hundred flags” [16] must become Europeans’ fundamental geopolitical standard. In such a perspective, as in all the concepts of the New Right, a striving to combine “conservative” and “modernist” elements,i.e., “right” and “left” principles, is clearly visible. In recent years, the New Right has rejected such a label insofar as it considers itself to be “right” to the same extent that it is “left.”

De Benoist’s geopolitical theses are based on an affirmation of the “continental fate of Europe.” In this regard, he fully adheres to the conceptions of Haushofer’s school. From this follows the New Right’s characteristic juxtaposition of “Europe” and the “West.” For them, Europe is a continental, geopolitical formation founded on an ensemble of ethnicities with a common Indo-European origin and possessing common cultural roots. This concept is a traditional one. The “West,” on the contrary, is a geopolitical and historical concept of the modern world which denies ethnic and spiritual traditions, instead putting forth purely material and quantitative criteria of existence, i.e., an essentially utilitarian and rationalist, mechanistic bourgeois civilization. Accordingly, the USA is understood as the most complete incarnation of the West and its “civilization.”

The concrete project of the New Right unfolds along this plane. Europe is to integrate into a “Federal Empire” in opposition to the West and the US. Moreover, regionalist tendencies are to be particularly encouraged, as regions and ethnic minorities retain more traditional features than the metropolises and cultural centers affected by the “Spirit of the West.” On this note, France is supposed to orient itself towards Germany and Middle Europa – hence the interest of the New Right in De Gaulle and Friedrich Naumann. On the level of practical politics, since the ‘70’s the New Right has acted in favor of Europe’s strict strategic neutrality, its withdrawal from NATO, and the development of independent, European nuclear potential.

In regards to the USSR (and later Russia), the position of the New Right has evolved. Starting with the classical thesis of “Neither West nor East, but Europe”, the New Right has since gradually developed the thesis of “Europe above all, but better with the East than with the West.” On a practical level, the original interest in China and the project of a strategic alliance between Europe and China for the purpose of opposing both “American and Soviet imperialism” came to be replaced with a moderate “Sovietophilia” and ideas of a European-Russian alliance.

The New Right’s geopolitics are radically anti-Atlanticist and anti-Mondialist in orientation. They see the fate of Europe as the antithesis of the Atlanticist and Mondialist projects and are thus opponents of “thalassocracy” and the “One World” concept.

It should be noted that in the conditions of the total strategic and political domination of Atlanticism in Europe during the Cold War, de Benoist’s geopolitical position (theoretically and logically flawless), being contrasted to the “norms of political thought,” had no chance of becoming widespread. It was in its own way a kind of “dissidence”, and like any “dissidence” or “non-conformism,” it had a marginal character. To this day, the intellectual level of the New Right, the high quality of its publications, and even the number of its followers among European academia have been ignored by authorities and the analytical institutions which delegate authority to geopolitical projects.

2. Jean Thiriart – Europe from Vladivostok to Dublin

Yet another excellent variety of continentalist geopolitics was developed by another European “dissident,” the Belgian Jean Thiriart (1922-1992). From the early ’60’s onwards, he was the leader of the pan-European radical movement “Young Europe.”

Thiriart considered geopolitics to be the foremost discipline of political science without which it is impossible to construct a rational and farsighted political or state strategy. As a follower of Haushofer and Niekisch, he considered himself to be a “European National Bolshevik” and a builder of the “European Empire.” It was his ideas which anticipated the further developed and more sophisticated projects of the New Right.

Jean Thiriart built his political theory on the principle of the “autarchy of large spaces.” Developed in the middle of the 19th century by the German economist Friedrich List, this theory asserts that the potential strategic and economic development of a state is possible only if it possesses sufficient geopolitical scale and larger territorial advantages. Thiriart applied this concept to the actual situation in Europe and came to the conclusion that the global value of Europe’s states would ultimately be lost if they did not unite into a unified Empire in opposition to the USA. Moreover, Thiriart believed that such an “Empire” would not be “federal” and “regional-oriented”, but ultimately unitary, centralized, and would become a powerful, single continental Nation-State in accordance with the Jacobin model. Here lies the fundamental difference between the views of de Benoist and Thiriart.

In the late ’70’s Thiriart’s views underwent some modification. An analysis of the prevailing geopolitical situation led him to the conclusion that Europe’s scale was insufficient to liberate it from American thalassocracy. Consequently, the main condition for “European liberation” was the unification of Europe and the USSR. He moved from a geopolitical scheme involving three main zones – the West, Europe, and Russia (USSR) – to one with only two components, i.e., the West and the Eurasian continent. Moreover, Thiriart came to the radical conclusion that Europe would have to choose Soviet socialism over Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Thus appeared the project of the “Euro-Soviet Empire from Vladivostok to Dublin” [17]. This proposition nearly prophetically described the reasons which would lead to the collapse of the USSR if it did not commit to new geopolitical moves in Europe and the South in the near future. Thiriart believed that the ideas of Haushofer concerning a “continental bloc of Berlin-Moscow-Tokyo” were relevant to a large extent even now. It is important that these theses of Thiriart were presented 15 years before the collapse of the USSR and absolutely accurately predicted the logic and reasons behind this disaster. Thiriart unsuccessfully attempted to present his views to Soviet leaders, but he did personally meet with Nasser, Zhou Enlai, and senior Yugoslav officials in the ’60’s. It is significant that Moscow rejected his proposed organization of clandestine “European liberation brigades” tasked with waging a terroristic struggle against “Atlanticist agents” in Europe.

Jean Thiriart’s views currently underpin the active, non-conformist movement of the European National-Bolsheviks, such as the European Liberation Front, and are thoroughly in line with the projects of contemporary Russian Neo-Eurasianism.

3. Thinking in Continents – Jordis von Lohausen

Thiriart himself was very close to the Austrian general Jordis von Lohausen who, unlike Thiriart and de Benoist, did not participate in direct political activism or build concrete social projects. Instead, Lohausen adhered to a strictly scientific approach and restricted himself to pure geopolitical analysis, although his original position as a continentalist and follower of Haushofer was one and the same with that of the National-Bolsheviks and New Right.

Lohausen believed that political power can only become durable and sustainable when rulers think in terms of “millennia and continents” rather than in immediate or local categories. His main work, accordingly, is titled The Strength to Conquer – Thinking in Continents [18].

Lohausen was of the opinion that global territorial, civilizational, and cultural as well as social process are only understandable if they are examined from a “farsighted” perspective as opposed to what he termed historical “short-sightedness.” In human society, authority, upon which the choice of historical path and the most important decisions depend, should be guided by the most general schemes which allow this or that state or people to find their place in a vast historical perspective. Therefore, the basic discipline necessary for the determination of power strategies is geopolitics in its traditional sense of operating with global categories while remaining aloof of analytical particularities (like Lacoste’s “internal” school of applied geopolitics). Modern ideologies and the latest technological and civilizational shifts undoubtedly change the topography of the world, but they cannot cancel the basic laws linked to natural and cultural cycles that are measured in millennia.

Such global categories include space, language, ethnos, and resources, etc. Lohausen thus proposes the following formula of power: “strength = force x location.”

Lohausen elaborates:

“Insofar as Strength is Power multiplied by location, only a favorable geographical position offers the opportunity of fully developing internal forces.” [19]

Thus, power (political, intellectual, etc.) is directly linked with space.

Lohausen separated the fate of Europe from the fate of the West as he considered Europe to be a continental formation only temporarily under the control of thalassocracy. Accordingly, the geopolitical liberation of Europe requires a spatial (positional) minimum which can be achieved only through the unification of Germany, integration processes in Central Europe, the restoration of Prussia’s territorial integrity (torn between Poland, the USSR, and the GDR), and the further gathering of European states into a new, autonomous bloc independent of Atlanticism. In this scheme, it is important to note the role of Prussia which Lohausen (following Niekisch and Spengler) considered to be the most continental, “Eurasian” part of Germany. If Koenigsberg was the capital of Germany instead of Berlin, then European history would have gone in a different, more “correct” direction with an emphasis on a European-Russian alliance against Anglo-Saxon thalassocracy.

Lohausen considered the future of Europe to be unthinkable from a strategic perspective without Russia and, vice versa, Russia (the USSR) needed Europe. Without it, Russia would be geopolitically “incomplete” and vulnerable to America, whose location is so much more advantageous that, consequently, its strength could sooner or later outstrip the USSR. Lohausen stressed that the USSR could have four different Europes to its West – a “hostile Europe,” a “subordinated Europe,” a “devastated Europe,” or a “European ally.” The first three variants would be inevitable if the USSR continued its European policy which, indeed, ultimately brought the Soviet Union to defeat in the Cold War. Only striving to make Europe “allied and friendly” at any cost could have redeemed the fatal geopolitical situation of the USSR and signaled a new stage in geopolitical history – a Eurasian stage.

Lohausen purposefully confined his position to pure geopolitical observations, and he ignored any ideological issues. For example, to him him Boyar Rus, Tsarist Russia, and the Soviet Union were all parts of a single continuous process independent of changes in the ruling system or ideology. Geopolitically, Russia was heartland and its fate was predetermined by its lands no matter what regime ruled it.

Like Thiriart, Lohausen foresaw the geopolitical collapse of the USSR as an inevitability if it continued to follow its usual course. However, what Atlanticist geopoliticians considered to be a victory, Lohausen saw above all as a defeat for continental forces. With this, however, there was a nuance. The collapse of the Soviet system could open new opportunities for creating a positive point of reference for the establishment of a future Eurasian bloc, a continental Empire, insofar as certain restrictions such as the ones imposed by Marxist ideology would be removed.

4. Jean Parvulesco’s Eurasian Empire of the End

A more romantic version of geopolitics was put forth by the famous French writer Jean Parvulesco. Earlier geopolitical themes in literature had arisen in George Orwell’s dystopian1984 which futuristically described the division of the world into three enormous continental blocs: Eastasia, Eurasia, and Oceania. Similar themes can be encountered in the works of Arthur Kestler, Aldous Huxley, Raymond Abellio, etc.

Jean Parvulesco made geopolitical themes central in all of his publications, thereby opening a new genre of “geopolitical fiction.”

Parvulesco’s concepts can be summarized briefly by the following [20]: the history of mankind is the history of Power and authority. Various semi-secret organizations strive to access central positions in civilization, i.e., Power, the cycles of existence of which far exceed the duration of conventional political ideologies, ruling dynasties, religious institutions, or states and nations. The two organizations that have acted throughout history, albeit under different names, are distinguished by Parvulesco as the “Order of Atlanticists” and the “Order of Eurasianists.” Between these two forces rages a centuries-old struggle participated in by such disparate figures as the Pope, patriarchs, kings, diplomats, financiers, revolutionaries, mystics, generals, scientists, artists, etc. All socio-cultural manifestations, accordingly, boil down to primordial, albeit extremely complex, geopolitical archetypes.

This is a geopolitical line pushed to the logical limit, the roots of which were even clearly traced by the rather rationalistic founders of geopolitics as such who were “foreign” to such “mysticism.” 

In Parvulesco’s plots, General De Gaulle and the geopolitics structures founded by him, which remained in the shadows after his presidency, play a central role. Parvulesco terms this “geopolitical holism.” Such “geopolitical holism” is the French analogue of the Haushofer school’s continentalism.

The main task of the supporters of this line was the organization of the European continental bloc “Paris-Berlin-Moscow” and in this aspect Parvulesco’s theories interlock with the theses of the New Right and the National-Bolsheviks.

Parvulesco maintained that the current historical stage is one of the culmination of centuries of geopolitical confrontation in which the dramatic history of the continental-civilizational duel will come to a head. He predicted the imminent emergence of the giant continental-scale construction of the “Eurasian Empire of the End” and the final showdown with the “Empire of the Atlantic.” He described this eschatological encounter in an apocalyptic tone as the “Endkampf” (“Final Battle”). Interestingly enough, the fictional characters of Parvulesco’s texts act side by side with real historical personalities, many of which the author maintained (and to this day still does) friendly relationships with. Among them are politicians from De Gaulle’s inner circle, English and American diplomats, the poet Ezra Pound, the philosopher Julius Evola, the politician and writer Raymond Abellio, the sculptor Arno Breker, various members of occult organizations, etc.

Despite the fictional character of Parvulesco’s texts, they in fact possess relatively enormous geopolitical value, as a number of his articles published in the late ’70’s strangely enough accurately described the situation which prevailed in the world in the mid ‘90s.

5. The Indian ocean as a path to world domination – Robert Steuckers

The total opposite of the “geopolitical visionary” that was Parvulesco is the Belgian geopolitician and publicist Robert Steuckers, the publisher of the two prestigious journals Orientations and Vouloir. Steuckers approached geopolitics from a purely scientific, rationalist position and strove to liberate the discipline from what he deemed all of its “random” eccentricities. Following the logic of the New Right in an academic orientation, he nonetheless came to conclusions strikingly close to the “prophecies” of Parvulesco.

Steuckers also believed that the socio-political and diplomatic projects of different states and blocs, no matter in whatever ideological form they are clothed in, represent veiled and temporarily indirect expressions of global geopolitical projects. In this phenomenon he saw the influence of the “Land” factor on human history, as man is a creature of the earth (created from earth). As follows, earth and space predetermine man in the most significant of his manifestations. This theory was the precursor of “geohistory.”

For Steuckers, a continentalist orientation was a priority as he considered Atlanticism to be hostile to Europe and believed the fate of European prosperity to be connected with Germany and  [21]. Steuckers was an active proponent of Europe’s cooperation with Third World countries and the Arab world in particular.

Along with this, he stressed the enormous importance of the Indian Ocean to the future geopolitical structure of the planet. He defined the Indian Ocean as the “Middle Ocean” located between the Atlantic and Pacific, strictly in the middle between the eastern coast of Africa and the Pacific zone home to New Zealand, Australia, New Guinea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Indochina. Maritime control over the Indian Ocean was considered to be a key position for geopolitically influencing three of the most important “large spaces,” i.e., Africa, southern-Eurasian Rimland, and the Pacific region. Hence the strategic priority attached to various small islands in the Indian Ocean, especially Diego Garcia which is equidistant from all coastal areas.

Steuckers asserted that the Indian Ocean was the territory on which all of European strategy should be focused insofar as it is through this zone that Europe could influence the USA, Eurasia, and Japan all at once. From his point of view, the decisive geopolitical confrontation which would determine the future 21st century would unfold in precisely this space.

Steuckers actively busied himself with the history of geopolitics and is the author of the article on geopolitics in the new edition of the Brussels Encyclopedia.

6. Carlo Terracciano: Russia + Islam = the salvation of Europe

A particularly active center of continentally-oriented geopolitics can be found in Italy. After the Second World War, the ideas of Carl Schmitt were more widespread in Italy than in any other European country, and thanks to this the geopolitical mindset is very common there. In addition, it was precisely in Italy that Jean Thiriart’s “Young Europe” movement and the ideas of continental National-Bolshevism were most developed of all.

Of all the numerous political and sociological journals and centers of the New Right dealing with geopolitics, the Milanese “Orion” magazine, in which the geopolitical analyses of Dr. Carlo Terracciano were published regularly over the course of 10 years, is of particular interest. Terracciano professed the most extreme version of European continentalism most immediately congruent to Eurasianism.

Terracciano fully accepted the map of Mackinder and Mahan and concurs with the rigorous civilizational and geopolitical dualism distinguished by them. Moreover, believing that the fate of Europe as a whole totally depends on the fate of Russia, Eurasia, and the East, he clearly stands on the side of heartland. For him, the continental East is a positive and the Atlanticist West is a negative. Radical approaches are exceptions among Europeans, even among continentally-oriented geopoliticians, and Terracciano does not put any accent on the special status of Europe, instead believing that it is a mere secondary point in view of the planetary confrontation of thalassocracy and tellurocracy. He fully subscribed to the idea of a united Eurasian State, a “Euro-Soviet Empire from Vladivostok to Dublin,” which brings him close to Thiriart. However, he does not share the “Jacobinism” and “universalism” inherent to Thiriart, instead insisting on ethno-cultural differentiation and regionalism which, in turn, brings him close to Alain de Benoist.

Terracciano underlines the centrality of the Russian factor which he combines with another interesting point – he believes that the most important role in the fight with Atlanticism belongs to the Islamic world, especially the anti-American regimes of Iran, Libya, Iraq, etc. This leads him to the conclusion that the Islamic world is, to a large extent, a proponent of continental geopolitical interests. He even considered “fundamentalist” versions of Islam to be positive in this regard.

The ultimate formula which summarizes the geopolitical views of Dr. Terracciano is the following: Russia (heartland) + Islam vs. USA (Atlanticism, Mondialism) [22].

Terracciano saw Europe as the bridgehead of a Russo-Islamic anti-Mondialist bloc. In his opinion, only such a radical approach can objectively result in a genuine European renaissance.

Terracciano’s views are shared by other associates of Orion and the intellectual center working at its base (including professor Claudio Mutti, Maurizio Murelli, the sociologist Alessandra Colla, Marko Battarra, etc.). A number of leftist, social-democratic, communist, and anarchist circles in Italy, the newspaper Umanità, and the journal Nuovo Angolazione have gravitated in this National-Bolshevik direction [represented by Terracciano].

Footnotes:

[16] Alain de Benoist “Les idess a l’endroit”, Paris, 1979

[17] Jean Thiriart “L’Empire Eurosovietique de Vladivistok jusque Dublin”, Brussell, 1988

[18] Jordis von Lohausen “Mut zur Macht. Denken in Kontinenten”, Berg, 1978

[19] Ibid

[20] Jean Parvulesco “Galaxie GRU”, Paris, 1991

[21] Robert Steukers “La Russie, L’Europe et L’Occident” dans “Orientation” № 4 nov.-dec. 1983

[22] Carlo Terracciano “Nel Fiume della Storia” in “Orion”, Milano, №№ 22 — 30, 1986 — 1987

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold 

Chapter 6 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999) / Chapter 6 of Conspirology (2005) 

The role of the USA, the last remaining superpower in the world, is central to global geopolitics today. Beginning with the end of the 19th century, this peripheral, marginal continent, previously but a European province secondary and complimentary to the Old World, increasingly became an independent political and cultural power. After the Second World War, the USA even came to act as the paradigmatic, universal model for the countries of Europe themselves and even Asia. The significance of the steady growth of America and the totality of the American ideological, cultural, psychological, and even philosophical complex goes beyond the framework of purely economic or military influence. “Mythological America,” “America as a concept,” and “America as the American Ideal” are today manifesting themselves all the more visibly.

There must be compelling reasons why the “American idea” has taken root and implanted itself as something “neo-sacred” in global geopolitical consciousness connected to the collective unconsciousness of humanity and the mysterious continental geography that can be traced back millennia, the memory of which still lives in the archetypes of the psyche. Considering the “mythological” underpinnings of America as an “internal continent” is the main task of this chapter.

The Secret Map

Today, hypotheses on the Old World’s discovery of America long before Christopher Columbus’ voyage are becoming all the more popular. It has been proven that Scandinavian Vikings visited North America (Vinland) with their ships, and runic inscriptions are being found across the eastern coast of Canada, the Labrador, in Newfoundland, etc. There exist, moreover, the sufficiently reasonable theories of the scholar Jacques de Maio on the link between Incan civilization and these same Vikings, and there are other versions which claim that Europe had always known of the existence of the American continent, yet for specific reasons related to its sacred nature, did not widely disseminate this information. But, the most interesting instance in this regard is the mysterious story of the map of Muhiddin Piri Reis. Let us dwell on this map in detail.

In 1520, Muhiddin Piri Reis, an admiral in the Turkish navy, published the navigational atlas Bahriye which is still preserved in the National Museum of Istanbul. Some of the maps contained in this atlas depict North and South America, Greenland, and Antarctica with remarkable precision, yet these areas simply could not have been known to mariners at that time unless, of course, official historians are to be believed.

Siri Reis explains the origin of these maps as being discovered among one of the Spaniards who participated in the three expeditions of Christopher Columbus and later captured by the Turkish officer Kemal during a naval battle. In his remarks, Piri Reis notes that only thanks to these maps was Columbus able to discover the New World, and this fact was indirectly confirmed in the book of Christopher Columbus’s son, Fernando, The Life of Admiral Christopher Columbus. It reads: “He [Columbus] worked through mounds of information before he came to the conviction that he would discover a number of countries lying to the West of the Canary Islands.” Columbus’ maps, which fell into the hands of Piri Reis, were drawn in 1498. But Piri Reis himself claims that the collection dated back to the times of Alexander the Great long before Columbus. Indeed, some of the maps’ details – such as the portrayal of Antarctica and Greenland as having no ice cover, which allows one to note that Greenland in particular consists of two islands (a fact confirmed only recently by a French expedition) – could only be relevant to a geographical map of the world from five-thousand years ago! The analysis by Dr. Afetinan Tarikh Kurumu in his book The Oldest Map of America (Ankara, 1954), along with the examination carried out by the American Institute of Marine Hydrocartography, have revealed the incredible accuracy of these maps which, among other things, display the mountain ranges of Antarctica and Greenland which were only recently discovered by geologists. In addition, according to some experts, such precision could only be obtained today with the aid of aerial photography.

No matter what, knowledge of America’s existence necessarily had to have been present among the peoples of Eurasia before Columbus. Knowledge never disappears, but merely descends into the sphere of the unconscious or into the depths of esoteric secrets. That being said, the American continent is, by all logic, an important link in the “sacred geography” of the ancient peoples, and America’s modern role as a distinct civilization represents none other than the awakening of dormant archetypes.

Why not “Columbia?”

Many explain the modern naming of the continent after Amerigo Vespucci and not after Christopher Columbus as an historical misunderstanding and accidental injustice. In no way can we agree with this, as it is not difficult to note that even on the most local scale among purely “rational” name christenings, only those names survive which accord with the semi-conscious archetypes manifested in the well-known phenomenon of so-called “folk etymology.” At times, the similarity of words’ soundings plays an important role, but the identification of concepts on the basis of similarities in sound does not so much demonstrate their “erroneousness” (as the purely “positivist” and “anti-psychological” science of the 19th – 20th centuries presumed) as it does the stability of semantic structures on the level of entire words as well as on the level of the autonomous meaning of letters and letter-combinations. On a basic level, elements referring to “folk etymology” are based on such metaphysical, complete, and far from “folk” sacred methods such as Hindu Nirukta or Jewish Kabbalah. Be that as it may, we presume that the word “America”, in order to match the giant continent’s importance by virtue of its geopolitical mission, should consist of sound concepts associated with the archaic models of the proto-language rudimentarily preserved by the sub-consciousness of the nations of Eurasia.

First and foremost in the sacred form (and, accordingly, the name) of America, the idea of its “extreme Western” origin should be reflected. According to the works of Professor Wirth [35], the ancient Western sacred center was the land of Mo-Uru, or the islands of Mo-Uru located in the Northwestern Atlantic. This name is mentioned in the Bundahishn, a Zoroastrian scripture, in which it is named third after the Ariana-Vedja, the land of the great Aryan ancestors. (Ariana-vedja itself lay directly at the north pole, the Arctic continent “Arktogeya” which disappeared many thousands of years ago). It is precisely with the aid of this key word “Mo-Uru”, and based on the decoding of the oldest runic and proto-runic symbols (and in particular, the decoding of the liner pre-dynastic writing of Egypt and the Minoan inscriptions, and even ancient rock tracings), that Professor Wirth was able to penetrate the secrets of many of pre-history’s ethnic and racial cataclysms. In its phonetic variations, Mo-Uru is mentioned in the Bible (Moria is the name of the country where Moses was supposed to offer Isaac as a sacrifice to God) and in the Celtic sagas, where the country of “Morias” or “Murias” is referred to as the homeland of the divine northern tribes of Tuatha Dé Danann, as well as in the Scandinavian cults in which the famous stone circle of the cultic pagan center in Uppsala was called “Mora-walls” or “Stone of Mora,” etc. Wirth proposes (and convincingly proves in his detailed and throughly-reasoned works The Origin of Mankind and The Sacred Proto-Writing of Mankind) that the “Amorites,” “Moors,” and even the oceanic “Maori” were the descendants of the ancient natives of this sacred center in the Northern Atlantic, and that the geography of this land was later transferred into the historical toponyms of the “peoples of Mo-Uru’s” new settlements. Curiously enough, “Amorites” means “People of the West” (am uru) in ancient Hebrew. There also exists the sacred doctrine mentioned by Guenon which claims that the Jewish tradition itself is “Western” in its symbolic and pre-historical origins as evidenced by, in particular, the Jewish custom of celebrating the New Year in the fall and the change of day in the evening, stressing the importance of the “Western” orientation corresponding to the universal historical correlations between evening and autumn, the “sunset” period of the day or year. In this perspective, Chaldean Ur, which Abraham left for the promised land is perhaps a substitute of Mo-Uru, the “North-Atlantic Ur”, just as the Zohar asserts that “Ur”, where Abraham originally resided, symbolizes “the highest spiritual state” from which Abraham “descended” downwards by virtue of providential necessity. (It is curious to note that Jews themselves often share this point of view stressing this Western origin of their tradition, as can be seen among the early Zionist projects of the “Jewish state” organization in America, in Simon Wiesenthal’s books on the Jewish pre-history of America, and in Edmund Wiseman’s America: The New Jerusalem).

So, the mysterious Mo-Uru denotes a sacred continent beyond Europe which lies to the West in the Atlantic. Moreover, “mouru”, “amuru,” or “amoru” (such forms are encountered in historically different traditions) are phonetically similar to the word “America.” It can thus not be excluded (and it is indeed quite likely) that precisely such a “coincidence,” or, more precisely, a providential correspondence, served the unconscious or half-conscious basis for consolidating such an externally profane yet internally sacred name for the New World.

Atlantis and Beyond Atlantis: the mystery of the dollar

It is only natural that “America” and “Mo-Uru” have a direct relationship to the myth of Atlantis, the paleo-continent about which Solon, Plato, and many before and after them spoke. Atlantis was the Western, sacred continent upon which a spiritual civilization flourished only to be destroyed as a result of a great cataclysm and flood. The death of the continent is most often described as comprising several stages. After the sinking of the mainland located to the West of Eurasia and Africa, for some time after separate islands in the North Atlantic were preserved on which the last tribes of the Atlantians were concentrated, the carriers of the ancient tradition. In Wirth’s opinion, Mo-Uru was such a remnant of Atlantis which in turn came to be flooded only much later, perhaps a few millennia following the main cataclysm.

Judging by everything, the American continent was not the westernmost continent in sacred geography as Atlantis was, but rather its further-Western “continuation.” In other words, America was “beyond Atlantis”, the lands located “on the other side of the West.” It is possible that the sacred, symbolic location of America explains the disturbing secrets associated with it in the sacred geography of Eurasia’s traditional civilizations. 

According to this sacred geography, located in the West is a “Green Country,” the “Land of the Dead,” or some kind of quasi-material world resembling Hades or Sheol. This is the country of dusk and dawn in which there is no escape for mortals and whom only the initiated can reach. It is believed that the name Greenland (literally “Green Land”) refers to this same symbolic complex. But this “Green Country” is not Atlantis (and not even Mo-Uru!). This has to be one laying even further West as the “world of death,” the “kingdom of shadows.” And it is thus the supernatural dimension of the American continent which is quite miraculously revealed in such a, at first glance, banal thing as the dollar sign. Rene Guenon once noted that this symbol on American money is the graphic simplification of the sacred seal found on ancient coins of the Mediterranean zone. Originally, the two vertical bars were depictions of the two “pillars of Hercules” which, according to legend, stand in the far West beyond the Gibraltar Strait. The loop on this mark was once a slogan with the symbolic inscription “nec plus ultra”, which literally means “onward to nowhere.” Both of these symbols were meant to mark the border, or the Western limit of human sacred geography beyond which were found “inhuman worlds.” This “border” symbol, which indicates that it is impossible to go beyond the Gibraltar, paradoxically became the financial emblem of America, the country lying “beyond the borders” precisely “where it is impossible to go,” where the inscription on the original dollar sign categorically prohibited travel. It is here that the “otherworldly” symbolism of America appears, revealing the shady, forbidden sacred-geographical aspects of human civilization.[36]

In this view, Columbus’ newfound discovery of the American continent bears a rather sinister meaning, as it signifies the emergence of “sunken Atlantis” on the horizon of history. But not even Atlantis itself, but its “shadow,” its negative continuation of the symbolic West to the point of the “world of the dead.” It is quite characteristic in this regard that this “new discovery” temporally coincided with the beginning of the severe decline of European (and pan-Eurasian) civilization, which rapidly began to lose its spiritual, religious, qualitative, and sacred principles from this time on.

On a cultural, philosophical level, it is America that went on to become the perfect projection of purely profane, atheistic, and poly-atheistic utopias. Social models based on purely human rationality, beginning with Thomas Moore, increasingly settled on this continent.

Here once again, we see how it is not only the “unexplored” quality of these lands rendering it favorable for the realization of utopia, but also the archetypes of the “land of the dead where eternal peace and order reigns” and the image of the “green country” of the West that influenced the choice of this geographical space.

The historical cycle of America, its rise from the watery depths as the “New Atlantis,” can be likened not to the true and risen[37] return of the “golden age”, but to the chimerical, fake, and illusory bearing the noxious smell of a continental grave.

Sunrise in the West, Sunset in the East

The well known metaphysician and Traditionalist Geydar Dzhemal once pointed to an interesting peculiarity stemming from the geographical location of the American continent: for Americans, every morning the sun rises from the direction of Europe (that is, from the side which sacred geography constantly associates with the West) and sets on the side of Asia (the symbolic East). In a strange way, such a shift in the symbolism of orientations in the natural “worldview” of this continent’s residents resonates with the famous eschatological prophecy foreseeing that “in the last days” the sun will rise in the West and set in the East. Such an exception necessarily influences the archaic dimension of the continental American psyche, complementing the already entirely specific role of America as the re-emerging Beyond Atlantis, the “green country of the dead.” If we add to this the “rationalist utopianism” characteristic not only of the theorists of the Old World but also the founding fathers of the North American states, then, indeed, we derive a variant of an eschatological, messianic complex forming the paradigm and structure of American continental consciousness as a whole, and particularly those aspects which are most deeply connected with geopolitics, universalism, and self-identity. This eschatological scenario, in its most general features, is the same in the most remotely distant religions. In Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and in the majority of the Aryan pagan traditions, and even in the Melanesian cargo-cults, the “messianic era” is characterized by “the resurrection (or return) of the dead,” “the restoration of heavenly prosperity”, the “revealing of everything lost over the course of history,” the “appearance of new lands and new heavens,” the “presence of everlasting grace,” etc. If one more attentively looks at the American mentality in its North American variation, we see nearly all aspects of this eschatological plan. The “resurrection of the dead” is reflected in the practice of freezing the corpses of wealthy Americans searching for resurrection with the aid of scientific techniques in the coming century, as well as in a number of American neo-spiritualist sects who preach thanatophilia and scientifically (using quack devices) prove the “immortality of the soul.” Such “heavenly prosperity” is translated into the concept of “material prosperity”; the “new land” is the American continent itself, the base of the new “golden age” termed in some occult and astrological milieus as the “Age of Aquarius” or “New Age” (the widespread pseudo-religious movement highly developed in the US).

This eschatology permeates the very concept of “new world order” producing the current slogan of a “global community” (repeating and developing American ideological projects), and these notions presume the expansion of the American model to every last bit of territory on the planet. Thus, the “New World” or “new land” emerging from the depths of disturbing mystery and esoteric secrets pretends to be the new, spiritual land foretold of the Apocalypse which is to appear after the End Times. For continental America, the post-apocalyptic epoch has already arrived. The Allies’ victory in the Second World War led the US to world domination, the persecution of Jews in Germany (provably explaining the accomplishment of the apocalyptic “Holocaust”), the symbolism of the state of Israel’s re-establishment, and the recent collapse of the USSR, the last planetary opponent of the West, are interpreted by the leaders of America as the undoubtable signs of global victory and the arrival of the “new eon”, the epoch of sole world domination, the “end of history,” and the triumph of the world market.

In the USA, the countdown to messianic times has already begun.

Holy America

The archaic, unconscious complex of the “American ideal” is an entirely clear, straightforward expression manifested in the the “political theology of Americanism.” We have in mind the neo-Protestant concept of “America the promised land.” In this notion, the energy of the continent yields a particular theological construction, and if certain terms of this mystical “Protestant Americanism” are perceived not as rhetorical metaphors, but as a precise formation of eschatological constructions, then a rather unexpected and disturbing picture emerges. For example, George Washington himself stated that the “United States is the New Jerusalem determined by Providence as the territory on which man should attain his full development, where science, freedom, happiness, and fame shall spread with peace.” Here it is important to note the concept of the “New Jerusalem” which, in the language of a Christian (even a Protestant) necessarily points to the Apocalypse and refers to the last stage of the eschatological scenario, the descent of the spiritual “Hail of the Lord,” the “New Jerusalem” from heaven. [38]

For his part, John Adams clearly defined globalism as an American mission, calling the USA “a pure and virtuous republic whose task is to rule the world and establishes the oneness of people.”

In recent times, this special “patriotism” has gained new energy thanks to the development of television, which has led to the formation of the “televangelism” phenomenon which Isidro Palacios called “e-Christianity.” For example, the famous televangelist Jerry Howell now formulates the “American ideal” in the following way: “The USA is a country blessed by Almighty God which like no other country on earth is now exposed inside and out to the attacks of devilish machinations which could end in the destruction of the American nation. The devil is battling with the will of God, which put the US above all other nations, like ancient Israel…” These theological motives of Protestant eschatology are typical of modern American presidents. In 1984, Reagan stated: “I don’t think that the Lord, who blessed this country like no other, would ever want want us to trade it away because of its weakness.”

Without taking into account the symbolic role of Beyond Atlantis in its supra-temporal, supra-historical complex, this messianic pathos remains unclear, and the mass-scale spiritual fraud behind it cannot be completely assessed and understood. In the most general sense, as in all parodical eschatologies, we are dealing with the displacement of the spiritual golden age which is supposed to arrive immediately after the End of History, its shift to the period preceding the End.

Apollo, Diana, and the Truncated Pyramid

This same parodical logic, when applied to the material level of spiritual reality, distorts sacred meaning and stands behind the technological progress of “America the continent” especially in such illustrative spheres as space research. It is quite revealing that the Americans were the first to land on the moon where, according to various archaic traditions, the “souls of our ancestors” reside. (It is especially important that Soviet cosmonauts belonging to a similarly significantly eschatological political formation did not manage to achieve this). In esoteric tradition, there exists a direct link between the “green land of the dead” and the Moon, and this very link can be traced to the objective, material, and spiritually profane history of modernity.

American cosmonauts’ space flights consciously bore a “ritualistic meaning”, as is evident even in the name of the “Apollo” spacecraft, Apollo being the traditional mythological companion of Diana, the moon. Moreover, as was reported even in the secular press, the American astronauts brought Masonic rings with them to the moon. This in fact means that the “ritualistic” character of the events could not have but been obvious to them, given that “entering the sphere of the moon” means passing through the lesser mysteries in Masonic ritual. Here once again there is a symbolic parallel: the initiation into the lesser mysteries brings a Mason into the so-called “Edenic (heavenly) state” returning him to the spiritual completeness which characterized the people of the Golden Age. In the case of the individual, all of this is realized on an internal, “microcosmic” level. The flight to the moon ritual took on an external, material, “macrocosmic” character, then “sacralized” not only by the individual, but also the entire “continent”, the messenger of which is the individual. On a symbolic level, the interplanetary journey from America to the moon was equivalent to the journey from “America” to “America,” and this paradoxical ritual strengthened and intensified the messianic pride of America as a whole, the American subconscious. It should also be noted that the Masonic tradition is extremely developed in America, and in this regard there exist certain theories that insist on the originality, uniqueness, and “chosenness” of American Masonry in comparison to other branches. In American Masonic lodges, the legend is widespread that the last Knights Templar, having been in hiding for some time since their persecution by French monarchs and Catholic authorities in Europe, later fled to America and brought their treasures and relics with them. Some have even claimed that the Holy Grail itself was brought to America. Be that as it may, American Masons are convinced that the true “sacred” center of Masonry is to be found in the USA, while European Masonry is “too archaic and helpless” and is nothing other than a “relic of the past.” It is undeniable, moreover, that Masonic signs make up many of the US’ state symbols, such as the white five-pointed star (the symbols of “Adam of Paradise” – again the “heavenly” theme) and the truncated pyramid whose peak is separated from the base by a ring of 13 stars symbolizing the 13 tribes of Israel. (Joseph’s tribe is often symbolically represented as the double tribe of Ephraim and Manasseh, which yields 13 instead of 12 and such a doctrine is peculiar to Masonic arithmetic). The truncated pyramid bears a disturbing symbolic meaning, as it refers to hierarchy devoid of its sacred peaks and its sacred center. It is possible that this emblem was originally designed to express the anti-authoritarian and anti-monarchical orientation of the US political system and the absence of a single ruler, but the symbol itself has never been limited to a purely emblematic function. The truncated pyramid necessarily implies the idea of “interrupted consecration,” and precisely this incompleteness in the initiative cycle is completely characteristic of “black magicians” as understood by Tradition.

Gifs from the “Ancestors’ World”

Mircea Eliade and other scholars dealing with the structure of archaic beliefs have dwelled in similar terms on the logic of the so-called “cargo-cults” [39] and the Melanesian, eschatological “local religions” associated with the abolition of all religious rules and the onset of a special “Messianic” age in which promiscuity, unlimited alcoholic ecstasy, and idleness are permitted and which is characterized by “the return of the dead” bearing gifts on huge ships from “America.” In addition to the symbolic underpinnings of these cults, it is impossible to rule out the rudimentary subconscious archetypes in them forgotten by sacred geography. On this note it is important that the relationship between cargo-cultists and white “Americans” is ambiguous. One the one hand, “Americans” are considered to be usurpers of the goods “produced” by the natives’ ancestors and their “gods,” while on the other hand, in certain aspects, cargo-cultists themselves begin to imitate the whites, imitate some of their mannerisms, behaviors, habits, and postures. No matter if “Americans” are the usurpers and no matter if they do or do not look like the “real” inhabitants of the land of the dead, they have nonetheless had direct contact with them. And this alone renders them distinguished, special. Over all, the cargo-cult complex predicts the nearing beginning of a “golden age” and absolute abundance beyond all conceivable limits.

In analyzing cargo-cults, Eliade showed just how much in common they have, with only minor variations, with those found in Africa and among the Hindus, the peoples of Oceania, and elsewhere. Thus, eschatological cargo-cultism represents a fairly universal complex characterized by rooted structures of the unconscious to which is attached a primordial sacred meaning submerged over the course of thousands of years in the the psychic and rudimentary spheres. The cargo-cultist complex is something in the likes of an perfecting component of the “land of the dead” – “mystical America,” “Beyond Atlantis.” The indigenous consciousness of non-American territories being pulled away from the vertical and genuine eschatological perspective at the expense of metaphysical value commit a shift similar to the one which occurs in the American conscience itself. The spiritual is translated into the material and the other-worldly is translated into that which is of this world. It is this and nothing else which explains the complex relationship of many archaic peoples to Americanism and its representatives. On the one hand, Americans attract rejection, repulsion, and the desire to shut off their influence (and sometimes even “expose” or “expropriate” them), but on the other hand, the “magical presence of the dead ancestors” behind “Americans”, as a guarantor of their material success, evokes an irresistible desire to imitate them.

Bury America

That disturbing and sinister country on the other side of the ocean. Without history, without tradition, without roots. Artificial, aggressive, an intrusive reality completely devoid of spirit, focused only on the material world and technical efficiency; cold, indifferent, glowing with neon advertisements and senseless luxury, shrouded in pathological poverty, genetic degeneration, and the rupture of any and all connections between people, things, nature, and culture – the result of a pure experiment by the European utopian rationalists.

Today, America is imposing its planetary domination the triumph of its lifestyle, and its civilizational model upon all peoples of the earth. Upon us. America sees in herself and only in herself “progress” and the “norms of civilization,” thus denying everyone else the right to their own path, their own culture, and their own system of values. How accurately does this all precisely recall the prophecy of the coming of the Antichrist…the King of the “green country” of the dead rising from the abyss of ancient crime…

Burying America is our religious duty.

Footnotes:

[35] H.Wirth “Heilige Urshrift der Menshheit”

[36] On the symbolism of the “green country” and the West, see Gustav Meyrink’s The Angel of the West Window, St. Petersburg, 1991

[37] The English visionary, poet, and artist William Blake established a mythological image of America as a “positive Atlantis” designed for the purpose of putting an end to the alienation and degradation of contemporary Europe. But this proved to be an incorrect mythologem.

[38] The Revelation of St. John the Evangelist 21:10-27.

[39] See M. Eliade’s “The Cosmic Renovation” in The End of the World

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold 

Chapter 7 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999) / Chapter 1 from Book 2/Part 4 of Foundations of Geopolitics (Moscow, Arktogeya: 2000)

Liberalism: A Totalitarian Ideology

What is the dominant ideology of the contemporary West and its geopolitical vanguard, the United States of America? This is an absolutely urgent question as it absolutely affects every one of us. Let us be frank: we have lost the global geopolitical conflict. We are defeated. Therefore, we have been obliged to precisely and rigidly know the answers to the following questions: who is the boss in the new planetary arrangement of forces? What are the basic features of his worldview? What does he think about the world, history, the fate of humanity, and about us? The latter question in particular is just as necessary for anyone who intends to reconcile with and humbly serve the new masters as it is for anyone who refuses to accept such a state of affairs and strives to rise up and reconquer newfound geopolitical freedom.

The belief has been instilled in us that there is no ideology in the West, that a pluralism of positions and convictions reigns there, and that everyone there is free to believe, think, speak, and do whatever they want. This is an absolute lie, a simple propagandistic ploy borrowed from the Cold War arsenal (a war against us). In fact, there is a dominant ideology in the West which is no less totalitarian or intolerant than any other ideology. Only its forms and principles are peculiar, its philosophical roots different, and its historical basis differing from those ideologies which are more familiar to us. This is the ideology of liberalism. It is based on the dogma of the “autonomous individual”, i.e., consistent individualism, “applied rationalism,” faith in technological progress, the notion of the “open society,” and the introduction of the “market” and “free trade” principle into not only the economic, but also the ideological, social, and philosophical absolute.

Liberal ideology is “right” in a narrowly economic sense and “left” in the sense of humanitarian rhetoric. Moreover, all combinations of right with left, or simply right and left by themselves, are rejected, disassembled, marginalized, and are forced into the background by liberalism. Liberalism is totalitarian in its own way. Instead of the direct, physical repression of dissidents, it resorts to tactics of soft strangulation, gradually pushing opponents into the margins of society, the economic disadvantaging of dissidents and opponents, etc. But a fact is a fact: the dominant ideology of the West (Liberalism) actively fights against alternative political and ideological projects, using merely subtler, “softer,” and more refined methods to achieve its goals than other forms of totalitarianism. This does not mean that it is any less effective. Liberal totalitarianism is veiled, ghostly, and invisible rather than openly brutal, but it is no less cruel.

The existence of a “dominant ideology” in the West is gradually becoming more clearly recognized in our society. The reality of liberalism and liberal ideology has become obvious and, consequently, we have gained greater certainty as to its existence. The supporters of the West are now necessarily distinguished by their sharing of all the specific ideological premises of liberalism (and not merely some kind of vague “democracy” under which everyone is free to understand anything vague and uncertain), and its opponents are united by a simple hostility to this ideology. Yet liberalism has one more, more hidden layer: the distinct theological and religious assumptions which ultimately led the West to the ideological model which once took root in it and has now come to prevail. This layer is not as universally and unambiguously recognized as the vulgar cliches of the “open society” and “human rights,” but, nevertheless, it is precisely this part which is the basis and secret source of the liberal ideology which rules the planet, which itself is just the tip of the iceberg.

The matter at hand is none other than Protestant eschatology.

The USA – the quintessence of the West

Today, there is no longer any doubt that the world is ruled by the only remaining, fully-fledged superpower, the United States of America. This is not only the most powerful state in the West in a military sense, but is also the product of the entire Western path of development, its peak, its maximum achievement. The USA was founded and built as an artificially constructed formation devoid of historical inertia, traditions, etc. measured by only the most radical recipes worked out over the course of Western civilization. The US is the pinnacle of Western civilization, the crown of its becoming.

The US is the sum of the West and its geopolitical, ideological, and religious vanguard. Only in the US have the principles of liberalism been so totally and consistently implemented. For quite some time, the West and liberalism have come to be authoritatively identified with the USA.

America is the hegemon of the modern world, a gigantic geopolitical, strategic, and economic empire which controls all of the most important processes on the planet not in the capacity as merely another, usual state, even a strong or developed one, but precisely as an ideological model, a path of development, and as the judge and shepherd of mankind which imposes its distinct system of ideological, philosophical, and political values. The US Empire is the empire of liberalism, the empire of capital, the empire of the post-industrial society as the highest stage of the bourgeois system’s development.

Without a doubt, the US is the direct descendent of Europe and European history, but the uniqueness of this formation consists in that the US took from Europe only the most refined and purified trajectory of its civilization in the form of liberal rationalism, the theory of the “social contract,” individualism, dynamic technological industrialism, and the absolutized notions of the “trade system.” Earlier, these tendencies were concentrated in Protestant England, and the British Empire was the first (if we do not take into account Ancient Phoenicia) purely “trade civilization” model to which all of Western history logically led. It is no accident that the major theoreticians of Liberalism were Englishmen – Adam Smith, Ricardo, etc, as were the philosophers of individualism – Locke, Hobbes, Mandeville, etc. Max Weber and the even brighter Werner Sombart have shown how Western capitalism was born out of the Protestant ethic and just how essential the ethno-religious factor is to the emergence of particular socio-economic forms.

The baton of the “trade system” was gradually passed from England to the US whose leadership, since the second half of the 20th century, has become an indisputable historical fact in the general context of Western civilization.

The USA is the epitome of the West, Western capitalism, and its center and axis, its essence. Now, from the standpoint of our experience, in which the US has become the sole boss of the entire planet, for which it had been striving for so long, we can easily recognize the logic of history as leading in focus up to a single point (which, for historical reasons, could not have been seen by those thinkers who did not live to see the dramatic turning point of the geopolitical, social, and economic Cold War confrontation).

Thus, all of Western history leads up to the United States of America.

The “West” as a geopolitical phenomenon actually emerged out of the schism of the Christian Church into Orthodoxy and Catholicism. The Catholic zone became the basis for what has since then been known as the “West” as a concept. From this point on, the people of the Catholic world identified themselves with all of humanity and identified their history with world history and their civilization with civilization in general. All remaining civilizations and traditions were contemptuously likened to “savages” and “barbarians.” It is telling that not only Christian nations but the entire Orthodox world, which in fact was the zone of real, undistorted, authentic Christianity, fell into such an “inhuman” category. In fact, the Orthodox countries – at first Byzantium and later Russia – were Christians and were the ones to challenge the Catholics’ aggressive hostility. Orthodoxy presented an example of a different Christianity, a universal, open, non-sectarian, radically alternative civilizational model which prevailed in the West prior to the time when it claimed to be the only form of Christian statehood. It follows that the seed of the dialectical development of civilization and geopolitical processes in the succeeding centuries is to be sought in Catholicism’s opposition to Orthodoxy.

The history of the West is to be accounted for only after the schism of the Church. At that time, Catholicism became the head of purely “Western” trends. After a certain period of time, however, certain elements of Catholic teachings retained from the heritage of the Orthodox unity of the Church came into contradiction with the main trajectory of the West’s development. The Reformation appeared as a fracture. At that moment, the most “Western” trends isolated themselves and became concentrated in the Protestant type. Protestantism spread precisely in those countries and among those peoples who moved in the direction dictated by the schism – estrangement from the East, arrogant contempt for “savage peoples,” the identification of themselves and their technological development with the peak of civilization, and the individualistic and rationalistic trends which were no longer satisfiable within the Catholic framework (although they, in turn, were an essential step away from the traditional and faithful spirit of the original teachings of Orthodoxy)

The Protestant countries, and first and foremost England, represented the path of “sea civilization” and gravitated to the absolutization of the liberal model and the universalization of the “trade system.” Henceforth the English began to play the role of the vanguard of the West, the “Far West.”

The most extreme and radical Protestant sects of England later formed the basis of American civilization and designed and realized the project of the United States of America. They went to the extreme West to the “promised land” to build a perfect society, the “ideal” and “absolute West.” The United States of America as a state was established by the consensus of fundamentalist Protestant sects, and the overwhelming majority of the American political class to this day remain unchanged as the representatives of these Protestant confessions. This, nevertheless, is quite logical. The country is still ruled by the legal, ideological heirs of those who created, organized, and led it to material prosperity and the rank of a planetary power.

The Americans themselves call this “Manifest Destiny.” In other words, the Americans see their history as a consistent upward path towards civilizational triumph and the victory of this philosophical model upon which American civilization is founded as the quintessence of the entire history of the West.

Protestantism as an Ideology

The following argument can be made: “Contemporary Western society, and especially American society, have already long been atheist, religion maintaining only a small number of followers. Thus, fundamentalism, such as of the Protestant type, can in no way be equated to the official ideology of the USA, much less to that of the West as a whole.”

In fact, it is necessary to point out that religion is not obliged to act as a cult or as a set of doctrines. In the contemporary world, religion manifests itself implicitly as a set of psychological predispositions, as a system of cultural and existential cues, and as a semi-conscious geopolitical intuition. Religion can even be compared to ideology – some (the minority) master the entirety of the conceptual system, while others (the majority) merely intuitively grasp the ideology. More often than not, today religion functions more through the cultural background, family psychology, and the norm of social ethics. In this regard, the US is absolutely a Protestant country, and this “Protestantism” affects not only this confession’s open believers, but also the vast masses of people of other religious beliefs and even atheists. The Protestant spirit can be easily spotted not only among Puritans, Baptists, Quakers, Mormons, etc., but also in American Krishnaism, the Moon sect, among the American Jesuits, and even in the plainly non-religious American citizen. All of them are to a certain degree affected by “Protestant ideology” even though it may be recognized as a cult and dogma only by a relative minority.

The second argument that could be made is that the political class in the US does not proportionally reflect all of society. In this view, it is sufficient to look at the negligible number of colored politicians and administrators. The traditional, “majority-type” American politician, after all, is a “WASP” – a “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” Consequently, a fully-fledged Protestant fundamentalism is more probable among the elites than among other layers of society.

Finally, more concretely, the US Republican Party, one of the two parties possessing a de facto political monopoly, is openly and consistently guided by a Protestant, fundamentalist worldview fully in line with the axis of American civilization and the dogmatic religious incarnation of the US’ Manifest Destiny. An intermediate layer between the generally-accepted secular liberalism of the masses and the Protestant, eschatologically fundamentalism of the political elite is filled by geopolitical centers of analysts serving the government who employ a synthetic technique in their projects in which the main religious and philosophical postulates of Protestantism are taken  minus the details and the prophetic fanaticism of their preachers and combined with the more pragmatic sides of liberal doctrine, albeit freed from the pathetic demagogy of “human rights” and “democracy.” In other words, the geopolitical thinking which is extremely developed among the US political elite is non-antagonistically combined with eschatological fundamentalism which in turn forms the idea of the “US as the New Israel called to rule peoples at the end of history” as well as the idea of free trade as the maximal rationalization of social order based on the priority of “rational egoism” and the “atomic individual.”

The Protestant messianism of American geopolitics is thus combined with the proposal of a universal market model of governance and the liberal system of cultural values.

“The Evil Empire”

For many centuries, the main geopolitical and ideological opponent of the West has been Russia.

This is entirely natural. On a theological level, this is rooted in the confrontation between Catholicism (+ Protestantism) and Orthodoxy and the opposition of the Western Roman Empire to Byzantium. The Western and Eastern forms of Christianity represent two choices, two paths, two incompatible, mutually exclusive ideals. Orthodoxy is oriented towards the spiritual transformation of the world in the rays of the uncreated Tabor light, while Catholicism focuses on the material restructuring of Earth under the administration of the Vatican [40]. Orthodox Christians praise contemplation above all, while Catholics worship action. Orthodox political doctrine insists on the “symphony of authorities” which strictly delineates the secular (the Basileus, the Tsar) and the spiritual (the patriarch, the clergy). Catholicism strives to spread the Pope’s power into secure life, thereby provoking responsive usurpation on the part of secular monarchs who aspire to subjugate the Vatican. Orthodox Christians consider Catholics to be “apostates” breeding “apostasy” which Catholics consider the Orthodox to be a “barbarian spiritualist sect.”

The most anti-Orthodox traits – including the refusal of service and many dogmas – were stretched to their limit by Protestants.

Rus was the direct and sole spiritual, political, and geopolitical successor to Byzantium after the fall of Constantinople. For this reason and this reason alone was it called “Holy Rus.” It was made “holy,” “God-bearing,” and “chosen by God” by the providential adoption of the Byzantine heritage and full faithfulness to the Orthodox tradition (including its socio-political and even economic aspects). It is especially important to emphasize that it is not merely a fact that Orthodoxy spread as a confession and lent this holiness. Orthodox churches exist in other countries and among other peoples. What is important is that the combination of the Orthodox faith with a powerful and free political empire, the Tsardom, and the Tsar in conjunction with the national Russian Patriarch ensured the dogmatic and theological, eschatological validity of its name. Strictly speaking, Rus ceased to be “holy” when the “symphony of powers” and the Orthodox political system was rejected firstly by the second Romanov (the split) and then by his son Peter the Great, the Westerner and liquidator of this sacred heritage.

Be that as it may, since the 16th century Rus acted as the main ideological and civilizational opponent of Europe. Later followed the prolonged geopolitical duel with England in the East, and, most recently, the Cold War.

History is not linear. It often backtracks, sidetracks, projects nuances, and accentuates paradoxes and anomalies. But the central line is evident. Without a doubt, there exists some kind of “Manifest Destiny” in a broad sense. It led the West to the American model, the American way of life, and to being a superpower. The East, on the other hand (at least the Christian East), became embodied in Russia over the course of centuries. The socialist faith in the golden age of the Soviet Russians was an absolutely symmetrical antithesis to the market-based eschatologism of the Protestant Anglo-Saxons. There was the “end of the world” according to the liberal scenario and its opposite, the “end of the world” according to the Orthodox-Russian, social, Eurasian, Eastern scenario. For them, this means total enslavement and rationalization. For us, this means total transformation and liberation.

The logic of history constantly highlights this fundamental dualism on many different levels, whether in the form of the USA vs. USSR, West vs. East, or America vs. Russia. In economics, politics, geopolitics, theology, and culture there is a frighteningly clear antithesis which has clearly unfolded in front of us, the plot of a global drama involving two poles of a physical and spiritual continental duel, a great war of continents.

Dispensationalism

Do Americans themselves recognize the theological background of their geopolitical confrontation with Eurasia and Russia? Undoubtedly, they do, and sometimes even more clearly than Russians.

There exists a particular Protestant eschatological teaching known as “Dispensationalism” (from the Latin word “despensatio” which can be translated as “plot”, “plan,” or “design”). According to this theory, God has one “plan” for the Anglo-Saxon Christians, another one for the Jews, and a third for all other peoples. The Anglo-Saxons consider themselves to be the “descendants of the ten tribes of Israel who did not return to Judea from Babylonian captivity.” These ten tribes “recalled their origins and adopted Protestantism as their main confession.”

According to the adherents of Dispensationalism, the “plot” for the Protestant Anglo-Saxons is the following: a troubling era will arrive before the end times (the “great tribulation”). At this moment, the forces of evil and the “Evil Empire” (when Reagan called the USSR the “Evil Empire,” he had in mind precisely this eschatological Biblical meaning) will attack the Protestant Anglo-Saxons (as well as other “born again” peoples), and a short period of “the abomination of desolation” will reign. The main villain of this “troubled epoch” (tribulation) is King Gog, and here lies a very important point: in Dispensationalist eschatology, this character has steadily come to be identified with Russia.

This was first formulated most clearly during the Crimean War in 1855 by the Evangelist John Cumming when he identified Russian Tsar Nikolai II with the Biblical “Gog, the Prince of Magog” – the leader of the invasion of Israel foretold in the Bible [41]. This line was once again unleashed with particular force in 1917 and in the Cold War era when it became the virtually official position of the “moral majority” of religious America.

God has yet another “plan” for Israel according to Dispensationalist teachings. By “Israel” they understand the literal restoration of the Jewish state before the end times. Unlike Orthodox and all other normal Christians, Protestant fundamentalists believe that they are related to the Jews still practicing Judaism today and are convinced that the Biblical prophecies on the nation of Israel’s participation in the events of the “end times” are to be understood literally, strictly according to the Old Testament. In the end times, the Jews are supposed to return to Israel, restore their state (this “Dispensationalist prophecy” strangely enough was literally fulfilled in 1947) and then be subjected to the invasion of Gog, i..e, the “Russians,” the “Eurasians.”

Then begins the strangest part of “Dispensationalism.” It is presumed that at the moment of the tribulation, the Anglo-Saxon Christians will be “taken up” (“raptured”) to Heaven as if on a “space ship or saucer” and there they will ride out the war between Gog (the Russians) and Israel. Then, the Anglo-Saxons, together with the Protestant “Christ,” will descend to Earth again where they will meet the Israeli victors over Gog, who will convert to Protestantism. Then begins the “thousand-year reign” and America, together with Israel, will dominate the stable paradise of the “open society,” the “one world.”

This extravagant theory, if not for certain circumstances, would remain in the domain of marginal fanatics. But…

First of all, one such convinced “Dispensationalist”, a sincere believer in the literal fulfillment of such an eschatological scenario, was none other than Cyrus Scofield, famous for being the original producer of the popular English Bible, the “Scofield Reference Bible.” which has sold many millions of copies. In America, this book can be found in every corner, and it was Scofield who inserted his own historical commentary and prophecies on future events authored in the spirit of Dispensationalism into Biblical text, thus rendering it difficult for the inexperienced reader to distinguish the actual Biblical text from its treatment by Scofield. Christian propaganda in the Anglo-Saxon world, and particularly in the US, thus intrinsically presents such “patriotic” American education, Manifest Destiny, Russophobic eschatological indoctrination, and outright Zionism. In other words, the newest form of the centuries-old ideology that lies at the heart of the dualism of the West in opposition to the East which we have discussed is fully embodied in Dispensationalism.

In some contemporary Dispensationalist texts, such “plans” are connected to the newest technological advancements, which then gives rise to a “nuclear Dispensationalism,” i.e., the consideration of “nuclear weapons” as some kind of apocalyptic asset. Once again, Russia (and earlier the USSR) is presented as among the “forces of evil” of the “nuclear King Gog.”

The person responsible for popularizing this “atomic Dispensationalism” was the evangelist Hal Lindsey, the author of a book interpreting prophecies titled The Late, Great Planet Earth [42] which has sold 18 million copies (in its time, it was the second bestseller after the Bible itself). An ardent follower of Lindsey was none other than Ronald Reagan who regularly invited Lindsey to lecture nuclear strategists at the Pentagon [43].

Another “nuclear Dispensationalist” is the televangelist Jerry Falwell, who became Regan’s closest government advisor and participated in Reagan’s private meetings and top military consultations in which questions of nuclear security were discussed. Thus, archaic religious, eschatological notions perfectly coexist with secular and progressive ones in American society along with high technology, geopolitical analysis, and brilliantly efficient systems of political management.

In fact, Dispensationalism itself remains inexplicable without considering the unconditional pro-Israeli position of the US which in fact quite often directly contradicts the geopolitical and economic interests of the United States. Protestant fundamentalists’ solidarity with the fate of earthly Israel as restored in 1947 – which in the eyes of Protestants was a direct and impressive confirmation of Scofield and his Bible’s interpretations – is founded on these deeply theological and eschatological tales.

For us, it is very important just how profound and sustained are the anti-Russian, anti-Eastern, and anti-Eurasian principles of American thinking. These are the depths of denial and hatred rooted in and carefully nurtured over the course of centuries.

The Final Trick of the Antichrist

Putting all the pieces together, we obtain a quite frightening picture (for Russians). The forces, groups, worldviews, and state formations collectively called the “West”, which after victory in the Cold War became the sole rulers of the world behind the facade of “liberalism”, profess a concrete eschatological, theological doctrine in which the events of secular history, technological progress, international relations, social processes, etc. are interpreted from an apocalyptic perspective. The civilizational roots of this Western model date back to deep antiquity and, in some cense a certain archaism has been preserved in them up to the present day parallel to technological and social modernization. These forces consistently identify us, Russians, as the “spirits of hell,” demons of the “order of King Gog from the land of Magog”, and as the bearers of “absolute evil.” The Biblical reference to the apocalyptic “princes of Rosh, Meshech, and Tubal” are revealed as an unambiguous identification of Russia – “Rosh” being Russia, “Meshech” being Moscow, and “Tubal” being an ancient name for the Scythians. In other words, the West, and particularly the United States’ Russophobia does not arise merely out of pharisaical care about the “victims of totalitarianism” or notorious “human rights.” Instead, we are dealing with a consistent and “rationalized” doctrinal demonization of Eastern European civilization in all of its aspects – historical, cultural, theological, geopolitical, ethical, social, economic, etc.

Particular attention should be paid to the multi-dimensional coincidence of the remotely distant conceptual levels of “Western ideology,” i.e., the convergence of the supporters of capitalism in the economic sphere with the theoreticians of individualism in the socio-philosophical realm, geopolitics on the strategic level of continents, and the brand of theology operating with the eschatological and apocalyptic doctrines of Dispensationalism. All of these elements converge in an unambiguous and constant identification of Russia as the “Evil Empire”, as the historical negative, and as the repugnant villain of world drama.

This is all very, very serious. World wars, the collapse of empires, the disappearance of entire peoples and races, class conflicts, and revolutions are but episodes of a great conflict, the culmination of which is supposed to be the final, apocalyptic battle, the Endkampf, in which we will play the most important role. In the eyes of the West, our role is overall and entirely negative. The role assigned to us is that of the planetary scapegoat.

The Western Antichrist is striving to convince the world that the real “Antichrist” is his planetary and spiritual enemy, that is, Continent Russia and its secret pole: us. 

Footnotes:

[40] See F.M. Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor and The Brothers Karamazov

[41] Ezekiel 38-39

[42] Hal Lindsey, The Late, Great Planet Earth, New York, 1977

[43] See Gregory Krupey’s The Christian Right, Zionism, and the Nearing Penteholocaust in Adam Parfery’s Apocalypse Culture, New York,1988

Author: Leonid Savin 

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Original article published by Eurasia: Informational-Analytical Portal on June 19, 2013 

Ideology and the political sciences as a whole are directly tied to the scientific paradigm prevailing in society. In its time, Cartesian logic influenced political processes in European countries just as the principles and methods of warfare (the continuation of politics in its extreme from according to Clausewitz) and diplomacy changed following new scientific discoveries. Religious worldview is also directly linked to political designs. European colonists in Latin America attempted to build “heaven on earth” just as the Jesuits projected their vision of the world onto Indian society not only in terms of ethics and behavior, but also in urban planning and territorial management. In the 20th century, the most striking example of the influence of religious ideas on politics was the establishment of the state of Israel and the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

The 20th century is also well known for new discoveries in science. Albert Einstein shifted understandings of the nature of physics and Ilya Prigogine reminded the world of chaos in academic terms. The theories of “superstring”, self-organizing criticality, nonlinear geometry, epistemological anarchism, dissipative structures, and complex thinking and others all left their mark not only on natural but also political sciences.

Immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the American diplomat Steven Mann appealed to new fields in physics to explain the nature of ongoing political processes. Drawing on examples from different spheres of research, he showed that the self-dissolution of the USSR reminds one of how a pile of wet sand can crumble once the moisture (for the USSR this was ideology) ceases to play a binding role following evaporation. Unlike his colleagues who were concerned with the collapse of world’s second superpower for the sake of the imbalance in the system of global security as a whole, Mann kept his cool and, as he wrote in his article “Chaos Theory and Strategic Thinking”, after the elements of a system disintegrate, they soon inevitably fall back into place. In the same publication, he compared the state to a computer and ideology to a virus which can be applied as an instrument in capturing a territory without any material damage. In the case of the Soviet Union, liberal democracy was supposed to fill the void of the former ideology after regime change and impose new values which would aid the former Soviet countries in pooling together their material resources and helping citizens transform into the obedient consumers and staff personnel of the new “computer” system. As we know, such a mechanism was introduced into the post-Soviet space and led to disastrous consequences.

But if new scientific discoveries explaining the nature of natural processes are applicable to describing political disturbances, then why can’t we apply them to contemporary geopolitical dynamics and integration processes? After all, Western militaries have long since been considering non-linear thinking, holist theories, and various academic schools and striven to apply them in conflict simulations, combat tactics, and strategy. It might as well be that the philosophical ideas of post-modernity (such as the rhizomatic existence and chaosmos theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) as well as more precise sciences preferring complex formulas and mathematical calculations will be sufficiently applicable in modeling new superstate entities, one of which is none other than the project for the Eurasian Union.

Such a term as “complex systems” utilized in modern science will come to be quite suitable for such a new formation. In addition, the presence of numerous actors associated with both the internal politics of this system and international relations compel us to appeal to yet another well-established designation, that of nonlinear dynamics.

Lets us see how a complex system operates in, at first glance, unpredictable conditions from the point of view of the new scientific paradigm the authors of which have long since been busy with such a trajectory. It is possible that such a theory will help us to predict the formation and development of the Eurasian Union as well as to avoid various mistakes in the future and circumvent diplomatic traps set by this projects’s opponents on the chessboard of global geopolitics. Of course, it is difficult to limit ourselves to just one or another new discovery. Bearing this in mind, let us being with the concepts of systems theory. One of the pioneers of this field was Lars Skyttner, whose monograph General Systems Theory: Ideas and Applications served as the basis for determining the very laws of a systems’ functioning. There are fifteen such rules.

1.The second law of thermodynamics. Although Skyttner refers to the redistribution of heat between bodies within a closed system, according to a number of authors this law is applicable to complex systems which are fundamentally open.

2.The law of complementarity. In the context of Eurasianism, Lev Gumilev developed the laws of complementarity between peoples. In systems theory, this law appears as the following: any two projections or system models allow one to acquire knowledge about one of the systems, as two systems are by no means fully independent or compatible. Accordingly, Paul Feyerabend and Nicholas Maxwell’s ideas on the existence of competing and alternative theories possess no less of a convincing base of evidence. Undoubtedly, the Eurasian Union is a project subject to numerous descriptions, sometimes even contradictory ones.

3.Holism. According to Skyttner, a system is composed of holistic properties which do not manifest themselves in any of its individual parts or interactions, while its individual parts consist of wholes which do not necessary appear in the system as a whole. In our case, the Eurasian Union is represented only partly by its system as a whole. The numerous details of which it consists escape from view. For example, the Eurasian space is made up of a great mass of different ethni and language groups which inhabit it. However, for one reason or another not all of the nationalities can make decisions pertaining to the supranational, international formation and, of course, not all languages can claim to be recognized as official languages of the union. Something similar can be said about the legal aspects of the union. Traditional laws and religion strongly influence a number of regions while in others they are totally absent. Moreover, the principle of holism leads to the necessity of interdisciplinary studies which reject the narrowness of “specializations” that are often insufficient for studying complex processes.

4.The “darkness” concept states that a system cannot be entirely known inside and out. Firstly, a given system’s elements themselves cannot be totally conscious of themselves and, of course, each one will be responsible for the information available to it in political processes. The armed forces of the US have attempted to solve this problem by means of establishing a global information network and network-centric foundations for combat operations in which the rapid exchange of information between each and every unit is supposed to establish situational awareness. On the tactical level, this is has been partially solved, but on the strategic and global levels such a task is still far from being completed. The deployment of new US bases and installations is partly explained by Washington’s desire to achieve informational superiority for controlling enemies and allies. However, due to fundamental disagreements on this matter by other states and the differences between political cultures, full spectrum dominance is unlikely to be feasible even by means of the US’ military strength. In connection with the darkness principle, the constant complaints of Western politicians as to the unpredictable behavior of the Russian leadership should also be noted. It is likely that these critics, from whose mouths such remarks are heard, have not yet matured enough to understand complex systems theory. After all, no-one  would deny that Russia is indeed a complex country in the broadest sense of this word.

5.The “80-20” principle, according to which the behavior of a system is formed 20% by its elements, while the remaining 80% is fulfilled by the stabilizing functions of the system, i.e., a kind of protective service. This concept in fact confirms the well-known theory that the minority is always behind both the establishment and death of states. The remaining masses are led by this simple minority (the “passionaries” according to Gumilev). This principle appears to be fairly clear. It is possible that mathematical modeling could contribute to an adequate allocation of resources (both human and material) in the creation of the Eurasian Union.

6.William Ashby, who deals with questions of cybernetics, i.e., control, was involved in the formulation of the law of requisite variety. According to this law, the variety of elements governing a system should be no less than the variety of perturbations input into the system. In other words, the greater the diversity of a system’s possible operations, the easier it will be to deal with possible deviations. Although this law is quite straightforward, some actions of the current leadership [of the Eurasian Union] display quite an inability to think in complex categories. Perhaps the very principle of democracy, with voter accountability and the need for a simple language and definite unification of terminology, is necessary in order to describe various operations. However, for such a project as the Eurasian Union, even in its initial format, quite a large number of alternative solutions for this or that issue will be necessary along with operational creativity. Undoubtedly, this involves the presence of this project’s detractors who see it as a serious rival and future opponent in the conduct of global affairs. It can be predicted in advance that these detractors will attempt to create a maximum number of obstacles which will manifest themselves in foreign policy as well as within the nucleus of the Eurasian Union. Therefore, it is necessary to be prepared for a great variety of perturbations in advance.

7.The principle of hierarchy. The word hierarchy immediately brings to mind either the pyramid of layered categories relevant to the agrarian period of human history, or the layers of political and bureaucratic ladders that reflect the principle of a state’s functioning in the industrial era. In the case of the Eurasian Union, however, such hierarchies are based on natural phenomena and consist of several integrated systems on each level. Thus, in complex systems hierarchy represents itself as a rather complex process instead of a single structure consisting of separated blocks. An example of this in international relations is presented by supra-state structures which need their own managerial language differing from the model used in the states themselves. Something similar to a new language that should qualitatively overcome existing ones must be developed for the Eurasian Union.

8.Modularity. Any system is divided into a certain number of modules. Researchers have noted that the spontaneous emergence of modular organization is peculiar to critical networks. The presence of such modules produces a system in which so-called “walls of resistance” appear which impede the passage of signals. This resistance can be posed by parties, bureaucratic officials, or the specific interests of regional or national elites. The Armenian political scientist Hrachya Arzumanyan noted in his studies on complex systems and contemporary security that modules are horizontal structures while hierarchies (as mentioned above) are vertical structures in complex systems which help one to better understand and instrumentally use a system, i.e., manage it.

9.Redundancy of resources. Such a requirement is needed for ensuring stability under circumstances of disturbances as discussed in the description of the law of requisite variety and the 80-20 principle. It should also be noted that an important condition of the information age is that supplementary channels of communication are needed for the obtainment of proper information and its robust protection. Information leaks or the intentional incorrect interpretation of information can be used to destabilize a system from within.

10.The principle of “large density flow” is also connected with the previous point. If the flow of resources through a system is large enough, then more resources will be available for coping with disturbances. This all seems quite simple, but in addition to the tasks of ensuring the stability of a system, the questions of quantum leap, development, and evolution are might also arise, i.e., those societal imperatives for the realization of qualified policies and new achievements in science and technology.

11.Lars Skyttner’s  principle of sub-optimization is defined in the following way: even if all subsystems are individually designed to operate at maximum efficiency, this does not mean that the system as a whole will operate at the same efficiency. Vice versa, it is possible to develop the most effective model for a whole system, but its individual elements might not live up to such. This brings to mind certain thoughts associated with the unification and standardization of administrative decisions and processes. According to this principle, it follows that there is no single organization or collective which will be effective at all levels of a hierarchy. Hence the conclusion can be drawn that adequate staffing and proper organization is necessary for integration processes. Criticizing officials is totally appropriate especially with the amendment to Vilfredo Pareto’s theory of the rotation of elites and its allogenic origin suggested by sociologists.

12.The next principle, which also bears relevance to the previous one, refers to the redundancy of potential control. In order to achieve a desired approach, it is necessary to possess a sufficiently thorough understanding of a system. But here a problem arises. If complex systems theory takes into account difficulties arising from the description of a model, then for political processes both in Russia and the CIS countries, the potential for effective action is clearly lacking. The increasingly pronounced dichotomy between the top and the bottom, dissatisfaction in society, and the Center’s misunderstanding of the situation prevailing in the regions should serve as a serious warning for those dealing with issues of integration.

13.The principle of causal negative feedback and positive feedback, which is also a staple of physics, is linked to the equilibrium of systems. With the presence of negative feedback, the equalized state of a system remains invariant to a wide range of initial conditions. Lorenz’s strange attractor also fits the description of this principle. Positive feedback produces the opposite effects. This phenomenon is also called the law of creativity since the consideration of a social system depends on examining different results from all groups at once with the most similar initial parameters possible.

14.The principle of relaxation deals with the following the following: if the relaxation time of a system is less than the average time between disturbances, then a system is likely to be stable. This is directly relatable to integration processes seeing as how they mean the rearrangement of economic, legal, political, and social mechanisms. If this re-organization goes too fast, then it will fail to adapt to and “digest” previous impacts. Of course, the sheer overlay of impacts creates uncertainty as to which decisions should be taken to arrive at certain results. In light of the modernization of society’s requirement of ruling elites, it would be fully logical to think about just how many reforms are good, how they are presented, and how long the “breather” should be between reforms so that unfortunate consequences in the style of “Perestroika-2” are not encountered.

15.The principle of spotting is a quite interesting postulate proposed by Skyttner which says that systems constructed on restrictive rules, where what is permissible and what is not are specified in advance, are less stabile than systems which develop randomly. At first glance, this appears to be a quite paradoxical idea. After all, the collapse of the USSR and similar experiences show that rigid, inflexible systems fall apart rather than chaotic ones. This is due to the change in the external environment of a system which drives the system to spend too many resources on following its single, pre-planned model of approach. This is rendered even more difficult when external players understand this and contribute to it from the outside. North Korea is perhaps the most exemplary such political model. The absence of strong dynamics in contrast to a rapidly changing context is particularly evident in this example. But in Russia and, more broadly, the countries potentially relatable to the Eurasian Union, the opposite is happening. Actions which might be contrary to accepted norms can often be directed towards the survival of a system and its effective functions. Of course, such a thesis is not an excuse for inconsistencies in foreign policy or justification for the efforts of oligarchical clans in the countries of the future Eurasian Union to defend their narrow self-interests veiled under integration.

We have briefly described the fundamental principles proposed for complex systems by Lars Skyttner. Yet there are still a number of attributes. In their time on the basis of interdisciplinary studies, scholars at the Santa Fe Institute developed methods for controlling complex, adaptive systems and other definitions. For example, the issue of emergencies inherent to the phenomena which we have discussed, albeit in regards to emergent states, was first discussed and described by them in examining the political processes which collapsed the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. At that time, the big players in Europe preferred to balance issues using suppressive methods against the disturbances which arose in newly-forming states.

The contemporary, no less active processes taking place on the periphery of Russia and at other points of the planet also hint towards paradigmatic geopolitical developments. But if earlier this appeared as a threat to nation-states, then today the idea of nation-state has sunk into oblivion and modern science even possesses an explanation for these processes. Balancing between order and chaos, which necessarily arise out of the properties of complex systems, and the pluralistic and non-linear thinking characteristic of their descriptions will be useful not only for explaining the changes already underway, but will also aid in designing the new reality of the Eurasian Union. The main task is choosing the right equivalents between current geopolitical perturbations and the theories of complex adaptive systems. This is at least totally possible on a theoretical level, and as an experiment it could be extremely useful for forecasting and modeling integration processes and possible threats against them.

Artwork: “Grozny” by Aleksey Belyaev-Guintovt (2004)

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 7 from The Russian Thing Vol. 1 (Moscow, Arktogeya: 2001)

The Third Position

In Samuel Huntington’s famous article describing the impending “clash of civilizations”, Huntington mentions a very important formula: “modernization without westernization.” This formula describes the relationship to problems of socio-economic and technological development experienced by some countries (as a rule, those of the Third World) who, while understanding the objective necessity of the development and improvement of their social systems’ political and economic mechanisms, refuse to blindly follow the West, instead striving to put some of Western technology – in isolation from its ideological content – in service of their traditional value systems and national, religious, and political characters. Many representatives of the elites of the East, having received higher Western educations, return to their home countries with important technical knowledge and methodologies which they then use to strengthen their own national systems. Thus, instead of the rapprochement between civilizations expected by liberal optimists, what ensues is the arming of certain “archaic,” “traditionalist” regimes with new technologies which render civilizational confrontation all the sharper.

To this insightful analysis can be added the consideration that the majority of outstanding “Westernized” intellectuals, cultural figures, and creative individuals were and are largely nonconformists, anti-system oriented people “of the East” who in studying the geniuses of the West strengthen their own critical positions. A characteristic example of such a path is that of Ali Shariati, the main theoretician of the Iranian Revolution. Shariati studied in Paris, mastered Heidegger and Guenon as well as several neo-Marxist authors, and gradually came to the conviction that a conservative-revolutionary synthesis between revolutionary Shiism, mystical Islam, socialism, and existentialism was needed. Shariati was then able to bring the Iranian intellectual elite and youth to revolution who otherwise would have hardly recognized their ideals in the gloomy traditionalism of the Mullahs. This example is especially important since we are dealing with a successful revolution which ended in the complete victory of an anti-mondialist, anti-Western, and conservative-revolutionary regime.

The same path was walked by the Russian Slavophiles who borrowed various models from German philosophers (Herder, Fichte, Hegel) which would come to form the basis of their purely Russian national conviction. Such is also the method of the contemporary Russian Neo-Eurasianists who are creatively processing the non-conformist doctrines of the European “New Right” and “New Left” in the interests of Russia.

The Autarchy of Large Spaces

Fleshing out the concepts of “modernization” and “Westernization” itself is of tremendous value. After all, the West is doing everything that it can so that both terms are rendered synonymous in mass consciousness. According to this logic, it turns out that change and reform are possible only if they are oriented towards the West and copy Western models. The alternative is presented as “stagnation,” “archaism,” “conservatism,” inefficiency, and a lack of dynamism. Thus, the West achieves its civilizational goal by imposing the limits, laws, and criteria mastered by it on the rest of the world. This partiality and egoism of liberalism in relation to those for whom liberalism is promoted as a “progressive alternative” was brilliantly described by the genius theoretician of economics, Friedrich List. In his works, List showed that countries having long-since gone along the path of market economics and liberalism invariably benefit from the imposition of a similar model on those countries using alternative models. As can be seen, the “equal” terms of “free trade” in fact lead to the further enrichment of the developed market countries, and to the impoverishment of those which have attempted to follow the market path. The rich, in this case, get richer while the poor get poorer. Accordingly, List asserts, traditionally liberal countries (and primarily the Anglo-Saxon ones) excessively benefit from imposing their own model on everyone else, as this guarantees their obtainment of colossal economic and political profit.

But what is the way out for such non-liberal countries which, due to objective circumstances, are confronted with effective and aggressive liberal competitors? This problem was especially acute for Germany in the 19th century, that very country which Friedrich List was called to aid. His answer was the theory of the “autarchy of large spaces” which is an economic synonym for “modernization without Westernization.” It should be noted that List’s ideas were employed by such different politicians as Walther Rathenau, Count Witte, and Vladimir Lenin with enormous success.

The concept of the “autarchy of large spaces” implies that non-market states left in the conditions of harsh competition with market ones should work out a model of autonomous development which partly reproduces the technological developments of liberal systems in the severely restrictive framework of a large-scale “customs union.” In this case, “freedom of trade” is limited to the framework of a strategic bloc of states integrating their political and economic-administrative efforts in order to rapidly increase economic dynamics. In relation to the more developed liberal countries, by contrast, a protective customs barrier is raised based on the principles of strict protectionism. Thus, the scope for expanding the newest economic technologies is maximally widened while, on the other hand, this is supported by consistent political and economic sovereignty.

Undoubtedly, such an approach extremely discomforts the liberals of developed market states as it exposes their strategy, reveals their aggressive undertones, and effectively counteracts their geopolitical interference and, ultimately, their external control over those states which the liberals seek to transform into economic and political colonies.

Modernization and Sovereignty

Let us note that the thesis of “modernization without Westernization” is itself a conceptual weapon, the rise of which is extremely uncomfortable for the representatives of the West. For the West, what is most important is instilling a dualistic scheme in the public consciousness in which reformists and the supporters of change stand on the one hand against conservatives, the stubborn supporters of the past, on the other. As long as this equation is presented in such a way, then definite support is assured for the “Westernizing reformers.” But all that is necessary is to introduce a third element into this formula, and the picture becomes much more interesting. Besides the “Westernizing modernists” and “anti-Western anti-modernists,” whose confrontation always leads sooner or later to the victory of the “reformers” supposedly embodying the “future,” there appear the “anti-Western modernists” or “conservative revolutionaries.” The very fact of such a force as an independent platform, ideological bloc, economic model, and cultural front sharply aggravates the proportions of otherwise banal political confrontation. The “anti-Western modernists” stand for radical reforms, revolutionary changes to economic models, the explosive rotation of elites in vital spheres of governance, and the large-scale modernization of all spheres of life. But, on this note, the complete preservation of geopolitical, economic, and cultural sovereignty, the return to one’s roots, and support for identity remain an absolute and nonnegotiable condition. For them, both conditions – “modernization” and “sovereignty” – remain absolute imperatives which are not to be compromised under any circumstances.

In fact, even in the modern world we see various civilizational pockets in which individual peoples and countries continue to insist on preserving their identity despite all considerations of political expediency or economic efficiency. Serbia, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, North Korea, Libya, and Cuba are examples of such. Possessing insufficient conditions for compete autarchy, however, these regimes bear the costs of enormous sacrifices to defend their identity, opt for direct and extremely “costly” confrontation with the West by rejecting its diktat. The drawbacks of withholding autonomy could be easily overcome in the case of such an enormous formation as Russia, together with some friendly CIS countries and certain states of the “far abroad.”

The question lies only in political will and determination. The guaranteeing of resources is secondary in this case. Let us refer to the following example: in Republika Srpska in Bosnia, when I asked what was preventing the reaching of a truce in a specific area, I received an astonishing response from a volunteer militiaman: “That there mountain, that little mountain, is famous in Serbian chronicles from the Middle Ages. Now she is in the hands of the enemies. There’s nothing on it – no strategic points, no useful minerals, no industrial enterprises – it’s just a piece of land. But a piece of Serbian land. We’ve already buried several hundred of our fighters there. We’ve been offered peace in exchange for that damned mountain. But we won’t accept such a peace. We need that mountain. That useless mountain…”

The very fact of national history and the span of national territory are fully comparable to the most serious utilitarian, technological, and economic parameters. Moreover, for most nations, such are worth even more – life.

The Conservative Revolution – the last imperative

“Modernization without Westernization” should become the main slogan of a “new course” which should unite the best forces from both the “conservative” and “reformist” camps. This new platform, if carefully developed and rigorously implanted in the consciousness of the masses, could instantly clear up a number of dark spots in our political and economic lives. Together with this, the subversive nature of the actives of those forces which either deny the necessity of reforms (the apologists of nostalgia and stagnation) or deny the necessity of submitting reforms to the national, geopolitical, civilizational, and cultural imperative (the agents of Western influence) will become obvious. Accordingly, in our critical situation, both of these groups should be kicked out of the political establishment and the central ideological, economic, and conceptual initiative should be delegated to the newly established front of “conservative revolutionaries.”

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold 

From The Conservative Revolution (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1994), The Russian Thing Vol. 1 (2001), and The Philosophy of War (2004)

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 8 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1991 edition) / Essay #6 from The End of the World: Eschatology and Tradition (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1997) / Essay #5 from Sweet Angel (Moscow, Arktogeya: 2000)

Our study of the sacred-geographical layout of Russia and in a broader sense Eurasia has led us to the necessity of considering the purely religious aspect of “Russian uniqueness”, i.e., the aspect directly connected to the Orthodox Church in which one of the most important elements of the identity of “Continent Russia” is concentrated. The vastness of such a topic compels us to choose but a single layer of the problem and determine an angle that will form the basis of our study. We believe that the most essential and most interesting perspective would be a consideration of the specificity of Russian Orthodoxy in the context of Rene Guenon’s works. In order to accomplish this or, more precisely, in order to lay the groundwork for such an approach which would offer unlimited possibilities for a deep and unexpected understanding of Russian Orthodoxy, we must first briefly outline the most important propositions of Guenon in regards to exotericism, esotericism, initiation, and counter-initiation. Basing ourselves on these provisions, we can then better and more clearly grasp the secret of Russia and the meaning of its historical mission.

Religion and Initiation according to Guenon

According to Guenon, Tradition (the entirety of sacred knowledge dating back to the primordial and inhuman divine source) has, in the final period of our cycle – the Kali Yuga, which has already been counting down for several millennia – been divided into two parts: exotericism and esotericism. Exotericism can manifest itself in the form of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or in a non-religious form (Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.) and represents the socio-psychological, ordering aspect of Tradition, i.e., the face of Tradition oriented exclusively outwards toward people and made available to all members of traditional society without exception. Esotericism, for its part, is the purely spiritual sphere. On this level, Tradition appeals to the “elite” and the “chosen” who have been called to go deep into sacred doctrines and myths. Esotericism is the underside of Tradition, while exotericism remains the outer side.

Religious society conventionally has two types of rituals intended for the induction of the neophyte into the bosom of the Sacred. The first is acceptance into an exoteric organization (“conversion”) and the second is initiation, this time into an esoteric organization. Initiation is the foundation of esotericism, and in certain cases it can be constructed not only as a ritual, but also a complex of associated esoteric and symbolic doctrines, or even as a manifestation of concrete spiritual influences exceeding the scope of the outer, exoteric tradition.

According to Guenon, the existence of precisely such a dual structure in traditional society is a necessary condition for any society to be considered normal and fully-fledged.

The uniqueness of Christianity

Such a schematic presentation, however, requires special explanation in regards to the Christian religion. Guenon believed that the Christian tradition, unlike Judaism and Islam, was originally incomplete, possessing only an esoteric and initiatic level. As evidence of this is cited the absence of a consideration in the New Testament of any legal or social dimension which constitutes the essence of any exotericism. Only in later eras did Christianity “descend” to the exoteric level in adopting the socio-religious basis of a revised code of Roman law. This original and essential esotericism of the Christian tradition should be borne in mind in order to understand further considerations.

The Shiite problem through the lens of Henry Corbin

The image of Tradition divided into internal and external spheres is particularly inapplicable in the special case of Shiism in the Islamic tradition. The most authoritative Western scholar of Islam, Henry Corbin, pointed out this very interesting feature of Iranian Islam, which is by and large Shiite. On the one hand, Shiite Islam is replete with numerous explicit references to esotericism and the foundation of Shiite doctrine particularly rests on the recognition of the central place of the “light of the Imamate” and the sacred mission of Ali, the first of the imams whose figure corresponds to the deeply esoteric level of the Muslim religion. On the other hand, “Sufi” initiatic organizations are least widespread of all in Shiism. Corbin asserts that Shiite Sufism is a rare encounter and, thus, Shiite Islam does not comply with the norm of the strict division of tradition into external and internal planes as is the case in Sunni Islam. Guenon himself, however, recognized that Iranian Islam was a special phenomenon and he associated its absence of bans on the depiction of humans or animals in sacred art (such bans are strictly observed in Sunni Islam) with the specific Aryan origin of the Iranians who, in comparison to Semites, are much less inclined toward idolatry.

In Shiism, and particularly in Iranian Shiism, we are thus dealing with an esoteric tradition more open and less formalized or institutionalized than at-Tasawwuf and Sufism. In the case of extreme Shiism (“Islamism”) this is totally evident given the virtual absence of any exotericism at all.

It should also be noted that the Iranians occupy the more “eastern” geographical and intellectual regions of the Islamic Umma, or in more general terms the Caliphate (let us recall the “Oriental Theosophy” of Suhrawardi). 

Orthodoxy and the East

Taking the above-mentioned into account, an analogy can be suggested between Catholicism and Sunnism on the one hand and Orthodoxy and Shiism on the other. Firstly, unlike in Catholicism, it is practically impossible to record any special esoteric organizations in the history of the Eastern Church, whether hermetic orders, companionships, or gnostic brotherhoods. Despite their absence, however, the esoteric underpinnings of Orthodoxy can be clearly traced and are evident in the sacred architecture of churches, initiatic iconography, and a widespread apophatic theology (which was practically erased by exoteric Catholicism with the introduction of the dogma of the Filioque)[1], as well as in the monastic contemplative practices in Hesychasm, the Old Believers, and the traditions of the Holy Fools, etc.

Secondly, Orthodoxy never evolved into a purely social religion, but remained above this level. The Orthodox Patriarch, unlike the Pope, is first and foremost the spiritual center of the Church, and who does not directly influence public and political life. The social role of the Roman Pope was indeed the subject of severe criticism of Catholicism expressed by the Orthodox. It can be said that this “descent” of Christianity into society which existed in the West never happened in the East. In some sense, the “Ghibelline archetype” was realized in Russia with the Sacred Emperor as the center of the state and the Patriarch fulfilling strictly sacred functions [2].

Thirdly, this “Ghibelline archetype” mentioned above was embodied in the sacred attitude towards the Russian Tsars. It was the Tsar who was the sacred center of the Russian imperial ecumene in whose figure were concentrated all of the immanent religious energies of the [empire’s] peoples. Unlike Catholic eschatology, in which the “anti-Pope” and the usurpation of the throne of St. Peter are discussed in an apocalyptic sense, Orthodox prophecies never mentioned an “anti-Patriarch.” Instead, all negative, counter-sacred forces are gathered in the singular personage of the “anti-Tsar,” the “Antichrist-Emperor.” In principle, this “Ghibelline” aspect is typologically close to the Shiite understanding of the sacred nature of Authority, as Shiite doctrine (unlike Sunni) insists on the rule of only the Aliites, the sacred descendants of the first of the Imams. The Shiites believe that no-one outside of this line has any “sacred” or “initiatic” right to rule.

Fourthly, the eastern geographical location of Russian Orthodoxy logically puts it in close proximity to the lines of the eastern fathers, i.e., the saintly fathers from Greece, Anatolia, Syria, Lebanon, Cappadocia, etc.

Fifthly, the tradition of “Hesychasm”, or “light gnosis” from the first anchorites and the Athos monastery was not the product of some kind of formal organization within the framework of Russian Orthodoxy. Hesychasm literally permeates the Orthodox tradition all the way to the point of its extern aspects. Of course, the division between internal and external aspects remained, but there have never existed any structural differences between the Hesychasts and Old Believers on the one hand, and the clergy and believers on the other. This differs from the strict organization of initiatic orders in Catholicism, where this border is clearly marked.

Sixthly and finally, the esoteric specificity of Orthodoxy has been preserved in Church ritual itself and particularly in the presence of iconostasis [3] which separates the altar of the Sacrament from the laity. Catholic ritual involves the openness of the altar, its accessibility to viewing by all the laity at any time during service and outside of it. Thus, the sacrament of the altar is genuinely exoteric and “descends” to the outer level. In Orthodoxy, however, the gates of Iconostasis – the Royal Gates – are open only for a short period during the key moments of the liturgy (the exception being on certain holidays). This symbolizes the unique revelation of the apophatic, unknowable Principle on the other side of the cataphatic vision of the sacred world which in a normal state is presented only by symbols – the images of iconostasis, the Deeisis near, etc., as if they replace the altar. This unique feature of Orthodox ritual is connected to the historical absence of a developed “scholastic” and rational theological tradition in Russia, as theology itself in the Orthodox Church relates to the initiatic and super-rational level, whereas the openness of the altar in the Catholic Church relates the sacrament to the sphere of the rational and dogmatic. When the Catholic believer is in search of initiation, he must to appeal to special non-church authorities (esoteric communities, brotherhoods, associations, etc.), but the Orthodox can attain such as desired in the liturgy itself and enter into the most profound transcendent dimension without the aid of other sacred institutions.

Thus, it should be grasped that the Orthodox Church, similarly to the Shiite trend in Islam, is not subject to the strict division into exoteric and esoteric levels, this being true at least on the level of its archetypal organization of the sacred system. However, this does not mean that all of Orthodoxy is esoteric or that all the Orthodox are esotericists. Without a doubt, the division of “internal” and “external” planes is maintained in Orthodoxy as it is everywhere else depending on the personal qualities and “spiritual caste” of this or that human being. However, in our case, this division is not formalized, and the degree of initiatic quality depends exclusively on the internal nature of the believer and his efforts to realize his given spiritual possibilities.

Of course, the degree of spiritual realization strictly corresponding to the general structure of the initiatic sphere is preserved in Orthodoxy, but its character is more flexibly and less structured than it is in closed esoteric organizations.

The question of “virtual initiation”

Speaking of initiation, Guenon distinguished between “virtual initiation” and “effective” or “realized” initiation. From his point of view, the Christian religion, since becoming “exoteric,” cannot offer any sort of “initiation.” In Catholic ritual and in the Catholic scarament, purely spiritual energies of the same nature as in initiatic rituals are also in action, but they are not oriented towards perfect interiorization and, consequently, affect only the outer side of the individual structure of believers. “Salvation” is guaranteed, but the path to higher, super-individual levels of existence is not opened as happens in purely esoteric mysteries.

However, an initiation received by means of esotericism might remain a forever “virtual,” untapped possibility if there is a lack of knowledge of the secrets of the “initiatic work,” the “Great Work,” or if the “dedicated” prefers to use the “wealth” attained for goals opposite to the great goal of spiritual exaltation and the realization of purely heavenly, spiritual states.

Orthodox Initiation

Building on the particularities of the Orthodox Tradition and basing ourself on the typological parallel with the Shiite tradition, an extremely important conclusion can be drawn: Orthodoxy is an operative instrument for transferring “virtual initiation.” Thus, Orthodox ritual itself, unlike Catholic ritual, preserves an initiatic character peculiar to original Christianity.

On the symbolic level, the Church of St. Andrew the First-Called – the Orthodox Church – never fully separated itself from the esoteric Church of St. John, as happened in the case of the Church of St. Peter.

In addition, the Medieval legend of “the Kingdom of Prester John” located somewhere in the East, can be symbolically related not only to the main sacred center of the Primordial Tradition, but also by analogy to Russia itself where, in fact, “John” (Ivan, Ioan) has always been the most widespread name.

This particularity and uniqueness of Russian Orthodoxy has its doctrinal reflection in the Orthodox “Formula of Faith,” in which the rejection of the Catholic innovation of the “Filioque” – i.e., the assertion that the Holy Spirit comes not only from the Father, the First Entity of the Trinity, but also from the Son, the Second Entity – bears the character of a rejection of “mediating” entities between the sacred, spiritual Cosmos (the “Holy Spirit”) and the Genesis. In other words, it rejects exotericism as a mediating force between the believer and initiation. The omnipresence of the Holy Spirit and its direct link to the Father, along with the apophatic hypostasis of the Trinity, means a direct totality of the “Spiritual Light” accessible to the Orthodox which permeates Being in every sense and opens the initiatic “dispensation” in Orthodox life. This Orthodox principle of “divine dispensation” [literally “house-building” in Russian – J.A.], which is central to the entire Eastern Church and its practices, precisely corresponds to the “church-dispensation” [literally “church-building” in Russian – J.A.] line of Western Christian initiation pronounced in the sphere of special non-church organizations of the initiatic type later concentrated in “Christian Masonry” and “campanionships” [4].

Such an initiatic phenomenon in Orthodoxy and especially the absence of the Filioque explain the fact that, unlike Catholic esotericism, in Orthodoxy there are no traces to be found of “hermeticism” as a separate and independent discipline. As a sacred cosmology, “hermeticism” actually focuses on the consecration of the Sacred Cosmos – the realm of the Holy Spirit – as the direct product of the Father, i.e., in the forthright “God-likeness” of the Cosmos, the “theophany” of the Cosmos free from the passage of the “censorship of Logos.” If in full-fledged theology the Logos-Son is naturally shifted onto the supra-individual level that is transcendental in relation to the human mind, then in terms of the degeneration of theological consciousness this hypostasis of the Holy Trinity is in danger of being identified with the human mind which is price sly what happened in Catholic teleology beginning with the exclusion of the apophatic approach. This reaches its conclusion with “rationalism” and “humanism” of a semi-profane character.

Orthodox doctrine, by virtue of its natural, “informal Hermeticism” did not undergo a similar transformation and has preserved its initiatic, super-individual and super-rational nature.

Here it should be noted that there is a second, equally troubling aspect of the arrangement under examination. Being common to the entire people without a strict division into “elite” and “common” forms of spirituality, the Russian Orthodox Church is also posed with the risk of offering mere “virtual initiation,” albeit of a different type than that in the Catholic tradition. In the majority of cases, the “virtual initiation” afforded by Orthodoxy to all Christians can fail to be taken to its logical conclusion in the form of a positive and final goal which, on the one hand, is totally understandable taking into account the necessary difference between the inner nature of people and the overall exclusivity of a fully-fledged initiatic path (there many “called”, but very few “chosen”). On the other hand however, this orientation towards the “super-personal” or “beyond-personal” aspects of apophatic Orthodox theology serves almost exclusively the discursive and rational forms of initiatic doctrines, sometimes extremely important at the preparatory stage. Thus, the realization of “virtual initiation” gradually becomes more and more problematic.

Of course, the chosen, the saints, the elders, and the monks, or any simply exceptional personalities can indeed reach the end of this path, but the majority are compelled to limit themselves to mere “virtual initiation.” Such a stipulation especially explains the phenomenon of the widespread tradition of “Holy fools” in Rus, i.e., those people who have acquired the opportunity of spiritual contemplation, but are incapable of harmoniously combining it with the normal functioning of the individual, rational level of their personality. On the other hand, “Holy foolishness”, as a phenomenon of Russian spirituality, is a particularly telling aspect of Russian Orthodoxy which once again confirms the Eastern Church’s initiatic nature (after all, without any special “initiation,” no holy fools would have existed). The difficulty associated with the complete realization of “virtual initiation”, however, is thus quite clear.

The dark mystery of Cosmism

When Rene Guenon spoke of the “counter-initiatic” organizations of the West, he of course did not put quotation marks around the issue, as the very nature of this topic demands certain precautions. After all, if one summates all of what Guenon said on this question (including in the form of innuendos and assumptions), the following picture unfolds: in the past centuries, “counter-initiation” has manifested itself all the more clearly in the degraded initiatic organization of the “hermetic type” in the West. This can refer to the “offshoots of Masonry” as well as neo-Rosicrucianist or neo-alchemic organizations. These groups, which inherited the secrets and rituals of “virtual initiation”, gave rise to a whole range of pseudo-initiatic occult and theosophist societies in the 19th century which later formed the basis of what has acceptably been called “neo-spiritualism” (Guenon ranked magnetism, spiritism, the theosophism of Madame Blavatsky and Bezan, the occultism of Papus, the anthroposophy of Steiner, and all the extensions and variations of such neo-mysticist and pseudo-esoteric trends as “neo-spiritualisms.” Today the majority of such neo-spiritualist organizations are united under the sign of the syncretic “New Age” movement). Neo-spiritualism itself is not directly “counter-initiatic”, but is an instrument aimed at the destruction of the remnants of the true Tradition in the West under the guise of a “return to spirituality” which in turn leads the profane into the abyss of dissolution in psychic chaos. In turn, “counter-initiation” belongs to a much deeper level of reality, being associated with what has been called the “Devil’s Mission.”

Rene Guenon considered the “Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor”[5] to be one of the most dangerous counter-initiatic organizations. The line is drawn from this to all the more massive neo-spiritualist tendencies, including even those sometimes opposed to its teachings, such as Theosophism, occultism, perverted neo-Hinduism (“Auroville,” Sri Aurobindo Ghosh) and others. It is extremely telling that the doctrine of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was called “the Cosmic Philosophy,” “the Cosmic Doctrine”, or sometimes “Cosmism.” The essence of the “Cosmism” of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor consists of contact with the “cosmos” or “cosmic consciousness” which means the attainment of the “light nature” of the Cosmos (the “light” theme is embodied in the very name of the order, Luxor, the Egyptian city whose name is similar to the Latin word Lux or “light” and the name Lucifer, or “light-bringer”). The “Cosmic Doctrine” concentrates all attention on the “psychic” or “subtle” plane, practically identifying the “spritual” and the “super-psychic” with that of the “soul” or “mental” element [6]. This is not a special form of philosophically abstract “pantheism”, but a “magical,” “concrete”, “operative” and “aggressive” one. Besides actually ignoring the transcendental aspects of the Spirit, the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor’s Comism also threatened transferring many “initiatic” sacred and spiritual symbols and rituals to the “mental” and material level which entails a “parodying” of true initiation and its grotesque and dangerous imitation. The members of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, possessing indisputable paranormal capabilities, were not only the first to formulate the foundations of “neo-spiritualist” theories, but also through provoking mysterious phenomena achieved their speedy introduction in to the most diverse cultural and scholarly environments. Historically, the roots of this secret society date back to several German Masonic lodges of the 18th century in which the members of the highest degree practiced “operative magic.” Roots can also be traced back to the unconventional Masonry of the Egyptian Rite (the Memphis-Mizraim) and the “sexual magic” groups of Randolph which displayed considerable “Satanic characteristics.” In fact, the Cosmism of the counter-initiatic Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor was later inherited by openly Satanic centers such as the Order of the Templars of the Orient (O.T.O.) of Kellner and Aleister Crowley, which called itself the “Beast of 666.”

If we turn to Russia in the second half the 19th century, we discover a quite striking phenomenon which was called “Russian Cosmism” whose most famous representative was Nikolay Fedorovich Fedorov, the author of the famous work The Philosophy of the Common Cause. In Fedorov’s biography there is no mention of any contact with “counter-initiatic” organizations, but his works remain a compendium of counter-initiatic doctrines that almost exactly match those of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. Fedorov even maintained the theory of “artificially resurrecting the dead” which Tradition considers to be an outspoken sign of the “Kingdom of the Antichrist.” In addition, Fedorov’s ideas to a certain extent formed the paradigm for the transfer of spiritual, symbolic, and religious doctrines to the psychic-materialist level. Among these we find the theories of “the management of atmospheric phenomena,” the “conversion of churches into museums,” and, finally, the “project for establishing a universal and indivisible human brotherhood to include all the ‘resurrected love of the ancestors’ and become the crown of history.” Fedorov’s moral utopianism and pantheistic messianism inspired a number of Russian philosophers, scholars, writers, and theoreticians and, what’s more, his “Cosmism” was extremely popular in “Bolshevik” circles, who identified the “brotherhood of the risen and resurrected” (sic!) with communism. In some sense, the ideas of Fedorov reflected the exalted revolutionary messianism of the era.

However, Fedorovist Cosmism in fact possesses a purely Orthodox Christian form which was not the only (although perhaps the most striking) manifestation of counter-initiatic Cosmism in Russia. In a broader sense, Russian Cosmism can be called a clearly formulated tendency of Orthodox “virtual initiation” which (if we recall its universal nature ensured by the mere fact of confessional belonging) was realized not by means of positive ascent from the mental world to the purely spiritual, heavenly, super-individual one, but by means of “fusing” with the intermediately psychic world, that is, the “thin Cosmos.” In this Cosmisist specificity, “natural” Russian “counter-initiation” negatively affected the issue of the Filioque just as how if the path from the spiritual universe, from the Cosmos of the Holy Spirit to the apophatic Principle of the Father itself is not completed, then no mere “rational” or “formalized” structures can hold back individual beings from “fusing” with the subtle plane and immersing in the Chaos and excitement of what Tradition calls the “Lower Waters.” Russian Cosmism is thus the ultimate form of degradation of the “Orthodox Holy Fooldom”, a demonic form of this foolishness in which the “Holy Fools of Christ” become the “Holy Fools of the Antichrist.” It is this character of Cosmism which sharply distinguishes practically all of Russian philosophy, science, and culture from European profanity just as how “Cosmisist” consciousness is drawn specifically to the non-rational, paradoxical, and powerful node of “subtle” energy which breaks through the structure of logical constructions.

If in Russia in the 20th century the most heinous persecution of the Church was indeed carried out under the communist regime, then we should see in this the “natural counter-initiation” of the Orthodox nation deprived of its vertical, holy perspective which, for lack of rational, “logos-related” boundaries, lapsed into the extreme forms of demonic, aggressive, and anarchic Cosmisist “foolishness”, and above all the “foolishness of the Antichrist.”

Conclusion

The features of the Russian Church and its specificity which we have broken down might help understand the bizarre and strange world of the Russian conscience which is similar neither to Western nor to Eastern forms. In his book East and West, Guenon identified the Russians as a “people which imitates” the archetypes inherent to the “truly Eastern” peoples. In another place, he noted how “occultist” and “spiritualist” practices are widespread in Russia, something which he saw as evidence of Russians’ special propensity for “psychism.” Finally, he puts forth the quite mysterious statement that “Russian communism” is most likely something other than what it is commonly considered. Despite their criticality, these assessments indeed very fairly describe the Orthodox people, whose true spiritual elite, albeit too small and too weak, pushed “virtual initiation” to the point of universality, while at the lowest levels it is as if the masses imitated the possession of the true spiritual mystery of the East.

Perhaps the Russian idea of sobornost and “universality” (such as that of the Slavophiles) and later the communists and socialists’ idea of “universal equality” were in fact the expressions of a vague consciousness of the “general dedication” of the nation, its “universal brotherhood” (indeed members of esoteric organizations call each other “brothers” as do “lodges,” “orders”, and monastic communities). It also cannot be excluded that the Bolshevik Revolution was an explosion of part of this justified conviction of “universal dedication” seeking to cancel the “exoteric” hierarchy, the “master system,” as something unnecessary and vicious imposed by the “alien West,” the “Grand Inquisitor” of Dostoevsky, and as a social Filioque which leaving a barrier between the people and the “light Cosmos of the Holy Spirit.” But properly speaking, these same tendencies, only on a closed, conspiratorial level, also enlivened the majority of “counter-initiatic” organizations which were not only anti-Catholic but also foreign to the “socialist” and “communist” pathos. For example, Theodor Reuss, who initiated Aleister Crowley, the Beast of 666, into esotericism, was a known anarchist and socialist. However, in no other country or region of the Earth have such counter-initiatic, thoroughly Cosmisist, and mystical-communist trends manifested themselves to such an extent as in Russia, which for more than 70 years became the epitome of the “Red Woman” of the Apocalypse, the Whore of Babylon.

But even long before this period, in the dark political mysticism and plotting of the Time of Troubles (coupled with the succession of the Impostors), in the grandiose stagings of the Apocalypse by the sinister Emperor Peter I [7], in the grotesque parody of the Russian Enlightenment of the time of Catherine and, finally, in the disturbing and psychedelic literature (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Sologub) and philosophy (Khomyakov, Solovyov, Rozanov, etc.) of Russia, the sprouts of “the red Cosmos sowed by the virtual initiation of Russian Orthodoxy” matured and produced flowers that pointed not upwards towards the sun of Russian Holiness, the spiritual sun of Sergey Radonezhsky, Nil Sorsky, and Seraphim Sarovsky, but downwards.

The current state of Russia cannot be defined in purely economic or political terms. The seeds of “virtual initiation” (it should not be forgotten that even under the communist dictatorship the majority of Russian baptized their children!) are too significant and active to expect any kind of transformation of Russia into a purely secular, capitalist, or profane state of the “Western” model. The roots of the “Russian phenomenon” are too deep and tragic to count on such an outcome. The Russian soul and, more precisely, the complexity of those “Russians virtually initiated” who form the mystical body of the “Inner Church” cannot abandon their “initiatic” and crucial function. Either there will be a catastrophe even more frightening and deep than under communism or, contrary to all external circumstances, a “spiritual elite” will appear which will halt the rapid decline into the abyss, “instantly” casting the “Nation of the Red Beast” into the Spiritual Heavens of the Holy Trinity much like Christ himself, freeing Old Adam from the snares of hell. If the possibility of salvation still exists for our “counter-initiatic” civilization, then does “initiatic” Orthodox Russia not remain the best place for ascension?

Footnotes: 

[1] See Ver la Tradition; Nicolas Vardikhas Est et Oest N. 43, 1991. The Filioque is the dogma concerning the Holy Spirit’s coming not only from the Father, but also the Son (Filio) which was introduced at the instance of Charlemagne.

[2] Guenon considered such a relationship between “spiritual authority” and “temporal/secular authority” to be the only normal form, since it strictly adheres to the hierarchical structure of reality as a whole. It is important to note that “temporal power”, or the “authority of emperors and kings” is not considered to be something profane in Tradition. On the contrary, imperial sacrality is practically identified with the exoteric side of Tradition. Hence why Guenon, in his Christianity and Initiation, quotes Christ saying “Render unto Caesar.” This can be seen as a recognition and “sanctification” of imperial sacrality. The desire of representatives of “spiritual sovereignty”, i.e. the Church, to interfere in administrative and political issues (which is characteristic of Catholicism” is a sign of the degeneration of the spiritual nature of this form of government, and an attempt to restore the dignity of the imperial function which thus appears not as a phenomenon of usurpation by the kshatriyas (warriors; the second caste) of the first caste (“priests”), but rather the legitimate defense of certain sacred rights. This observation helps to explain why Guenon himself, being a radical opponent of the “revolution of the Kshatriya” and an unequivocal support of the superiority of the “Brahmins” (the first caste) over the Kshatriyas (as opposed to Julius Evola), so sympathetically treated the Ghibelline tradition and in particular the great Ghibelline poet Dante Alighieri.

[3] It is important to note that the appearance of Iconostasis in the Ancient church chronologically coincides with the transition from esotericism to exotericism. If parallel to the actual “exotericization” of the Western Church the altar, as the “super-heavenly” (iperuranios) element of the Church became visually and spatially open, then the preservation of the altar in the Eastern Church meant its “refrain” from complete “exotericization” by keeping the esoteric element in the center of the church itself, not outside of it as in the case of Catholicism. Indeed, the “super-heavenly,” “hyper-Uranian” relevant cannot be exhibited for public meditation without changing the very quality of spiritual influences “theurgically” associated with this space.

But if the alter is kept a mystery behind the forbidden (for the exoteric) wall of iconostasis which both “unveils” the essence of the sacrament of the alter through the holy presence of icons of the Diesis type as well as “hides”such from unqualified view, thus allowing for a delicate balance to be maintained between esotericism and exotericism even without strict formalization. This in fact is the meaning etymologically contained in the term “revelare” which means both “to hide” and “to open.” A similar idea is inherent in the Latin word “coelus” or “sky”, which comes from the root meaning of”cover” or “cover over” thus connotating both “hide” and “open.”

It is also important to note the symbolism of the division of the Orthodox church into three parts: the altar, or “super-heavenly component,” the church itself, or the “heavenly component,” and the vestibule, or “terrestrial component.” Simeon of Thessolonica compared these three parts to the Holy Trinity, the three triads of Angelic orders, and the three categories of the Orthodox people – the presets, the “totally faithful” and the “leaning and converts.” Passing through these three stages of the Orthodox hierarchy typologically (or virtually) corresponds to the three phases of initiation: the “work of black,” “work of white,” and “work of red.” Upon the transferring of initiatic rituals to the masses of people, Orthodoxy undergoes particular in regards to the preparatory, first phase, “conversion” and “repentance”, as the baptized infant obviously cannot repent or become a convert, i.e. accept the theoretical aspects of the doctrine. The “work of black” is transferred to the post-baptism stage of a person’s spiritual realization, and the responsibility of “repentance and conversion” is taken over by godfathers and godmothers who act as a kind of “collateral” for the effective realization of the stage which is completed upon the infant’s baptism. In some cases, such a peculiarity yields an extremely negative result since the the spiritual absence of initiatic grain received at the time of the “second birth” ritual chronologically precedes the basic intellectual entry into the teachings of the Church. Consequently, such a presence does is bound to establish a special status for a person which, although raising him above the level of the profane, nevertheless makes it difficult to achieve consistent spiritual realization. Orthodoxy calls this prelest. The extremely widespread distribution of this phenomenon in Russia among parishioners demonstrates the seriousness of the cost which the Eastern Church has to bear in order to preserve its initiatic nature.

[4] Undoubtedly, in the last century Western Freemasonry has significantly changes its operative and initiatic character typical of earlier Masonry. In this case, we are dealing with the transformation of “virtual initiation” into “counter-initiation. Only in such terms is it possible to consider the activities of all of later Masonry to be anti-Christian, anti-Church, and anti-Tradition.

[5] As we have learned from a competent representative of one Western initiatic organization, Guenon was in the possession of the most accurate information concerning the Hermetic Brotherhood, since he himself apparently joined it in his youth!

[6] In Guenon’s opinion, this mixture is the main source of diabolical substitution which is unleashed by counter-initiatic forces. In his book The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times, Guenon explains in detail the “mechanism” of this phenomenon. The Devil belongs to the subtle, psychic world, the world of the soul. Purely spiritual regions, such as the realm of the Spirit, are closed to him. In the world of the soul, during special periods in cyclical history (such as at the end of a cycle), he may occupy a “central” position, but this “centrality” is imaginary and illusory. This illusion is obvious in reference to purely spiritual reality. Thus, the creation of the illusion of the “omnipotence of the devil” is possibly only under the condition of “concealing” the actual spirit level and placing the main emphasis on the medium, spiritual world in which the efficiency of the Devil is indeed overwhelming at times. As follows, mixing the spiritual with that of the soul is not only misleading, but a dangerous and malignant trend actively and consciously introduced into life by “Satan’s agents” or “Satan’s saints” (ali ash-Shaytan).

[7] See the colorful description of the “eschatological” amusements of Peter in Merezhkovsky’s The Antichrist. Peter and Alexey

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 8 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

Sacred teachings on race

The question of the racial layers of the Eurasian continent has occupied many researchers. In this regard, there exist the most remotely conflicting hypotheses and, moreover, not a single one of them is coherent and intelligible from a traditionalist point of view, that is, in regards to pre-history to which the origins of race date back. The views of modern scholars are so absurd and fantastical (due primarily to the influence of evolutionary theory) that their theories are even less acceptable in this sphere than in all the rest.

Moreover, it bears recognition that even within the confines of Tradition today, it is still difficult to find any more or less complete theories of the origins of races. The Biblical perspective which refers to the rise of race out of Noah’s sons – Shem, Ham, and Japheth – is either incomplete or its plausible interpretation has been entirely forgotten. Of course, it would be extremely interesting to compare the Judaistic and Christian theories of human races to even more extensive material, but this would demand a separate work altogether.

Here we propose to consider the mythological interpretation of the history of race based on the Oera Linda Chronicle, a document of the history of the Ingvaeones (whose authenticity has been disputed to the same extent that many have argued for it) [44]. We are dealing with a myth, perhaps not even a “new myth,” but a myth which presents the advantage of suggesting a reduction confirmed by the most general historical observations. On the other hand, the various interpretations of this myth so significantly impacted the very real socio-political history of the 20th century that this alone renders it deserving of careful consideration. The Oera Linda Chronicle contained in basic terms the general features which became, in a vulgarized and simplified form, the theoretical foundation of German racism. Everything that was scattered throughout numerous publications by Nazi “experts on the racial problem” is found in concentrated form in this text.

The Three Mothers

The Oera Linda Chronicle begins with a description of the origin of races:

After the twelfth Juulfeest she brought forth three maidens:—Lyda out of fierce heat. Finda out of strong heat. Frya out of moderate heat. When the last came into existence, Wr-alda breathed his spirit upon her in order that men might be bound to him. As soon as they were full grown they took pleasure and delight in the visions of Wr-alda. Hatred found its way among them. They each bore twelve sons and twelve daughters—at every Juul-time a couple. Thence come all mankind. Lyda was black, with hair curled like a lamb’s; her eyes shone like stars, and shot out glances like those of a bird of prey. Lyda was acute. She could hear a snake glide, and could smell a fish in the water. Lyda was strong and nimble. She could bend a large tree, yet when she walked she did not bruise a flower-stalk. Lyda was violent. Her voice was loud, and when she screamed in anger every creature quailed. Wonderful Lyda! She had no regard for laws; her actions were governed by her passions. To help the weak she would kill the strong, and when she had done it she would weep by their bodies. Poor Lyda! She turned grey by her mad behaviour, and at last she died heart-broken by the wickedness of her children. Foolish children! They accused each other of their mother’s death. They howled and fought like wolves, and while they did this the birds devoured the corpse. Who can refrain from tears at such a recital? Finda was yellow, and her hair was like the mane of a horse. She could not bend a tree, but where Lyda killed one lion she killed ten. Finda was seductive. Her voice was sweeter than any bird’s. Her eyes were alluring and enticing, but whoever looked upon them became her slave. Finda was unreasonable. She wrote thousands of laws, but she never obeyed one. She despised the frankness of the good, and gave herself up to flatterers. That was her misfortune. Her head was too full, but her heart was too vain. She loved nobody but herself, and she wished that all should love her. False Finda! Honey-sweet were her words, bat those who trusted them found sorrow at hand. Selfish Finda! She wished to rule everybody, and her sons were like her. They made their sisters serve them, and they slew each other for the mastery. Treacherous Finda! One wrong word would irritate her, and the cruellest deeds did not affect her. If she saw a lizard swallow a spider, she shuddered; but if she saw her children kill a Frisian, her bosom swelled with pleasure. Unfortunate Finda!She died in the bloom of her age, and the mode of her death is unknown. Hypocritical children! Her corpse was buried under a costly stone, pompous inscriptions were written on it, and loud lamentations were heard at it, but in private not a tear was shed. Despicable people! The laws that Finda established were written on golden tables, but the object for which they were made was never attained. The good laws were abolished, and selfishness instituted bad ones in their place. O Finda I then the earth overflowed with blood, and your children were mown down like grass. Yes, Finda! those were the fruits of your vanity. Look down from your watch-star and weep. Frya was white like the snow at sunrise, and the blue of her eyes vied with the rainbow. Beautiful Frya! Like the rays of the sun shone the locks of her hair, which were as fine as spiders’ webs. Clever Frya! When she opened her lips the birds ceased to sing and the leaves to quiver. Powerful Frya! At the glance of her eye the lion lay down at her feet and the adder withheld his poison.Pure Frya! Her food was honey, and her beverage was dew gathered from the cups of the flowers. Sensible Frya! The first lesson that she taught her children was self-control, and the second was the love of virtue; and when they were grown she taught them the value of liberty; for she said, “Without liberty all other virtues serve to make you slaves, and to disgrace your origin.” (http://sacred-texts.com/atl/olb/olb04.htm)

Such is the fundamental paradigm of the Oera Linda Chronicle. Three sacred mothers give birth to three sacred types, three paradigmatic psychological worldviews. The offspring of the three mothers are named accordingly: from Lyda the “Lydians,” from Finda the “Fins” and from Frya the “Frisians.” Interestingly enough, Africa was known as “Libya” or “Lydia” in ancient times (such as the time of Ptolemy) and the Lydians correspond to the black race. The Fins, according to the Oera Linda Chronicle are peoples of the yellow race, while the Frisians are the ancient Germanic tribes collectively denoted as the white race, the Aryans.

It is characteristic that almost the exact same paradigm is present in the Edda “Song of Rig” which tells of Rig’s (Odin’s) visit to three couples belonging to three generations. The visit paid to “grandfather and grandmother” leads to the generation of trolls, the “slaves” described as the negroid racial type. Rig’s stay with “father and mother” produces the Karl giants, the “owners” with the phenotypic traits of the yellow race. Finally, Rig’s coming to the “husband and wife” ends in the birth of the Earl, the prince, king, or aristocrat, endowed with all the Aryan attributes of blonde hair, blue eyes, etc.

The “Song of Rig” concludes at this point, having described the sacred structure of the castes and races in ancient Germanic society, but the Oera Linda Chronicle gives us a more detailed historical narrative abounding in important symbolic details.

Atlantis and Eurasia

The racial paradigm of the Oera Linda Chronicle has a clear geographic structure corresponding to the racial one. The “Lydians” inhabit the deep South and are hardly mentioned in the Chronicle.

The primary geographical territory where the sacred history of the Oera Linda unfolds is Eurasia, especially its North-Western region. The sacred center of the Frisians is situated in the North Atlantic in “Oldland” (or Atland), i.e., the “old country” (the word “Oldland” or “Atland” peculiarly resembles “Atlantis”). Following the sinking of “Atlantis,” this center is moved to the North Sea, to the lands lying north of present day Holland and Germany which were flooded only much later. The Frisians, the children of Frya, the Aryans, thus have their origins beyond Europe, their original abode being a sacred island. The Fins, the children of Finda, on the contrary, represent the indigenous people of Eurasia inhabiting all of the lands stretching from deep Siberia to the Iberian Peninsula. The peoples of Finda, accordingly, are the original Eurasians.

The ancestral home of the Frisians can naturally be referred to as Altland, Hyperborea, or the “islands of the joyful,” with the sacred center of solar Apollo. The northern location of the ancient Aryan lands confirms all of the sacred traditions of the Aryans such as the Vedas [46] and the Avesta (Aryan-Veja, the polar country) as in Greek and German myths [47].

Eurasia, in turn, is presented as the territory of the later distribution of the Frisians. Moreover, the spread of the Frisians has always been compared either to the ousting or the assimilation of the indigenous “Finish” population. According to the Oera Linda Chronicle, this paradigm of geographical relations is fundamental to all of racial history. The Frisians are the newcomers, the bearers of sacred knowledge, those “free in god” (Gottesfreien). The Fins are the natives who perceive this knowledge, the “servants of god” (Gottesknechten). The Lydians occupy the southern peripheral position of the continental structure and do not come into direct contact with the Frisians.

Types of culture

The three paradigmatic sacred races are differentiated not so much by external signs or psychological peculiarities as they are by metaphysical positions determining their cultural manifestations. The Oera Linda Chronicle thus suggests three variations of “racial metaphysics.”

The children of Frya, the “Frisians” (Aryans, whites) live in a state of primordial “democracy.” The Frisians’ law is internal, and therefore they are “externally”, absolutely free. The religious type of the Frisian is thus the “naturally dedicated” one. Its “I” coincides with the world spirit, Wr-alda. The sacred formula of Hinduism, “Atman is Bratman”, is best of all applied to the Frisians, whose “I” is identified as the absolute. The Frisians are thus peace-loving, happy, and enlightened.

The Frisians worshipped the feminine element, the Great White Mother [48], or Frya, the embodiment of racial gnosis, the “Aryan Sofia,” therein granting woman the priestly functions of carrying out basic rituals and preserving sacred knowledge. Every Frisian settlement had its own “Virgin,” Burgmagde, who acted as its highest sacred authority. This “Nordic matriarchy”, however, was purely intellectual, i.e., the woman standing at its center, the “goddess,” the daughter of Freya and her embodiment, was the concentration of the Frisians’ racial idea and divine purity. Sexual symbolism was completely absent in Frisian culture insofar as Frisian consciousness was maximally close to pure intellect and had no need for sensual “resistance” to spiritual reflection. Give that the idea of “liberty” was central to them, the Frisians had no slaves.

The peoples of Finda, the “Fins,” by contrast, lived in the conditions of strict hierarchy. They had lords, servants, and slaves and their laws were carefully proscribed, implemented only by way of authoritative coercion. Their god existed outside of themselves. They were warlike, aggressive, and prone to sensual symbols with idols, fetishes, and images of “gods” being characteristic of their culture.

The “Fins” lived under patriarchy. Man stood at the center of Finish civilization and fulfilled priestly and legislative functions, while women held subordinate, secondary oppositions. Physical symbols and the “naturalization” of primordial logos structures were characteristic of the peoples of Finda’s symbolism.

Finally, the Lydians had no clear laws whatsoever, even outward ones. They obeyed chaotic impulses in accordance with their decentralized cosmos. No hierarchy existed. At the heart of their social life were scraps of “Finish” sacred complexes, while promiscuity and semi-animalist matriarchy were characteristic for them. Thus, the Lydians often came to be slaves of the peoples of Finda.

Another important detail should be noted: “criminals” who betrayed the internal laws of the spiritual race could be found among the Frisians. As a matter of habit and as a dictate of their own consciousness, they withdrew themselves to a special territory which the Oera Linda Chronicle referred to as “England.” But sometimes it was such that the Frisian outcasts came to the peoples of Finda and became their higher caste, their lords and kings. Such “Frisians” formed a special type of people, a dynasty of “magicians,” “magi,” who put the sacred potency of the Frisian race at the service of the interests of the Fins. These “magi” became priest-kings and, properly speaking, the vicissitudes of the conflict between the Frisians and Fins in Eurasia only became so deep as a result of such “racial betrayal” of the “magicians,” whose intellect gave the Finish tribes the chance to really compete with the Frisians. The “magicians”, despising the Finish people, made them into their slaves and developed the basic tenets of an ersatz-religion which imparted the sacred knowledge of the Frisians into faith in “gods,” “spirits,” “demons,” and “images.”

The Frisians and Nostratica

The Frisians’ migration was not merely the spread of Aryan or Indo-European waves at rather foreseeable intervals. In the Oera Linda Chronicle, the white children of Frya correspond to the more modern presentations of the “Nostratic” porto-tribes, the carriers of the paradigmatic proto-language of Eurasia (and earlier that of the polar, now flooded land). The Indo-Germanic peoples were merely the last historical wave of the Frisians who were preceded by many other waves that laid the foundation of the pre-dynastic Egyptian, Sumerian, proto-Turkic, Kartvelian, and even Sino-Tibetan cultures. The “nostratic” intellect of the Eurasian and North-African languages corresponded to the traditional “Hyperborean” and “nostratic Frisian” paradigm which, being transmitted to one or another people of the Frisian type in one or another pre-historical people, gradually degraded, became detached, and lost its resemblance to the primordial, crystal hieroglyphs and subsequently transformed into belief in “gods”, “spirits,” and “demons.” Thus, the white race of the Oera Linda does not match the historical white race of the Indo-European races, but precedes it by many millennia.

It is important to note that Frya’s sons not only established the sacred, linguistic, and mythological base for the cultures of Finda’s type, but themselves reversed the effects of this degraded type. Thus arose the mixed, “Fino-Frisian” forms of tradition which, on the one hand, included spiritual cults of a “Hyperborean culture” while, on the other hand, bore typically “Asian” features. The Hittites, Scythians, Cimmerians, and Celts were such peoples. Moreover, many Indo-European tribes gradually absorbed “Finish” elements, such as the Germanic peoples of the Scaldic era, the Romans, Greeks, and Hindus of the post-Vedic period who were themselves quite far removed from the original “Frisian” state.

Such a presentation of the original white race of polar origin actually destroys the established notion of the Middle East as the focal center of civilization, writing, culture, etc. Moreover, in the logic of the Frisians’ migration, the Middle East appears as a later (in terms of pre-history) center of interaction between various streams of Frisian influence which flocked to the region from literally all corners of the world that were only then “Finized” in a most often distorted form, not a pure one. The Libyans, Takhars, and Amorites came to the Middle East from the West while the proto-Germanic peoples and proto-Celts came from the North. From the South-East came the proto-Turkic peoples and proto-Finns (this time in the historically narrow ethnic sense). The Ethiopians came from the South, and from the East came the Elamites and later the Persians and Dravidians. Thus, the famous concept of “ex Oriente Lux,” or “Light from the East,” or “Phoenician factor” in a cultural sense turns out to be not the source, but the distant consequence, a syncretic and simplistic summation of various aspects of the Frisian tradition brought there in already mixed, distorted “Finish” versions dating back to far more distant epochs.

Thus, the racial factor, as derived from the mythology of the Oera Linda Chronicle, perfectly accords with the modern linguistic “Nostratic” theory on the common origin of the whole spectrum of Eurasian languages [49]. On the other hand, the dialectical relation between the Frisian and Finish types in the sphere of sacred forms is key to understanding the many ancient transformations of mythological and religious complexes.

White esotericism and yellow exotericism

The main contradiction in the Oera Linda Chronicle is the confrontation between the culture of the “sons of Frya” and the culture of the “sons of Finda.” The meaning of this confrontation corresponds with astonishing accuracy to what have been called the “exoteric” (external) and “esoteric” (internal) sides of Tradition. Finda embodies the specificities of “exotericism,” as God existed outside of the “sons of Finda” as does sacred law. The Fin perceives himself as a “servant of God”,  the “lord’s property” existing outside of God himself. The Divine is thus manifested in such external images as idols and symbols which, for the sake of clarity, are supposed to possess a “naturalistic” character, the appearance of something concrete and tangible. The religious life of a Fin, just like his social life, is thus reduced to suppressing and punishing personal spiritual passions (in the case of religion), women (in the case of the family), or other people (in the case of social hierarchy), etc. At the head of the political and religious structure of Finish society stand the “magicians,” the “priestly kings,” who in relation to the people as a whole thus perform the function of the “subject” , the “incarnate deity”, or the mediator between the “lower” person and “higher” spirit.

The “children of Frya”, on the contrary, illustrate the “esoteric” level of Tradition. For them, God is within and is identical with sacred law and their own “I.” The Frisian perceives himself as “free in god” (Gottesfreie) and as an embodiment of freedom. For the Frisian, the Divine exists without an intermediary, outside of images or symbols. If the Frisian uses a symbol, then it is only a purely abstract, non-naturalistic, geometrically mathematical one. The religious life of the Frisian passed under the sign of justice and the rule of wisdom over deeds. He lives in a state of “aristocratic equality” and “harmony,” and inhibits no-one – neither his own feelings, since they concede with his wisdom and godly, “theophanic” worldview, nor women (who are absolutely obedient and are the material embodiment of the purity of his spiritual race, the white mirror of the world spirit, the guardians of the Nordic fire), nor other people, as he honors their freedom to be as holy as his own. Finally, instead of a priestly king, a “mediator” between people and the “gods,” the Frisians have the “White Lady,” the Great Priestess who is nothing other than their own racial substance and is not something external, but something internal, the tangible presence of the spirit uniformly distributed in each of the sons of the “goddess” Frya.

If we turn to historically known traditions, then we see a remarkably similar ratio between their esoteric and exoteric sides. If in some cases both of these aspects co-exist without conflict, then in other cases they are contradicted by one another which often leads to religious wars, reforms, schisms, and the rise of heresies. Thus, the dramatic confrontation of the Frisians and Fins in the racial conceptualization of the mythological, sacred geography of the Oera Linda Chronicle can be taken as a paradigm of considering the dynamics of religious reforms in Eurasia. The most glaringly evident example of this is the confrontation between Christianity (an esoteric, essentially Frisian tradition) and the later “residual” Judaism (which reproduces in itself all of the most characters signs of of “Finish” sacrality). It is also telling that the zone of Christianity’s historical spread coincides to a significant extent with the territories inhabited by the descendants of the last waves of the Frisian migrations, who preserved the memory of the “God within”, the “White Lady,” and the “God-given freedom of the supreme”, etc. more clearly than all the other “Finized” peoples.

The majority of Eurasian (and North African) ethni in which the Finish element is predominant converted to Islam, which has an emphatically exoteric character. On this note, it is extremely telling that the most “Frisian” aspects of the Islamic tradition, in particular Shi’ism (which highlights the mystical role of the Fatima, the progenitor of the “divine race” of the Imams, the “light of Ali” within believers, the thesis of the “lahut,” and the dignity of the Imams themselves, etc.) captured the areas predominantly inhabited by Indo-Europeans (Shi’ite Iran), while the majority of Finish ethni, such as the “Arabs” and “Turks”, are Sunnis.

As a hypothesis, it can be assumed that certain racial particularities stand behind the phenomenon of Islamic Sufism which is also a sacred from of the distinctly “Frisian” type. Although Sufism is widespread among peoples of the Finish type who are Muslims in their majority, it is possible that in the Sufi communities are grouped mainly those rudimentary sprinklings of other ethnic groups who, after dissolving into the general mass, distinguished themselves yet again, this time on purely spiritual grounds instead of ethnocultural criteria.

Democracy and Totalitarianism

The last two thousand years of Eurasian history and the dialectic of political transformations in Eurasian states can also be examined from a mythological perspective on racial types according to the Oera Linda Chronicle. All of the aspects of “aristocratic equality” can be assigned to the “Frisian” archetype while all “authoritarian,” “centralized,” and “tyrannical” systems accord with the “Finish” model. Of course, here, as in other cases, most often are found mixed versions containing elements of both structures since the peoples who acted in these epochs were almost all racially mixed without exception. Therefore, it is only possible to speak of things “relating to the Frisian variant” and “relating to the Finish variant,” in which the proportions of these two elements can substantially vary.

In essence, if we understand the racial particularities of the two fundamentally political paradigms of “democracy” and “totalitarianism,” then all the ambivalence of their confrontation becomes obvious, as does the essence of the disputes between “right” and “left” through the political history of the last centuries. “Freedom,” “equality,” and “fraternity,” are good for “free”, “equal,” and “fraternal” “Frisians”, and imposing despotic systems upon them would be a clear abuse of their racial nature. “Hierarchy,” “order,” and “discipline” are absolutely essential for people of the “Finish” type, while molding a “democratic regime” out of them will never lead to anything else but anarchy, disgrace, and degradation which naturally, logical ends in only greater “tyranny.” In this sense, we should understand the words of Plato that “democracy logically entails tyranny.”

The races of Russia

The history of the Russian state and Russia, lying at the center of the Eurasian continent, is significant to the greatest extent insofar as it brilliantly illustrates the whole complex of racial dialectics characteristic of Eurasian territories and ethni, albeit in a less obvious form. The pre-Russian history of the Slavs is above all tied to the last wave of the “Frisian” migration from the flooded island, the “Ingvaeones’ kingdom,” as the Slavs were originally, organically included in the Indo-European, Aryan cultural and racial bloc. At the same time, however, the history of Russia as a special geopolitical space represents something else.

First of all, according to the Old Russian Chronicles, Russian history began with the calling of Rurik to kingship which precisely corresponds to the “Finish” archetype of social organization in which a “Frisian” is called to be a priestly king, a “magician.”

Secondly, the “Chud,” “Mer,” and “Muroma”, i.e., “Asian” and “Finish” peoples, appeared among the Slavic tribes already in the first lines of the chronicle. Thus, we find the “Asian” sample at the very onset of the Russian state.

The later baptism of Rus and its feudal fragmentation are evidence of a strengthening of the “Frisian” factor, the “white” element, or carrier of the “white” religion which develops and begins to create the structure of “aristocratic equality.” In this period, the most “Gnostic” and “esoteric” elements of Russian spirituality were put into place, on the matter of which it is important to note that in some of the lands of Rus, and particularly in Novgorod and in general in the North, the “Frisian” model is rooted quite deeply and firmly. The invasion of the Mongols, the bearers of an obviously “Finish” model – hierarchy, discipline, and a developed repressive apparatus – tilted the (still far from absolutized) Frisian complex, thereby integrating Rus into the Yellow Empire which covered practically the whole of Eurasia except Northwestern Europe. But the Empire of Genghis Khan itself crumbled due to the expansion of the “aristocratic element” (once again the “Frisian” factor) among its rulers. Then Russia finally chose the “sons of Finda” type of state and took upon themselves the mission of uniting Northeastern Eurasia. Until the end of the Mongol yoke, the “Russian aristocracy” was constantly persecuted by the monarchs and the “Frisian” element was relegated to the purely religious sphere in the “equality” and “brotherhood” of Orthodox monasteries. After the long and more or less stable imperial period with the obvious domination of the “sons of Finda” complex, the “democratic” concept, already completely alien to the racial type of the Russian population, once again appeared in the form of the communist eschatological doctrine which heralded the beginning of a restoration of “Hyperborean,” heavenly proportions.

The races of Europe

The European zone of the Eurasian content is geographically closer to the sacred island, the cult center of the “sons of Freya.” Indeed, the “democratic” cultural type is found there much more often in history than in Asian or North-African regions. However, it would be a mistake to believe that Europe is inhabited only by “Frisians” and is therefore homogenous in its racial substrate. In Europe’s northern part, the “Frisian” element is mixed to a significant extent with the Lapp-Finic ethnos which in Eastern and Central Europe is phenotypically akin to the so-called “Alpine” race.  Western Europe is to a significant extent “Celtized,” and the “Celts” themselves were already a mixed people in antiquity according to the Oera Linda Chronicle. Finally, the population of Europe’s southern regions, the so-called “Mediterranean race”, bears a significant number of Middle-Eastern, Levantine, and Semitic racial traits. Thus, in their ancient, autochthonous Eurasian base preserved in the “Mongoloid Europeans” (and in particular the “Bigoudens” of France, who are indigenous French phenotypically indistinguishable from Paleoasiatic peoples) and in other non-European racial components (the Finnish, North African, Semitic and Turkic), the peoples of Europe are the descendants of the “sons of Finda.”

Given this racial heterogeneity, it becomes obvious that if European “Democracies” are to be stable, then they must be compensated by a fairly strict control of the “totalitarian” type. Herein lie the particularities of the modern “democratic” regimes of the West behind the facades of “equality” and “liberty” of which lurks a strict hierarchical system implicitly guiding the “Finish” herd in the right direction. The modern “magicians” governing Western societies, however, to this end utilize more refined and subtle means than the king-priests of ancient Eurasia.

The Nordic Tragedy

The Oera Linda Chronicle connects its sacred-racial approach not only to geography, but also to the logic of history. Here, sacred history has a cyclical character as the flowering of the spirit gives way to its decline, which yields new prosperity. In the Chronicle’s account, the main subjects of ancient history are the “children of Freya” whose victory is identical to the height of the spiritual world, and whose defeat is its downfall. The whole history traced by the Oera Linda Chronicle begins with the sinking of “Altlanda,” the “old land,” i.e., the history of the Frisians’ decline as the downward trajectory of the cycle. In the beginning, their “great Homeland”, Altland, is destroyed only for their new lands in the North Sea, which were at one point located in the shallows of the Dogger, to sink. Later, they are forced to migrate to Eurasia where they mix with the tribes of the Fins or are pressured by them. In the end, the treacherous magicians declare a real war on the Frisians and in their invasions interrupt the sacred tradition of the “White Virgins.” The last of them perishes at the hands of the magicians, and the sacred Nordic fire dies. Those who remain of the Frisians are scattered across Eurasia or indulge in sailing to unknown lands. A rather curious story from the Oera Linda Chronicle is that of the Frisian sailor named Inka (sic!) who sets off for distant lands never to return. Here it is worth recalling the theory of the historian Jacques de Maio of the “Viking” origin of the sun-worshiping Incans’ civilization. Be that as it may, the Frisians’ line descends lower and low while the peoples of  Finda, on the contrary, rise and gain all the more strength.

According to the prophecy of the last “White Virgin,” the misfortune of the Frisians is to last until the beginning of the third millennium (from Christ’s birth). At this moment, the decline of the Frisians reaches its lowest point, its winter solstice, only for the world spirit, Wr-alda, to once again breathe its “Od”, its “breath” into the white people and instantly revive “Frisian civilization,” i.e., re-enliven the divine Frya and save all of her faithful sons and daughters. Thus, the racial cycle of the Frisians also possesses an eschatological perspective and its own mysterious end. In the abyss of their fall, the Hyperborean ethnos, crushed by Finda and the treacherous magicians, is still destined to see the grandiose prosperity of its nordic culture and regain its lost freedom, “freedom in God.”

Return of the myth

The racial paradigm of the Oera Linda Chronicle represents a classic model of the mythological explanation of historical patterns. As with any myth, it sometimes intersects with scientific data and in some places exits into the dimension of completely unprovable postulates. But in the 20th century, the sphere of the myth did not disappear following positivist criticism and scientific enthusiasm but, on the contrary, once again found itself at the center of attention. A myth is evaluated not according to its conformity to objective reality (just as the concept of “objective reality” seems all the more unreliable and inconsistent), but by its virtue of impacting culture, the consciousness of people, and social transformation. The ethnic (or racial) interpretation of events has always been one of the most powerful, hypnotic, and most exhilarating.

It is no surprise that the Oera Linda Chronicle was at the center of attention in Germany in the 1920’s-1930’s when the national-racial interpretation of the world achieved its climax in Central Europe. At some point in real history, this myth turned out to have enormous influence on the course of events. Culture can be desacralized, but human blood and one’s native land will sooner or later make themselves felt and call to life the dormant archetypes of past ages. It is also no surprise that most prefer to ignore the topic of race today, and that the Oera Linda Chronicle has been safely forgotten. This is understandable, since the scenes of the last war are still fresh memories, especially since the European “Frisians” were determined to put the Eurasian “Fins” in their place.

The awakening of racial myth in its time brought monstrous catastrophe to Germany and the world. But the myth itself was not responsible for this, but the pragmatism and lack of criticality of its use. If the sacred is cast for a long time into the periphery of reality, then the surprise is that it will return in a monstrous, distorted form.

The return of a myth should be prepared meticulously and cautiously in advance given the consequences, and even catastrophic potential, of it getting out of hand in being brought to life.

Footnotes:

[44] In his comments on his edition of the Oera Linda chronicle (Ura-Linda Chronik, Leipzig, 1933), Professor Herman Wirth offers an analysis of the text’s content which allows three levels to be distinguished: the archaic layer, the additions by the Dutch copyist of the Enlightenment era, and much later insertions. It is significant those scholars who opposed Wirth’s thesis by pointed to the forgery of the Oera Linda Chronicle completely ignored his arguments, thereby replacing properly scholarly debate with “political” arguments and diligently criticizing the claims that the supporters of the document’s authenticity never even put forward. The inserts and stylization of the manufacturing of the Oera Linda Chronicle are unquestionable. the debate focuses solely on the presence or absence of an original document. In general, among the mass of colossal paleo-epigraphic and historical-religious heritage heritage of Herman Wirth, the Oera Linda Chronicle takes on a quite special meaning but, alas, this heritage remains entirely unexplored to this day.

[45] Ura-Linda Chronik, Lepizig, 1933, p. 1.

[46] See B.G. Tilak’s The Arctic Home in the Vedas. This work of the most prominent Hindu traditionalist and political figure attracted the attention of many 20th century traditionalists working on the subject of the Hyperborean origin of mankind mentioned by Guenon, Evola, etc. Moreover, there are grounds to believe that Guenon’s councilors on the Hindu doctrine were close to Tilak’s circle. Herman Wirth took this book of Tilak as the basis for his detailed studies of the origin of mankind. . See Herman Wirth’s Aufgang der Menschheit.

[47] A large numberer of mythological tales on this subject were collected by Evola in his Revolt Against the Modern World. See also H. Wirth’s Aufgang der Menschheit and Heilige Urshrift der Menshheit as well as R. Guenon’s Le roi du monde, Les formes traditionnelles, as well as Geticus’ La Dacia Iperborea.

[48] This matriarchal aspect of the Oera Linda Chronicle could not be more precisely related to the theories of Herman Wirth himself as to the primordial matriarchal structure of the ancient Aryan tradition. In this field, he followed the Swiss historian J.J. Bachofen (Gesammelte Werke, Basel, 1948). It is this specific concept of Wirth’s for which he was persecuted by Rosenberg, who was convinced of the patriarchal structure of ancient Aryan society. Julius Evola also criticized Wirth for this aspect of his theory, although he considered it in his own complex model of the rhythms of civilization contained in Revolt Against the Modern World. Evola believed that matriarchy arose during the secondary stages of the development of sacred civilization, during the “silver age,” while “primordial patriarchy” was restored by the heroic male civilization of the “bronze age.” Evola himself did not escape the persecution of the Nazi elite which investigated him for “whether this Italian baron understands the essence of ancient Germanic societies.” By order of Himmler, the esoteric Aryosopher and visionary Karl Maria Wiligut handled this. In his report to Himmler, Wiligut suggested that Evola was justified, but was still guilt of “undervaluing the role of women among the ancient Germanic peoples.” Rosenberg repressed Wirth for “matriarchy” and Himmler’s staff accused Evola of patriarchy. One gets the impression that the bosses of the Third Reich had not really engaged these questions…

[49] See the articles and books of V.M. Illich-Svitych, such as Materials for a Comparative Dictionary and Etymology (Moscow, 1967), as well as The Experience of Comparing Nostratic Languages (Moscow, 1971), The Correspondence of Occlusions in Nostratic Languages (Moscow, 1968), and the various publications of the Italian linguist A. Trombetti.

Author: Alexander Dugin

Translator: Jafe Arnold

Chapter 9 of Mysteries of Eurasia (1996 edition) from the collection Absolute Homeland (Moscow, Arktogeya: 1999)

Runology according to Herman Wirth

There exist several points of view as to what runes are. Some believe that runes are an altered version of the Latin alphabet that appeared in the 5th-6th centuries among the Scandinavians and Northern European Germanic peoples. Others suggest that runes were the ancient characters used for divination and recording texts which emerged only at a later stage and under the influence of Latin writing. These two points of view on the nature and origin of runes are considered to be the “scholarly” and “orthodox” ones.

But there is another theory of runes proposed by the German scholar, Professor Herman Wirth. We should mention from the outset that this theory is not recognized by broader scholarly circles. The reason for this neglect of Wirth is not so much his paleo-epigraphic and runological works as his assessment of the text famously known as the Oera Linda Chronicle, the story behind which resembles that of the “Book of Veles.” The Oera Linda Chronicle was discovered at the beginning of the 19th century and allegedly presented the most ancient history of the Germanic peoples (the Frisians) stretching back centuries to many millennia. The text was written in a special quasi-runic script and contained stories of pre-Christian mythology and the sacred history of the Germanic people. The Book of Veles (discovered only at the beginning of the 20th century) represented a precise analogue of the Oera Linda Chronicle, only applied to the Slavs.

Scholars immediately assessed the Oera Linda Chronicle to be an outright forgery dating back to the era of the Dutch Renaissance when some encyclopedist, shifting the mythological and geographical knowledge of the epoch to distant times, created a pseudo-mythological outline. The supporters of the authenticity of the Oera Linda Chronicle were recognized as marginals, charlatans, and subjected to mockery. The parallel with the history of the Book of Veles is obvious in this aspect. Herman Wirth, however, did not assert that we are dealing with an original. He merely suggested that the matter at hand is a very ancient version of a pre-Christian mythological tradition processed and stylized much later by a Dutch humanist. Wirth, being an expert in hundreds of ancient and modern languages, an archaeologist, a linguist, and a historian, accomplished a colossal feat in analyzing the content of this entire “antique” and separating it into temporally different layers – most ancient, later, and completely recent. The result of his reconstruction was the publication of the Oera Linda Chronicle with detailed commentary, something that made Wirth into an outcast among official historians who believed that the forgery of the Oera Linda Chronicle itself automatically discredited the author. For this reason, his other writings and even the major works of Herman Wirth, such as The Origin of Mankind and The Sacred Protolanguage of Humanity [50] which contain his runological theory, and don’t even mention the Oera Linda Chronicle, were left without attention from the wider scientific community. Yet these works contained stunning paleo-epigraphical material which fully deserves to become a sensation in the history of human proto-culture. Many of Wirth’s intuitions anticipated the so-called “nostratic” linguistic theories that appeared much later than the first works of this German professor. But this is only one side of his fantastic discoveries. The most important have been hitherto left aside.

And so, Wirth suggested the following explanation of runic characters. From his point of view, Scandinavian and ancient Germanic runes and runic circles represent traces of the most ancient symbolic model which lies at the heart of all types of languages, mythologies, cultures, rituals, sacred doctrines, calendar systems, astrological observations, etc. At one time, runes were known to all the peoples of the earth who descended from a single ancestral home, the northern country of Hyperborea. Wirth, as a supporter of the archeological theory of “cultural circles,” called this primordial proto-culture Thulekulturkreise, i.e. “the cultural circle of Thule.” Originally, runic circles were ritually applied only to wooden surfaces, since in the “cultural circle of Thule” wood was believed to be a sacred element, the physical embodiment of the World Axis. For this reason, it is impossible to trace the chronological development of fully-fledged runic writing in ancient epochs. The mere fragmentary inscriptions on cave walls, ceramics, stones and later on bronze and iron are most likely anomalies rather than the norm of ancient culture that only allow one to judge the evolutionary steps (or, more precisely, involution) of runic writing. Historical runes as they authentically appeared in the 5th-6th centuries are but the inertial traces of a forgotten ancient system which, in order to avoid confusion, can be called proto-runic.

According to Wirth, such a proto-runic system lies at the origin of all systems, including the Phoenician, Indian, Sumerian, Chinese, Egyptian, etc. Moreover, proto-runes and their system represent a key to the deciphering of absolutely all mythological stories and sacred doctrines, both monotheistic and developed and pagan and primitive. The runic circle is unmistakably evident in the phonemes, characters, mythological tales, customs, rituals, superstitions, associations, and ceremonies of all peoples of the earth. One merely needs to know the code in order for the deciphering of any system of symbols to not present any difficulty.

In his works, Herman Wirth accomplished the colossal work of isolating series of tales and characters that compose the primordial ensemble of symbols of the “culture of Thule,” which can be traced from cave drawings to the most developed and modern theological constructions. Each volume of Wirth’s works consists of around 1,000 pages, including atlases and albums cataloguing his discoveries in the fields of archaeology (he actively participated in excavations), paleo-epigraphy, comparative linguistics, and the history of religions. It is impossible, of course, to give even a brief presentation of these unique studies in a few pages and, what’s more, his works are so rare that they are sometimes even absent in the fullest of European libraries. This circumstance is explained by political considerations. The point is that Herman Wirth was the founder of the scientific research organization “Ancestors Heritage” (Ahnenerbe) during the Third Reich, and although he was found completely innocent of the crimes of Hitler’s regime, a certain shadow fell upon him as upon other famous German scholars and thinkers of a patriotic orientation, such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Junger, Arthur Mueller van den Bruck, Karl Haushofer, etc. However, even among them, Wirth suffered more, since the subjects he examined did not arouse the interest of European scholars (unlike Junger and Heidegger who were defended by their French supporters as spotless from the point of view of “anti-fascism”). Together with this, perhaps, is the fact that Wirth’s discoveries are incomparably important for our understanding of the origins of the human spirit than the works of many other authors…

Wirth lived until 1982, but for the entire remainder of his life him and his works were met with a silence so complete that the impression arises that this involves some kind of sinister secret, some kind of “conspiracy.” One episode in particular is indeed very strange. Herman Wirth’s last book, Palestinabuch, in which he collected all the results of his research on the “Hyperborean” origins of the Old Testament tradition on the basis of a systematization and research of the archaic layers of Middle Eastern culture, was mysteriously abducted from his house on the eve of its sending to the printer. If Wirth’s studies were simple charlatanism, then it is hardly believable that someone came up with the idea of stealing this manuscript of many thousands of pages.

But this mystery has yet to be unraveled.

Slavic runes

What interests us here is not simply the history of the German professor, but the way in which his concepts can aid us in studying Slavic antiquity and explain many of the mysteries of the ancient pre-Christian culture of our distant ancestors. Today, this topic is exciting a growing number of people, hence the interest in the “Book of Veles” and the reconstruction of pre-Cyrillic writing, etc.

If Wirth’s view is accepted, then we know that the northern peoples of Eurasia who lived in close proximity to the primordial Arctic homeland of Hyperborea preserved proto-runic systems much longer than others, albeit their full meaning, ritual use, and alphabetical and calendar understandings were distorted and forgotten. The runes found among these peoples are thus in fragmented form, as a legacy of ancient knowledge, the key to which has been irrevocably lost. Nevertheless, starting with the 5th century, such late runes appeared in Northern Eurasia. Wirth thus attentively studied the Germanic-Scandinavian regions and pointed out the exact correlation of runic signs and the Orkhon inscriptions of the ancient Turks. Such Turkic runes appeared almost simultaneously as the Germanic ones, which means that it is difficult to assume that they directly borrowed from each other. From the standpoint of simple geographical symmetry, what is immediately striking is that the ancient Slavs, mixed with Urgic tribes, were distributed between the settled areas of the Germano-Scandinavian tribes and the Turks of Siberia. Chernorizets Hrabrar wrote that these Slavs “wrote with lines and cuts.” Later runic writing was characterized by the fact that it was indented into wood or stones whereas, according to Wirth, the characters of original proto-runes were rounded. Thus, it is most likely of all that these “lines and cuts” were the symbolic system of “Slavic runes” which existed as a sort of intermediate layer between the Germanic and Turkic systems. Hrabrar’s pointing out that the ancient Slavs “pondered” such cuts indicates that the Slavs used their own runes as did the Germanic tribes, which served both as an alphabet and a method of sacred rituals (in its lowest form, for divination).

It is indeed astonishing how similar the characters of the “Hymn of Boyan” and the “Book of Veles” are to Germanic runes. Moreover, it cannot be excluded that Sulakadzaev, by means of his Masonic contacts to which all the threads of the history of the Book of Veles converge, might have been aware of the Oera Linda Chronicle similarly styled in runic writing. In such a case (which cannot be entirely discounted), the value of these documents is lost. It similarly cannot be discounted that, as in the case of the Oera Linda Chronicle, we are dealing with a later re-working of some kind of genuine ancient document. What is important is at least approaching the issue objectively and impartially without falling into premature enthusiasm or deliberate prejudice.

If the fragments of Sulakadzaev’s collection are authentic, then the Slavs must have had runic-type systems, the fragments of which we can unmistakably encounter in traditional Slavic embroidery, mythological tales, ornaments,  rituals, and beliefs. Consequently, the question at hand is initiating a thorough and large-scale deciphering of the ancient Slavic heritage without expecting that history will grant us any reliable material of a textual character. This would be all too easy. However, it also cannot be completed excluded that sooner or later the same testimony will be found. At the present moment, we can now proceed to decipher Slavic antiquity on a global scale given that we have the opportunity to utilize the invaluable scholarly framework developed by the genius German professor.

If we can explain the system of the Slavic runic circle, the problem will be solved, and all that will remain is to compare this model to the Germanic runes and writing system and the calendar signs of the ancient Turks. We will gradually reach the next level in getting ever closer to deciphering the ancient mysteries of Eurasia and grasping its proto-culture and secret, forgotten language as not merely a means of transmitting information (as technocrats and pragmatists today mistakenly understand language to be) but as information itself of the most important, the most significant, and sacred form.

The Mystery of the Apple: the Mystery of the North

Before we take the first steps in our study of Slavic runes, let us denote in the most general terms Herman Wirth’s concept in regards to the meaning of runic or proto-runic writing.

Wirth asserts that the primordial cultural model on the basis of which writing, phonemes, calendars, rituals, legal institutions, arts, and occupations developed, i.e., all of human culture in its primordial, nascent state, was the annual observation of the natural yearly phenomenon of the Arctic North [51]. Many traditions say that it is from the North that humanity’s ancestors descended to the middle and southern latitudes at which the ancient civilizations arose as reflections of the ancient homeland, as its reflections, reconstructions, and simulations. This is affirmed by the Iranian tradition which speaks of Airyana Vaeja, the homeland of the ancient Iranians’ ancestors. The same legend is contained in the Vedas where it is said that the first people lived in a place where day and night lasted a whole year, i..e, the Arctic. The Greeks also knew of the Northern country of Hyperborea, the home of solar Apollo [52]. 

The Hindus possess a traditional theory of cosmic cycles which they associate with the dynamics of continents. Each cycle has a corresponding continent, or dvipa. Our cycle corresponds to the so-called Jambudvipa, or “land of apple trees.” Rene Guenon showed [53] that such a theory does not concern India itself, but rather all relevant, existing continents and especially their synthesis in the form of the Northern Land, Arctogaia, or Hyperborea. This symbolic point is important. In many myths, the apple tree or apple are associated with paradise or the Garden of Eden, the place where mankind dwelt in primordial times. The very root of the word yabloko is etymologically linked to the Hindi jambu and German Appfel, or English apple, etc., which Wirth considers to be a kindred name of Apollo, the Hyperborean god of the Sun and Light. If one considers this “Arctic,” polar point, then the meaning of the many tales involving apples is brought to light, such as the rejuvenating apples of the Scandinavian sagas, the apples of Hesperides, the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge which caused the ancestors to abandon paradise, etc. In addition, there is yet another expressive detail: if one cuts an able crosswise, we have a five-pointed star in the middle, and this symbol was also a primordial image of the pole, the North, paradise.

Wirth explains the polar symbolism of the star in the following way. The ancient calendar was represented by a six-pointed star marking the six key positions of the sun: the summer sun (the tope line), the winter sun (the lower line), the point of sunrise and winter sunset (the winter solstice – two slanted slashed on the top) or the summer solstice (two slanted slashes on the bottom). Sometimes a horizontal line was marked which corresponded to the points of the equinoxes, thereby yielding an eight-pointed star. In the Arctic, the sixth, lower line is absent since in winter the sun does not rise at all and, consequently, the six-pointed star becomes a five-pointed one. Arctogaia is thus the land of apples and apple trees. Proceeding from this understanding, one can easily deduce the role of apples in Russian and Slavic folklore [54].

Basic runes

Let us return to the proto-runic circle. Observing the annual motion of the Arctic, Northern polar circle yields the following visible characters that are the basic proto-runes. The circle  depicts the daily sun over the head of the observer as if expanding the roundness of the sun to a cosmic scale. Perhaps the most ancient phoneme of this sign was the consonant R (with the variant of L since “fluid” consonants are often interchangeable when moved from language to language). The circle is sometimes adorned with a vertical bar at the bottom, from which comes the Greek ro – ρ.

This closed circle is broken in the Arctic autumn and spring periods when the sun makes short arcs  over the southern point. These arcs are the most ancient proto-runic character in Scandinavian circles, UR . Its vocalization, the vowel “u” is the only sound which can be made with a closed mouth. Symbolically, this corresponds to the sun’s descent into the darkness of night based on the symbolic identification of the mouth and and voice with the cosmos. Compare the Russian word nyebo, the upper point of the mouth, the palate, and the word for sky (also nyebo).

In the beginning of the year, the same sign UR  was probably pronounced like “a”, since the vowel “a” is sounded by a fully opened mouth, a symbol of a new beginning. The sun comes out from under the earth, from the darkness of a cave. The New Day, or New Year thus begins.

This sector is further associated with the sign KA  representing the symbol of lifting, upraised hands, horns, etc. This sound was used to identify everything relevant to upwards movement, hence its often connotation of spirit or fire. Above KA  rises R  (or RE or RI, since the vocalization of consonants in transition from the post-New Year A moves to the intermedia E and further to the I, which is the main sign of the summer solstice, the highest point of the year).

After the summer solstice pronounced as I and depicted by the vertical bar , the highest sign, the spirit, or regal dignity, the sun begins to slope downwards towards winter and the Arctic night, from the top point to the bottom. The connection between them is maintained in the hieroglyph S  and the proto-rune SOL  which represents a descending fire, sun, sunset, together with lighting. This is also the falling apple bringing autumn down to the Earth.

Further follows the hieroglyph TU or TO . This is the autumn descent, lowered hands, branches (willow, spruce, pine, yew, etc.). The vowel O represents the middle point between I (sounded with a half-closed mouth and stretched lips) and U (produced by closing the mouth).

In addition, there are the two nasal consonants N and M  which, according to Wirth, denote the horizontal, water, the Earth, the womb, stone, the bottom, night, darkness, etc. This is a consonant which does not acquire clear form. Therefore, the first cry of a child, MA, expresses the ancient Hyperborean cult formula “from the depths of the night is born new life, new light, a new cosmos.”

Historical runes have several intermediate markers: THURS, , the sign of the axe (or thorn) cuts the umbilical cord of the New Year from the Old. The axe and thorn, as well as the verb to prick are linked through the word “hack,” i.e axe. It is thus possible that the Slavs called this rune “kolo” or something similar. AS  and FEON  are the two parts of the World Tree, the Spruce, Birch, or Apple Tree, etc. From FEON comes Russian BOG, god. From AS comes Russian az, the first person singular of “I.”

The consonant N, initially depicted by a horizontal line  was later combined with NYT , hence Russian ne, nyet, and noch’. The vocalization of the springtime KA  (KEN  in later circles) yields GYFU , a rune similar to KA, the uplifted hand and horizontal bar. A variation of I was the rune IEH  which indicates the change in the trajectory of the sun’s path during the summer solstice.

At the point of the autumnal equinox was fixed the composite rune BEORG  or , i.e., “two mountains” which converge from the winter solstice in more ancient versions. From this phoneme is formed the Russian word for “birch”, bereza, the sacred tree of the Slavs. All other runes belong to the pre-New Year period, the autumn-winter season.

Next comes LAGU, a hook  which means water or lake. The Russian word for meadow, lug, carries both proto-meanings, i.e., something crooked, a bow, or bent (the appearance of this ideogram, the hook, or the handle of a stick) and a space filled with water in spring. This is close to the German root meaning lake. Hence the Russian word for puddle, luzhka.

The rune MADR  fell from the spring to the autumn, where it portrayed M (and sounded the same), the surging of water in contrast to the stagnant water of autumn, N.

The rune EOH  resembles the ideogram of a horse, hence all the mythological tales of “Water horses” or “sea stallions.” The rune ING  is the rune of marriage, the union of the sky (the upper triangle ) and land (the lower triangle ), or the male and feminine elements. It is also two entwined serpents phonetically pronounced by the gliding vowel NG (sometimes with a nasal N). In the ancient Russian language, “n” was nasal, but gradually disappeared. Such modern Russian words as ugol (angle), ugr’ (eel), kryuk (hook), ruka (arm), lyagushka (frog), etc. once had nasal “n” in front of “g” or “k.” Perhaps the Slavic name of the rune ING was ugol or kryuk.

ODIL represents a node, loop, or drop. It means spirit, seed, and sometimes fish due to hieroglyphic similarities and the fact that fish live in water while the pre-New Year sector of the sacred year corresponds to water. In ancient Russian, the real name for fish, zva, was taboo. It is possible that the Russian ODIL was called none other than zva or “spirit.”

The important rune DAG  means day, light, a double axe, or a bowl, vessel, or pot for ritual celebrations. This rune yielded the name of the Celtic god Dagda who in Irish mythology was associated with a magic cauldron in which food never expires. This is none other than the New Year rune. From this root evolved the Indo-European names for the celestial god: the Hindus’ Dyaus, Latin Deos, and the Greek θεός. To this same basis dates back German Tag and Russian den’ (“day”).

Now what remains is attempting to discover the Slavic roots, patterns, legends, and mythological tales, etc., which correlate with this set of sacred ideograms. Thereby, we will near the restoration of the sacred picture of the world of our ancestors and clarify the sacred models underlying our ancient culture, language, ceremonies, our psychology, etc.

Footnotes:

[51] The Russian word god (year) originally etymologically meant “suitable” or “dignified,” hence the words godny (suitable), ugodny (acceptable), prigodny (fit), vygodny (acceptable), and goditsya (to be suitable for) which is related to the Gothic guots and the ancient Upper German guot (good, blessed, fine). Consequently, the concept of the Year as a Blessing is inherent to the Russian language as an ethical, qualitative concept, not a quantitive unit of measuring time. It is also astonishing that the expression “Gottesjahr” or “Godly Year” often used by Wirth is contained in the Russian word god (year) if, of course, examined from the controversial etymological but very obvious parallel between the German words Gut (good) and Gott (God).

[52] See Bal Ganadhar Tilak, “Arctic home in Vedas” and “Orion”, Poona, 1955 ; G.Georgel, “Les quatres ages de l’humanite”, “Les rythmes dans l’histoire”;  J.Evola, “La rivolta contro il mondo moderno”; R. Guenon, “Les Formes traditionnelles et les cycles cosmiques” and “Le Roi du monde”; H.Wirth “ Aufgang der Menschheit” and “Heilige Urshrift der Menshheit”; A. Dugin, Giperboreyskaya Teoriya

[53] See R. Guenon, “Les Formes traditionnelles et les cycles cosmiques”

[54] See Dugin’s The Metaphysics of the Gospel, chapter 37

Author: Peter Savitsky 

Translator: Jafe Arnold

“The Geographical and Geopolitical Foundations of Eurasianism” (1933) from the compilation Foundations of Eurasianism (Moscow, Arktogeya: 2002)

There are significantly more grounds for calling Russia the “middle state” (Zhong Guo in Chinese) rather than China. The longer that time goes on, the more these grounds will make themselves evident. For Russia, Europe is nothing more than a peninsula of the Old Mainland that lies to the West of its borders. On this mainland, Russia itself occupies the main space, its torso. The total area of European states, taken together, is close to 5 million kilometers squared. The area of Russia within the contemporary USSR is significantly larger than 20 million kilometers squared (especially if one includes the space of the Mongolian and Tyva national republics of former “Outer Mongolia” and “Uryankhay land” which at the current moment are parts of the Soviet Union).

With rare exception, the Russian people of the late 19th and early 20th centuries forgot about the space behind the Urals (one of those who remembered them was the genius Russian chemist D.I. Mendeleev). Now another time has come. The whole “Ural-Kuznetsk combine”, with its blast furnaces, coal mines, and new cities with hundreds of thousands of inhabitants each are being built behind the Urals. There, the Turkestan-Siberian Railway (“Turksib”) is being laid. Nowhere else is the expansion of Russian culture so wide and spontaneous as in the part beyond the Urals, the so-called “Central Asian republics” (Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan). The whole torso of Russian lands, the “shot from Nyegoreloye to Xuchang station”, is coming to life.

The Eurasianists have their share of serving this turn of events. But along with this, the nature of the Russian world as a central world of the Old Mainland is being quite clearly revealed. There were moments when it seemed that emptiness laid between the periphery of Western Europe (the “European Russia” of the old geographers), to which the Russian lands before the Urals belong, and Asia (China, India, Iran). The Eurasianist arrangement of Russian modernity is filling this void with living, beating life. Since the end of the 19th century, the direct path from Europe to China and Japan has been laid through Russia (Great Siberia is a useful road). Geography points out with absolute certainty that there is no other way to run roads from Europe (at least from the Northern part) to Persia, India, and Indochina. Even today, such opportunities have not yet been fully realized. The Trains-Persian railway, cutting through Persia from the direction of the Northwest towards the Southeast and connected with the same route network as British India and Europe (through the Caucasus, Crimea, and Ukraine), was close to fruition on the eve of the world war. Currently, however, due to political circumstances, it has receded into the realm of groundless projects. There is no connection between the railways of Russian Turkestan (the “Central Asian republics”) and India and Russian railway networks are not oriented towards the Europe-India transit movement. But sooner or later, this movement will become a fact, whether in the form of railway paths, automobile lines, or air traffic. For the latter, the shortest distances are, let us say, of especially large importance for Russia. The greater the weight that will be procured by air traffic with its propensity and desire to fly in straight lines, the clearer will be the role of Russia-Eurasia as the “middle world.” The establishment of transpolar lines can still further enhance this role. In the Far North, Russia is a neighbor of America in a gigantic space. With the opening of a path through the pole, or rather over the pole, Russia will become the connecting link between Asia and North America.

Successive articles will discuss the Eurasianists’ desire to offer a spiritual synthesis of Eastern and Western elements. Here, however, it is important to point out the correspondences of this aspiration which are found in the field of geopolitics. Russia-Eurasia is the center of the Old World. If one eliminates this center, then all of the other parts of the Old World, this whole system of continental margins (Europe, Western Asia, Iran, India, Indochina, China, and Japan) become but a mere “scattered temple.” This world which lies to the East of Europe’s borders and to the North of “classical” Asia is the link that binds together the unity of all of these pieces. This is obvious in the present, and it will become all the clearer in the future.

The linking and unifying role of “middle earth” has been influential throughout history. Political dominance in the Eurasian world belonged to the nomads for several millennia. Occupying the space stretching from Europe’s borders to China, while simultaneously reaching towards Western Asia, Iran, and India, the nomads served as intermediaries between the  disparate worlds of settled cultures in their original states. Let us recall that historical interaction between Iran and China was never so close as in the epoch of Mongol rule (from the 13th to 14th centuries). And thirteen to fourteen centuries earlier, only through the nomad Eurasian world did the paths of the Hellenic and Chinese cultures cross, as shown by the latest excavations in Mongolia. It is an unavoidable fact that the Russian world was called to play a unifying role within the confines of the Old World. Only to the extent that Russia-Eurasia fulfills this vocation can it turn into an organic whole which combines all of the diverse cultures of the Old Continent and remove the confrontation between East and West. This fact is not yet sufficiently recognized in our time, but the correlations expressed by it lie in the nature of things. The tasks of unification first and foremost boil down to tasks of cultural creativity. A new and independent historical force grew into the unifying and conciliatory role in the form of Russian culture at the center of the Old World. Russian culture can fulfill this task only by cooperating with the cultures of all the surrounding peoples. In this regard, the cultures of the East are just as important for Russia-Eurasia as the cultures of the West. The particularity of Russian culture and geopolitics lies in precisely in such a simultaneous and even-footed approach to both East and West. For Russia, there are two equal fronts – the Western and South-Eastern ones. The Russian field of view can and should become one which first and foremost covers the entire Old World to an equal and full extent.

Let us return, however, to phenomena of a purely geographical nature. In comparison to the Russian “torso,” Europe and Asia both represent the outskirts of the Old World. Moreover, from a Russian-Eurasian point of view, Europe is, as has been said, everything that lies to the West of the Russian border, while Asia is everything that lies to the South and Southeast of it. Russia itself is neither Asia nor Europe. Such is the fundamental geopolitical thesis of the Eurasianists. In this view, there is no “European” or “Asiatic” Russia, but merely parts of Russia which lie to the West or East of the Urals, just as there are parts of it lying to the West and East of the Yenisei River, and so on. The Eurasianists continue: Russia is neither Asia nor Europe, but instead represents its own special geographical world. How does this world differ from Europe and Asia? The Western, Southern, and South-Eastern outskirts of the continents differ to a significant extent in their coasts and topographical diversity. Hence, it is not necessary to discuss the “torso” of this world insofar as, as has been said, it is merely a component of Russia-Eurasia.

This torso consists first and foremost of three plains (the White Sea plane, the West Siberian plane, and the Turkestan one) and of the regions lying to the East of them (including the low, mountainous countries to the East of the Yenisei river). The zonal composition of the Western and Southern outskirts of the continent are marked by “mosaic-fractional” and far from simple shapes. Forested areas, in their natural state, are replaced here in a bizarre sequence by, on the one hand, steppe and desert regions, and on the other side by tundra areas in (the high mountains). On the central plains, this mosaic is counterposed by the Old World relatively simply by a similar “flagged” locative zone. For this designation, we point to the fact that, when applied to a map, this location reminds one of the contours subdivided on the horizontal stripes of a flag. Going from South to North, deserts, steppes, forests, and tundra follow each other successively. Each of these zones forms a continuous latitudinal band. The broad latitudinal division of the Russian world is stressed most significantly by the latitudinal stretch of mountain ranges bordering the southern planes: the Crimean ridge, the Caucasus, the Kpet Dag, the Parapamiz, the Hindu Kush, the main mountain ranges of the Tien Shan, and the ranges in the north of Tibet, Ying Shan, and in the area of the Great Wall of China. The last of the above-mentioned ranges lies on the same line bordering the Southern, elevated plain occupied by the Gobi desert. This is linked to the Turkestan plain via the Dzhungarian gates.

One can note peculiar futures of an East-West symmetry in the zonal structure of the Old World’s mainland which indicate that the character of phenomenon on its Eastern outskirts is analogous to the same phenomena on the Western outskirts while differing from the nature of phenomena in the middle part of the continent. Both the Eastern and Western margins of the continent (the Far East and Europe) are located at attitudes between 35 and 60 degrees North which are naturally covered by forested regions. Here the boreal forests directly touch and gradually transition into the forests of Southern flora. Nothing else can be observed in the middle world, where forests of southern flora exist only in the regions of its mountain edges (Crimea, the Caucasus, and Turkestan) and never meet forests of northern flora or boreal ones, being separated from such by a continuum of steppe-desert strips. The middle world of the Old World can thus be identified as the region of the steppe and desert band stretching in a continuous line from the Carpathians to the Khingan taken together with its mountain frame (in the South) and those regions lying to the North of it (forest and tundra zones). It is this world that the Eurasianists call Eurasia in the exact sense of this word (Eurasia sensu stricto). This must be distinguished from the old “Eurasia” of Alexander von Humboldt which encompassed the whole of the Old Continent (Eurasia sensu latiore).

The Western border of Eurasia stretches to the Black Sea-Baltic bridge, i.e., the region where the continent narrows between the Baltic and Black Seas. Along this bridge and in general in the direction from Northwest to Southeast pass a number of indicative botanical and geographical borders such as, for example, the Eastern borders of yew, beech, and ivy. Starting on the shores of the Baltic Sea, each of these trees can be found reaching up to the Black Sea. to the West of these borders, i.e., where the above-mentioned species grow, the stretch of this forest zone along the whole area spanning from North to South has a continuous character. To the East begins the division into the forest zone in the North and the steppe zone in the South. This boundary can be considered the Western border of Eurasia. Eurasia’s border with Asia in the Far East runs along the longitudes at which the continuous strip of steppes dips in its approach of the Pacific Ocean, i.e., at the longitude of the Khingan.

The Eurasian world is a world “of both periodic and symmetric zone systems.” The boundaries of the main Eurasian zones conform with significant accuracy to the spanning of certain climactic boundaries. For example, the Southern border of the tundra matches the line joining the point of annually average relative humidity of 79.5% at 1 P.M. (The relative humidity in the afternoon is of particularly large importance for the life of vegetation and soils). The Southern border of the forest zone lies along the line connecting the point with the same relative humidity of 67.5%. The Southern border of the steppe (with its tip into the desert) is matched by the exact same relative humanity at 1 P.M. of 55.5%. A value lower than this is found across the desert. Attention should be drawn here to the equality of intervals covering the forest and steppe zones. Such coincidences and the same rhythmic distribution of intervals can be established even according to different indices (see our book The Geographical Particularities of Russia Part 1, Prague, 1927). This gives grounds to speak of a “periodic table of the zone systems of Russia-Eurasia.” Russia-Eurasia is a symmetric system, but not in the sense of the East-West symmetry which we discussed before, but in the South-North symmetric regard. The treeless tundra of the North is matched by the treeless steppes of the South. What’s more, the calcium content and percentage of humus in soil from the middle parts of the black soil zone symmetrically decrease moving in the directions of both North and South. This symmetric distribution of phenomena can also be noted in terms of soil colors, which reaches its greatest intensity in the very same middle portions of the horizontal zone. Moving both Northward and Southward, the soil color weakens (passing through shades of brown to whitish ones). In terms of sand and rock substrates, there is also a symmetrical divergence from the border between the forest and steppe zones: between the steppe islands to the North and the “islands” of forests in the South. Russian science defines this phenomenon as “extrazonal.” The steppe sectors in the forest zone can be characterized as a “southward-bearing” phenomenon and the forest islands in the steppes are essentially a “northward-bearing” phenomenon. These southward-bearing formations of the forest zone match the northward-bearing formations of steppes.

Nowhere else in the Old World is such a gradual transition in zonal systems, with both its “frequency” and simultaneous “symmetry”, displayed so clearly as in the plains of Russia-Eurasia.

The Russian world thus possesses an exceedingly clear geographic structure. The Urals do not play any defining or divisive role in this structure as they have been assigned (and are still attributed) by geographical “cliches.” The Urals, “by virtue of their orographic and geological specificities not only do not divide but, on the contrary, rather closely tie together ‘pre-Ural and post-Ural Russia,’ once again proving that taken together, both geographically constitute a single undivided continent of Eurasia.” The tundra, as a horizontal zone, lies both to the West and to the East of the Urals just as forest extends beyond one side and the other. The same is the case regarding the steppes and desert (the latter borders the Southern continuation of the Ural-Mugodzhary from both the East and West). We can observe no significant changes in geographical environment signified by the “border” of the Urals. More substantial is the geographical border of the “Intermarium”, i.e., the space between the Black and Baltic Seas on the one hand, and the Baltic Sea and the coast of Norway on the other.

This distinctive, crystal clear, and at the same time simple geographical structure of Russia-Eurasia is tied to a number of important geographical circumstances.

The nature of the Eurasian world is minimally favorable to any sort of “separatisms,” be they political, cultural, or economic. The specific “mosaic-fractional” structure of Europe and Asia facilitates the appearance of small, confined, and isolated worlds offering the material preconditions for the existence of small states specific to each city or province of cultural spheres or economic regions possessing large economic diversity in a narrow space. But Eurasia is quite another case. The wide cut sphere of “flagged” zonal distribution does not result in anything of the sort. Endless plains render customary wide horizons on the scale of geopolitical combinations. Within the steppes, moving across land through forests up until water, are numerous rivers and lakes. Man here finds himself in constant migration, continuously changing his place of inhabitance. Ethnic and cultural elements are drawn into intensive interaction, interbreeding, and mixing. In Europe and Asia, it sometimes happened that one could live only by the interests of his own “bell tower.” But in Eurasia, if this happened at all, then in a historical sense this lasted only an extremely brief period of time. In Northern Eurasia are hundreds of thousands of kilometers of forests among which there is not a single hectare of arable land. How can the inhabitants of this space survive without contact with the more Southern regions? In the South, on no less vastly spread steppes suitable for livestock and partly for agriculture,  there is not a single tree across many thousands of kilometers. How can the population of these regions live without economic interaction with the North? The nature of Eurasia has shown people the necessity of political, cultural, and economic unification to a much greater extent than in Europe and Asia. It is thus no wonder that what was in many respects a “uniform” way of life was the case for nomads across the entire space from Hungary to Manchuria and throughout history from the Scythians to the modern Mongols. It is similarly thus no wonder that such great attempts at political unification were born on the expanses of Eurasia such as those of the Scythians, Huns, and Mongols (13th-14th centuries), etc. These attempts included not only the steppes and desert, but also the Northward lying forest zone and the more Southern “mountain halo” region of Eurasia. It is no coincidence that the spirit of a sort of “brotherhood of peoples” hovers over Eurasia, having its roots in the centuries-old contact and cultural mergers of peoples of the most different races ranging from Germanic peoples (the Crimean Goths) and Slavs to the Tungus-Manchurians with links via the Finnish, Turkish, and Mongolian peoples. This “brotherhood of peoples” is reflected in the fact that there is no opposition between “higher” and “lower” races, but rather a mutual attraction much stronger here than any repulsion, thus easily awaking a “will for a common cause.” The history of Eurasia from its first chapters to its last is solid proof of this. These traditions were embraced by Russia in its fundamental historical cause. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were at times turbulent on account of deliberate “Westernism” which demanded that Russians feel themselves to be “Europeans” (which they in fact weren’t) and treat the other Eurasian peoples as “Asians” or an “inferior race.” Such an interpretation led Russia to nothing other than disaster (such as Russia’s Far Eastern adventure at the beginning of the 20th century). It should be hoped that this concept has been completely overcome by now in the Russian consciousness and that the last Russian “Europeanism”, still hiding in exile, has been deprived of any historical significance. Only by overcoming deliberate “Westernism” can the path be opened to real brotherhood between the Eurasian peoples from the Slavic and Finnish to the Turkish, Mongolian, and others.

Eurasia earlier played a unifying role in the Old World. Modern Russia, absorbing this tradition, must resolutely and irrevocably abandon violence and war, the old methods of unification belonging to gone and overcome epochs. In the modern period, the cause is one of cultural creativity, inspiration, insight, and cooperation. This is what the Eurasianists say. Despite all their temporary forms of ties, the peoples of Europe and Asia are still largely sitting in their own cubicles, living according to the interests of their own bell towers. Eurasian “place-development” will give impulse to this common cause in ways very much its own. The purpose of the Eurasian peoples is to, by their example, carry the other peoples of the world down this path. Then will the ethnographic ties by which a number of Eurasian peoples are connected to some non-Eurasian nations become useful for ecumenical affairs. These include the Indo-European connections of the Russians, the Persian and Iranian relations of the Eurasian Turks, and those points of contact existing between the Eurasian Mongols and the peoples of East Asia. All of these will come to benefit the construction of a new, organic culture for the “Old” World, which is (we believe) still young and carries in its womb a grand future.

Peter Savitsky (1895-1968) was a Russian geographer, economist, geopolitician, and philosopher known as one of the founding fathers of Eurasianism. 

Eurasianist Internet Archive presents the following translations of works by Peter Savitsky (in alphabetical order):

The Geographical and Geopolitical Foundations of Eurasianism