SIX

Two Traditionalists

RENÉ GUÉNON’S EARLY INVESTIGATIONS

This chapter is about the contributions to Atlantology of René Guénon (1886–1951) and Julius Evola (1898–1974), representatives of the twentieth-century Traditionalist current that also included Ananda Coomaraswamy, Marco Pallis, Frithjof Schuon, Titus Burckhardt, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. What distinguishes the Traditionalists’ approach to Atlantis from that of the “rationalists” is the metaphysical dimension that informs all their thinking and their reverence for sacred over profane authority.

Given these principles, the Traditionalists’ approach to the past, as to everything else, contrasts starkly with modernist orthodoxy. One of their virtues is that they turn received notions upside down, but not in the nihilistic way of postmodernism, which, if they had lived to see it, would have elicited their deepest scorn. In one of his chief doctrinal works, The Symbolism of the Cross, Guénon states that historical facts conform to the principle of correspondence, “and thereby, in their own mode, translate higher realities, of which they are, so to speak, a human expression. We would add that from our point of view (which obviously is quite different from that of the profane historians), it is this that gives to these facts the greater part of their significance.”1 Julius Evola, prefacing his Revolt Against the Modern World, writes that in traditional studies “all materials having a ‘historical’ and ‘scientific’ value are the ones that matter the least; conversely, all the mythical, legendary, and epic elements denied historical truth and demonstrative value acquire here a superior validity and become the source for a more real and certain knowledge.”2 This attitude made them natural adherents of the Atlantis myth.

Guénon was raised in a Catholic bourgeois family in provincial France. Disappointed in his hopes for an academic career in philosophy, he spent his life as an independent scholar and authority on every aspect of Tradition. He first came to notice in the Parisian occultist milieu, dominated by Papus and haunted by the prestigious figure of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (see chapter 2). It was a melting pot where Gnostic bishops and doctors of Hermetism hustled for attention among Theosophists, Martinists, and Freemasons. As he joined every available order, Guénon’s intellectual stature soon asserted itself. During a séance of automatic writing held by a group of Martinists in 1908, the spirit of Jacques de Molay, last Grand Master of the Templars, demanded that the Order of the Temple be revived, with the twenty-one-year-old Guénon as its head.

The “Ordre du Temple Renové” was duly founded and went to work immediately, holding séances in which a multitude of questions were put to the spirits, or whatever was communicating.3 Far from being interested in the Templars, many of the questions had to do with the “Archéomètre,” the great synthetic system of Saint-Yves’ latter years that was then coming to light. For instance, the spirits were asked about the symbolism of letters and numbers, the correspondences of colors and musical notes, the identity of Hebraic and Hindu traditions, and the primordial language of Vattan or Watan. Other questions were about topics that Guénon would later take for his articles or even whole books, such as the symbolism of cross, helix, swastika, cubic stone, and serpent; the multiple states of being, the distinction between Being and Nonbeing, the principles of infinitesimal calculus; and so on into rarefied realms of “metaphysics,” Guénon’s name for the field of study in which all esoteric traditions converge.

One of these séances was devoted to questions about former races and periods of prehistory, and it seems to be the answers that were recorded. Although the information on cosmic cycles belongs later in this book (see chapters 11–12), I give the transcript in its entirety, so that the whole scheme can be appreciated:

 The Great Year (period of the precession of the equinoxes) = 25,765 years. Half (12,882) = length of the evolution of one earthly human race. Manvantara = 432,000 years.

 Total duration of earthly humanity: 12,882 × 7 = about 90,000 years.

 The cycle of 12,882 is divided into 7 sub-cycles of 1840 years, and these divided into 3 periods of 613 years.

Thus there are 21 periods for the entire duration of one race, plus a period of transition of 78 years (but this does not count for the total duration of humanity, because the last period of one race coincides with the first period of another).

 The deluge takes place at the end of the 22nd period.

 The Earth is not the only physical planet where human beings are living.

A. The origin of the White race, and consequently of the first appearance of man on the earth should be set at 62,500 years before our era [= BCE]. The end of this race dates from 49,618 before our era (race B).

B. The Yellow race: the first men of this race came from the air (planet Venus), hence: “sons of Heaven,” writing from the top downwards. Inhabited the Pacific continent, of which only Polynesia remains. Tradition later reconstituted by Fo-Hi. End of this race in 36,735 before our era.

C. Black race. Lemuria. Drawn out of fire. Writing from below upwards. Deluge in 23,835 before our era. Extension in Africa, south of Asia, Pacific, Europe, whence many survivors.

D. White [Red?] race, Atlantis (between Africa and America). Language Watan: America, north Africa, Europe, Egypt, India. Deluge in 10,370 before our era. Remains: Antilles, Canaries, Azores, Cape Verde Isles. Tradition maintained in its purity by the Egyptians, mingled with the black tradition in India and Chaldea, with the white tradition in Europe.

E. Fifth race = white + red + black. Ends in 1912 of our era (22nd period from 1912–1990).

F. Fusion of the yellow race with the fifth race should give the sixth. Disappearance of America (in any case, of most of South America) and Japan. Invasion of yellow race peoples into Europe and America ending 14,794.

G. Fusion of the sixth with the remains of the black race will give the seventh race which will last until 27,677.4

This looks like a compromise between the French occultist tradition, with its distinction of four races by color, and the sevenfold divisions of Theosophy. It seems, forgivably, to confuse the root races with the sub-races, placing the Lemurian and Atlantean (root) races as the third and fourth, but within a timescale more suitable for seven sub-races, with “our era” correctly placed as the fifth of them. Admittedly Guénon was not responsible for any of this, at least not in rational terms. But if the material obtained by such methods is affected by the thoughts and preoccupations of the participants, then it might have reflected his interest in this kind of synthesis. From his later works (see chapter 11) one can deduce how much of it he retained, and what he discarded.

THE POLAR MOUNTAIN AND THE UNDERGROUND KINGDOM

After the World War, Guénon’s Traditionalism declared itself with books on Hinduism and Vedanta, and two polemical works, one against Spiritualism, the other against Theosophy. He returned to the subject of prehistoric continents, races, and traditions in Le Roi du monde (The king of the world), a study of spiritual centers first published in 1924.5 He writes there of Mount Meru, the celestial mountain of Hindu mythology, and identifies it with the North Pole.6 The Atlanteans, he says, called it Tula, the Greeks and Latins Thule. It represents “the first and supreme center for the whole of the current Manvantara . . . and its situation at the origin was literally polar.”7 It is also called the White Island, the Home of the Blessed, and the Land of the Living.8 Seven continents have emerged successively from it, “such that each one is the terrestrial world envisaged in the corresponding period.”9 The seven continents form a lotus with Meru at the center, and although Meru appears to have had a different location for each one of them, the mountain or pole itself is unchanging: it is the orientation of the terrestrial world that changes in relation to the pole.10

The Theosophists treated in chapters 3 and 4 had similar ideas on the successive emergence of continents and the consequent changes in the map of the world. The parallels are not surprising, considering that both they and Guénon were drawing on Hindu mythology. For instance, Blavatsky states outright in The Secret Doctrine, “Mount Meru, which is the North Pole, is said to have seven gold and seven silver steps leading to it.”11 She writes of the Imperishable Sacred Land, home of her first root race, “whose destiny it is to last from the beginning to the end of the Manvantara” and on which “the Pole-Star has its watchful eye.”12 Theosophy also has a White Island, though this was not polar but in the former Gobi Sea; it was and remains the spiritual center of the fifth root race, and is equated to Shambhala, the immaterial center of the Tibetan Kalachakra tradition. According to Alice Bailey, it is at “Shamballa” that the Lord of the World resides. He sounds much like the King of the World of Guénon’s title, who rules an initiatic center hidden somewhere in the trans-Himalayan region.

On this topic Guénon diverged sharply both from Theosophy and from Hindu and Buddhist tradition. First, there is a large chronological difference. Whereas the Theosophists’ Gobi center was founded during the later Atlantean era, around 70,000 BCE, in Guénon’s version the supreme center was transferred to Asia at the start of the Kali Yuga (fourth and worst age of the Hindu system), whose traditional date is 3102 BCE.13 More significantly, there is a geographical difference, for Guénon’s King of the World does not rule Shambhala (which is not mentioned), but the underground kingdom of Agarttha. For all the mystification surrounding this matter, the fact is that Agarttha has no basis in tradition but derives from the “astral travels” of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (see chapter 2). So the first principles of Guénon’s Roi du monde were firmly rooted in French occultism, a circumstance that has troubled more than one of Guénon’s admirers.

It is all the more surprising that, having once mentioned it, Guénon set aside the traditional doctrine that the supreme spiritual center for this Manvantara persists unchanged through all the vicissitudes of the seven continents, in favor of Saint-Yves’ subterranean kingdom with its sinister necromantic monarch. In a study already cited,14 Marco Baistrocchi argues that Guénon deliberately promoted Agarttha as a parody of Shambhala, to turn the spiritual elites of Europe away from Theosophy and Buddhism. In fact, many Traditionalists have followed Guénon’s example by becoming Muslims. At the same time, the Dalai Lama has been performing the Kalachakra Initiation, which is in some sense a gateway to Shambhala, with increasing frequency. Large numbers of Westerners are being initiated, even without the preparation that is traditionally required, presumably with some future end in view.

JULIUS EVOLA AND PAGAN IMPERIALISM

Evola’s intellectual journey resembles Guénon’s in some ways, while in others it could not have been more different. Guénon, as mentioned, had first published his Roi du monde theories in 1924 in a short-lived Italian esoteric journal, Atanòr, which was edited by Arturo Reghini (1878–1946). This Pythagorean mathematician, pagan, and Freemason was at the time a friend and close collaborator with Evola. For a while they saw the Fascist regime as a potential ally in the creation of a new Italy, free from communism on the one hand, and from the Catholic Church on the other. Reghini wrote hopefully of a “pagan imperialism” that would restore the spiritual authority of ancient Rome, and Evola took this up enthusiastically. The result was his book Imperialismo pagano (Pagan imperialism), written in 1926. Here he exhorted his countrymen in strident terms to disburden themselves of Christianity and return to a “Mediterranean Tradition,” which he defined thus:

It is not a myth. It is an archaic reality that even the profane historical sciences are now beginning to suspect. The epic and magical tradition of a positive, active civilization, strong in wisdom and strong in knowledge, it marked the elites of the Egypto-Chaldaic civilization, the paleo-Greek civilization, the Etruscan civilization, and others more mysterious whose echoes are heard in Syria, in Mycenae, in the Balearic Islands. The very spirit of paganism, it was then carried by the Mysteries of the Mediterranean basin until Mithra took his stand against the Judeo-Christian tide: Mithra, the “Conqueror of the Sun,” the “Bull-slayer,” the symbol of those who, regenerated in the “Strong strength of strengths,” are beyond good and evil, beyond “need,” beyond desire, beyond “passion.”15

The fate of the book and of Evola’s relations with the Fascist regime is a long story that cannot delay us here. The next step for Reghini and Evola was to gather a group of esotericists with an interest in Traditionalist studies and practical magic, called the Gruppo di Ur. In January 1927 they began publishing the members’ contributions, all under pseudonyms, in a monthly journal of that name.16

Evola, still in his twenties, was a keen, self-taught student of Western and Eastern thought, as well as a trained engineer, a World War I veteran, a Dadaist poet and painter, and the creator of a philosophy of the “Absolute Individual.” He was also fluent in German, and when Herman Wirth’s Der Aufgang der Menschheit arrived on his desk in 1928, he introduced it in an article titled “The Hyperborean Tradition” that contains his later theories in embryo.17

Evola eagerly embraced the idea of human origins in the Arctic or polar region, once made habitable by a differently positioned axis of the earth. As researchers like Jean-Sylvian Bailly and Bal Gangadhar Tilak had already shown, world mythology gave every reason to believe that at least a part of the human race had come from there. Secondarily, there was the Donnellian material with its arguments for a vanished Atlantic land. But Evola warns his readers not to share Wirth’s “Arctic Atlantis” confusion.

One must distinguish between the Hyperborean seat and the Atlantean seat, just as between Hyperborean tradition and Atlantean tradition. Once the Hyperborean cycle ended, it seems that a spiritual and traditional center was founded in Atlantis that reproduced, for a certain cycle, the Boreal one, appropriating many of its symbols since it was a kind of image of it. The two seats should not be confused. The Atlantean one was already secondary and particular in character, and many traditional centers were set up in the Eurasian continent independently of it, as direct offsprings of Hyperborea.18

Evola found much of Wirth’s theory congenial, though deficient in the spiritual dimension and too much biased toward matriarchy and feminine values. It spurred him on to develop a vision of the past better suited to his own psychology. In this version the superior and primordial heritage is the Hyperborean one, oriented North-South in memory of its origins, with its particular spirituality “that has an Olympian character, as it were, of calm, immutable sovereignty and intangible transcendence, free from passion and becoming, as in the Apollonian symbol of the pure light and celestial heights.”19 In contrast to it is the Atlantean heritage with its East-West direction, whose symbolic world is feminine and maternal, lunar and telluric, and whose spirituality hinges on death and resurrection. One can hardly miss the projection into the mythic past of Evola’s own exalted image of pagan Rome and his contempt for Christianity.

GUÉNON, EVOLA, AND WIRTH

Guénon did not read German, but was a regular, if diffident, reader of Ur and its successor Krur.20 In May 1929 he published an article in Le Voile d’Isis (The Veil of Isis), the journal founded by Papus that Guénon had now come to dominate. Its apparent subject was thunderstones, the name given to prehistoric flint ax-heads in the belief that they were generated by thunder and lightning. Their symbolism, he writes, “is Hyperborean in origin, i.e. it connects with the most ancient of present mankind’s traditions, the one that is truly the primitive tradition for the present Manvantara.” Then he adds in a footnote the same caution as Evola:

We should mention in this context that nowadays, through a strange confusion, some are talking about “Hyperborean Atlantis.” Hyperborea and Atlantis are two distinct regions, just as North and West are two different cardinal points, and as points of departure for traditions, the former is far anterior to the latter.21

The footnote continues with a long-winded protest against those who have attributed this confusion to Guénon himself: of course he has done nothing of the sort and can’t imagine how they got such an absurd idea! In the October 1929 issue of Le Voile d’Isis, readers discovered the guilty party: it was Paul Le Cour (see chapter 2), whom Guénon now accused of misreading the relevant passages in Le Roi du monde. This article on “Atlantis and Hyperborea” mentions Herman Wirth as an author of the said confusion, but it offers few facts about the vanished worlds and serves mainly to humiliate Le Cour.22

Evola’s next contribution to the subject appeared in Krur (the successor to Ur after his break with Reghini) in July 1930, as “The Symbolism of the Year.” It explained Herman Wirth’s theories of the symbols with which his “Arctic-Atlantic” race had represented the sun and the course of the year and illustrated some of them. Evola’s objection typifies the Traditionalist reversal of received values:

We have to take issue with the “naturalistic” interpretation [of the change in symbolism between northern and southern climates]. In primordial times, natural phenomena were never “worshiped” or treated religiously in that way, even when aspects of them were valid as revelations of the supernatural. The essence of religion at the origins was not a superstitious divination of natural phenomena, as [Wirth’s] interpretation of modern data suggests, but the reverse: the natural phenomena received their value, in antiquity, from making perceptible and symbolizing divine essences. Only in this way did they appear absolutely real.23

THE PRIMORDIAL TRADITION AND ITS DECLINE

In the summer of 1931, Guénon came out with his long-awaited definitive statement about Hyperborea and Atlantis. He now stated outright that the primordial tradition originated from the Hyperborean or Arctic region at the beginning of our Manvantara, and that the secondary and derivative tradition of Atlantis appeared later on its own continent.24 The Atlantean tradition belonged to one of the last divisions of the current cycle of terrestrial humanity, hence is comparatively recent and certainly in the second half of the present Manvantara. In chapter 11 we will see exactly how he dated it.

Guénon finds several allusions to Atlantis in the Book of Genesis, including “the fact that the literal meaning of Adam’s name is ‘red,’ the Atlantean tradition having been precisely that of the Red race; and it also seems that the biblical Flood corresponds directly to the cataclysm in which Atlantis disappeared.”25 This leads him to suspect that “the Atlantean cycle was taken as its basis by the Hebrew tradition, and its transmission took place either by the intermediary of the Egyptians, which at least has nothing improbable about it, or by some other means.”26 At the same time, another current came directly from the seat of the primordial tradition in the North. The meeting point of these two currents (a theme to which Guénon often returned) might be sought in the Celtic region or in Chaldea. While warning us not to trust the conclusions of “profane archaeologists,” Guénon adds that many vestiges of the forgotten past are now emerging from the earth, and that this may herald the end of the Manvantara, when everything must come together to prepare for the next cycle.27

When Evola came to revise Imperialismo pagano for a German edition (published 1933), he dropped the great Mediterranean tradition in favor of a “Nordic and primordial” tradition. He even called ancient Rome the last great creation of the Nordic spirit.28 Although this revision was clearly strategic, not to say toadying, it reflected a genuine change of attitude. Evola was by then busy with the work for which he is most remembered, Rivolta contra il mondo moderno (Revolt against the modern world). Here he was able to rival Guénon with a display of Traditionalist erudition and polemic, taking on the task of explaining the whole course of the Manvantara.

Like all Traditionalists, Evola believed that humanity is not the result of the “ascent of man” from mammals, but of a separate origin better called a “descent.” The Hyperborean phase was the “first age,” “golden age,” “age of the gods,” or “primordial age,” and the summit from which humanity has degenerated, following inexorable cyclical law. Evola does not try to date this primordial age, but its location is not in doubt: our cycle began in the extreme North, in the present Arctic Ocean,29 and the Hyperborean civilization was destroyed in a catastrophe, probably due to a change in the inclination of the earth’s axis.

The Hyperborean age was thus closed, and the second great age, the Atlantean, began. This entailed two separate migrations of the “Boreal” race that had inhabited the Arctic region, widely separated in both time and space.

Groups of Hyperboreans carrying the same spirit, the same blood, and the same body of symbols, signs, and languages first reached North America and the northern regions of the Eurasian continent. Supposedly, tens of thousands of years later a second great migratory wave ventured as far as Central America, reaching a land situated in the Atlantic region that is now lost, thereby establishing a new center modeled after the polar regions. This land may have been that Atlantis described by Plato and Diodorus.30

Working a well-known vein of Atlantology, Evola suggests that the second emigration gave rise to myths of wise rulers arriving from across the sea: Irish legends of the Tuatha de Danann coming from the West, and the Mexican legends of Quetzalcoatl coming from the East. The same emigration may also have been responsible for the appearance of the Cro-Magnons, the superior human type who appeared in western Europe at the end of the Ice Age without visible forbears, their culture fully formed.

As the Hyperboreans spread to the south, some groups interbred with peoples already living there

with the aboriginal Southern races, with proto-Mongoloid and Negroid races, and with other races that probably represented the degenerated residues of the inhabitants of a second prehistoric continent, now lost, which was located in the South, and which some designated as Lemuria. [Also] the red-skinned race of the last inhabitants of Atlantis (according to Plato’s mythical account, those who forfeited their pristine “divine” nature because of repeated unions with the human race); these people should be regarded as the original ethnic stock of several newer civilizations established by the migratory waves from west to east (the red race of Cretan-Aegeans, Eteicretes, Pelasgians, Lycians, Egyptians, Kefti, etc.), and of the American civilizations.31

The picture of the Boreal race descending from the Pole and meeting the Sudeen and Austral races is pure Fabre d’Olivet, whom Evola later credited with being the first person in modern times to assert the northern origin of the white race. He added that this was “less a scientific hypothesis than the exposition of a traditional teaching, still preserved in very restricted circles with which he was in touch.”32 As for Lemuria, Evola says next to nothing about it, because that continent “is connected to a cycle so ancient that it cannot be adequately considered in this context.”33 That said, we can summarize his version of prehistory as follows:

First land and first race: Lemuria, belonging to the previous cycle and situated in the South, from which some Negroid peoples descend.

Second land and second race: Hyperborea, corresponding to the Golden Age of the present cycle, situated in the North, whence Cro-Magnons and the Aryan race descended.

Third land: Atlantis, corresponding to the Silver and Bronze Ages, situated in the West; the place where the races met and mingled.

The historical period follows, corresponding to the Iron Age. Remnants of all races and their mixtures are present.

To anyone familiar with the order of root races in Theosophy and Anthroposophy, it seems strange to put Lemuria (supposedly the third) before Hyperborea (the second). But Evola’s Manvantara, like Guénon’s, was shorter than the Theosophists’ by an order of magnitude, being no more than a few tens of thousands of years. His blend of Fabre d’Olivet, Tilak, and Wirth with some Theosophical terms perfectly satisfied the racial mythology that he was developing at this period.34 The southern lands and their Lemurian inhabitants were consigned to the oblivion of a previous cycle. Hyperborea could then occupy the Golden Age of the current cycle, passing without interruption to Atlantis and thence to his own age. This provided Aryan humanity with the potential of a link with its Arctic ancestors, and one that, in suitably Olympian types, could bring about a rebirth of Hyperborean spirituality. For all his ups and downs, that remained Evola’s lodestar.

PRIESTS VERSUS WARRIORS

Evola held Guénon, twelve years his senior, in high regard. In later life he is reported as saying, “René Guénon . . . he was my master. I simply continued his work by transposing it to action.”35 The encounter with Guénon’s writings (they never met in person) had kindled in his ready mind the idea of the integral Tradition and given him a focal point for his life’s work. However, there were many obstacles to a reciprocal admiration on Guénon’s part, such as Evola’s Germanophilia, his concept of magic, his love of Rome and classical civilization, and his privileging of the Kshatriya (royal and warrior) caste above the Brahmin (priestly) caste.

This difference shows up in their respective attitudes to the Hindu legend of the “Revolt of the Kshatriyas.” Guénon interpreted this not as a single historical event but as the perennial revolt of temporal power against spiritual authority, which “may have had its beginnings either in Atlantis itself, or at least among the heirs of its tradition.”36 He devoted a whole book (Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power) to its consequences. These were part and parcel of his devolutionary outlook, for the revolt began the process by which power descended through the castes. Taken from the initiate-priests of the primordial tradition (called Brahmins in Hindu tradition) by the kings and warriors loyal to them (Kshatriyas), it later passed to the merchants (Vaishyas), and finally to the masses of modern democracy (Sudras).

While sharing this broad view, Evola had scant respect for any priestly caste. Like Wirth’s Arctic-Atlanteans, his Hyperboreans did not need priests: they already had transcendent awareness, living in a world where (as quoted above) “natural phenomena received their value . . . from making perceptible and symbolizing divine essences.” And although with human devolution, such perception had generally faded, it was perennially available to the superior individual. To this end, Evola devoted a book (The Doctrine of Awakening) to interpreting Buddhism as a Kshatriyabased movement, revolting against the corrupt priesthood of its day.

Guénon returned to the theme of Atlantis in his late work, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times. He does not mention it by name, but alludes to it while explaining the workings of the “counter-tradition” and “counter-initiation” that is in perennial opposition to Tradition. Apparently the counter-initiation originates from “the unique source to which all initiation is attached,” but “by a degeneration carried to its extreme limit.” One of its ploys is to fasten onto dead traditions abandoned by the spirit, using their residues for its own purposes.

This leads logically to the thought that this extreme degeneration must go a very long way back into the past; and, however obscure the question of its origins may be, there is some plausibility in the idea that it may be connected with the perversion of one of the ancient civilizations belonging to one or another of the continents that have disappeared in cataclysms occurring in the course of the present Manvantara.37

Guénon, who not coincidentally passed his later life in Cairo, warned that archaeologists who open ancient tombs are risking letting such residues out into the world, with potentially dangerous results.38 All this recalls the Theosophists’ tales of the light and dark magicians of Atlantis and Subba Row’s sinister words about the powerful elemental gods and goddesses worshiped by the Atlanteans, which still exist (see chapters 3–4).

Finally, as a word of caution to the rationalists, Guénon warns that there are two or three “time barriers” beyond which it is extremely difficult to obtain any accurate knowledge.39 The first of these is around the sixth century BCE, before which chronologies become hazy. The second is around the beginning of the Kali Yuga, which he calls the limit for things so far made known by archaeology. The third barrier corresponds to the last great terrestrial cataclysm, that of the disappearance of Atlantis, and it is quite useless to try to go back any further.