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