Hyperborea and Eurasia

(Beyond the Polar Mountains)

In the geography of the ancient world there is an interesting pattern. Ancient civilizations were formed under the influence of impulses coming from the North, but these only crystallized and took shape south of a particular geographical feature: the chain of Eurasian mountains which stretches from the Pyrenees to Manchuria. Civilization arose within this mysterious paradigm. From north of these mountains flowed raw manpower, which settled and and froze into specific forms in the south.

The myths of ancient peoples enshrined this model in a binary division of space: the ‘good’ (civilized) space – China, India, Iran, Sumer, Assyria, Greece, Italy, Iberia – lies south of the mountain range, whose peaks mark the furthest North: Tibet, Kailash, Alborz (Elbrus), Olympus… What lies to the North, beyond the north (hence the Greek word ‘hyper-Boreas,’ literally that which lies ‘north of the North Wind’—‘Jenseits des Nordens’ in Nietzsche) is a shadowy unknown sphere, the world of barbarism, the otherworldly abode of infernal beings—Picts, wild Germanics, Turanians. This two-fold model of sacred geography was described in particular detail by the ancient Iranians, for example, in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh. This set out the classical dualistic conception: Iran=Light / Turan=darkness, Iran=civilization / Turan=barbarism, Iran=sedentary life / Turan=nomadism.

The North Eurasian belt, from France to the Amur, forms a single zone, Turan (which, in fact, represents Hyperborea or at least the threshold of Hyperborea).

The ancient civilizations of the southern systems were constantly being invaded by this demonized Turanian region, which not only wrought destruction, ruin and death, but also injected new life, new blood, and fresh energy into the slowly degrading régimes of the South. There was something divine in the barbarian invasions. In plundering, raping, destroying and burning the centres of civilization, the Turanians laid bare the secret essence—the naked essence of being. They left behind imperial dynasties and invincible armies, a new ethic of brotherhood and solidarity, fair speech and iron will, passionate embraces and cruel death…They were like a ‘scourge of God’ (as was believed), renewing an effeminized South with the stern rigour of the North.

The ancient civilizations feared and did not understand the tribesman of Turan. They built the Great Wall and waged punitive campaigns to protect themselves, and despised and hated him, but with surprising frequency he reminded them of their own ideals. Fierce, indomitable Turan: ruthless, high-cheeked, blue-eyed, blond and high-spirited.

Turan – Hyperborean in the broadest sense – was the source of the blood royal. Most of the imperial and royal lines in history came into the civilized zone from the North. Chinese dynasties were for the most part Turanian in origin: Hun, Toba, Khitan, Jurchen, Mongol, and finally Manchu. Alexander the Great himself was the son of a king of the northern barbarians—Philip of Macedon.

The paradoxical duality of Turan is evident: a culture-bearing barbarism, a life-giving death, a destruction that opens the way for a new creation.

Turan: the ‘scourge of God,’ the mighty pulse of the continent, smashing the vessels of civilization to release the primordial light enclosed within.

In his empire-building impulse, Genghis Khan undertook an important sacred-geographic mission: ‘he levelled the mountains’ by making the natural northern boundary of the southern civilizations transparent and passable. The opening up of the North Eurasian region incredibly expanded the geographic vision of the southerners. The conventional North of the continent, the mountain ridge or ‘substitute’ Pole, was shown to be a local rather than a universal reality. The true North – great Arctida – manifested itself. The North and the South were themselves integrated into a single unit of Eurasian territory, subordinate to the will of the North in a planetary, continental sense. This is the grand Nordic restoration of sacred geography, which was achieved by Genghis Khan through his empire. Therein lies its fundamental difference from the empire of Alexander the Great, which was remained entirely south of the Eurasian mountain range, although the source of its impulse was also locally Polar in origin (with respect to the sacred geography of Greece)—Balkan Macedonia.

The Mongolosphere of Genghis Khan was not merely the eastern mirror image to the western empire of Alexander the Great, it unveiled for new civilizations the transcendental horizon of the Nordic dimension of being, that ‘Light of the North’ which Islamic esotericism teaches. Genghis Khan came from that north, opening the way to new spiritual spaces.

‘Erasing the mountains’—the key element in the sacred geography of the entire Mongolosphere, in every sense: historical, archetypal, and geopolitical.