Siberia: The Empire of Paradise

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