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ATLANTIS AND HYPERBOREA

An Inquiry into the Cyclical Mysteries

With a Reconsideration of the René Guénon’s Rendition of the Cycle of

Manifestation in Traditional Forms and Cosmic Cycles, The King of the World, and The

Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times

by Charles Upton

Now I a fourfold vision see

And a fourfold vision is given to me

Tis fourfold in my supreme delight

And three fold in soft Beulas night

And twofold Always. May God us keep

From Single vision & Newton’s sleep.

~ ~ William Blake,

from a letter to Thomas Butts

René Guénon and his followers, notably Frithjof Schuon and Martin Lings, take

as one of their central cosmological principles that cosmic manifestation is entropic, not

evolutionary: whatever has come into outer manifestation from the Unseen World has

already begun to die. Thus the traditional prophesies of the end of “this world” are not the

products of “clairvoyance,” arbitrary myth or random visionary experience, nor are they

projections or extrapolations based on past events or present conditions. Rather, they are

based upon a cosmological context: the doctrine of the “cycle of manifestation,” called by

the Hindus the Manvantara or Mahayuga , composed of four yugas or world-ages.

Guénon and those influenced by him consider the Hindu picture of this cycle to be the

most intelligible and complete, though a similar notion also appears in Greco-Roman

mythology. (The idea of a cycle-of-manifestation may be found the Abrahamic religions

as well, but here the doctrine is less explicit, more veiled in symbolism and allegory.)

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The Greek word for such a cycle-of-manifestation is aion , which is translatable

either as “world” or as “age.” When Jesus says “behold I am with you always, even to the

consummation of the world” or (according to a different translation) “of the age”, he is

positing the reality of such a cycle. It is interesting that aion can be translated into

English by either a spacial word (“world”) or a temporal one (“age”). The reason for this

is that aion denotes precisely a spacio-temporal reality. We visualize a year spacially as a

cycle of four seasons, as we visualize a twelve-hour period in terms of the circular dial of

a clock. Time is not purely linear; it is also cyclical, periodically returning to analogous

(though not strictly identical) points: dawn, noon, dusk, midnight, the vernal equinox, the

summer solstice, the autumnal equinox, the winter solstice. Anything that orbits, from the

spinning of an electron around an atomic nucleus, to the wheeling of a galaxy, to

(perhaps) the birth and death of the universe (a word that means “one turn”) -anything

that exhibits periodic motion -- is an example of a cycle in this sense. The word aion

denotes the spacio-temporal reality of such a cycle – a cycle of time considered sub

specie aeternitatis as a single quasi-spacial form, what the Hindus call the “long body.”

Any form or being that exists in time can also be viewed from the “outside,” from a point

that is relatively eternal in relation to that form, and so seen as a single, “simultaneous”

history of itself, a kind of histomap . The term for this level of reality, in Eastern

Orthodox theology, is aeonian time .

In any given cycle-of-manifestation, an eternal reality “enters” time, moving

from simultaneity toward succession. What is eternally present in synthetic mode is

analyzed temporally, and therefore appears successively; in Plato’s words, “time is the

moving image of Eternity.” But this move from eternity to time does not happen “all at

once.” Though eternity and time are in one sense absolutely discontinuous, necessitating

a radical break, a “fall” or “ascension”, in the passage from one to the other, in another

sense the path from eternity to time moves through a number of stages, passing from the

relatively more eternal toward the relatively more temporal, in the direction of the

“absolutely temporal” – a point which can never be reached, however, since “pure

sequence” would negate form absolutely, in which case there would be nothing to pass

from one sequential phase to another. Manifestation is thus intrinsically entropic. An

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eternal form “in the mind of God” appears in space and time, and is simultaneously

veiled by its own manifestation. It becomes progressively more subject to history and

contingency -- and when it has consumed the energy of the initial impulse that brought it

into manifest existence, it dissolves. Its dissolution unveils the eternal archetype of that

form, which never entered manifestation – the naked radiance of which initiates the next

cycle of manifestation.

It is in the context of this successive passage from eternity to time, or rather from

aeonian to linear time, that the doctrine of the existence of earlier world-ages – which are

not just earlier points in our own type of historical time -- makes sense. And the kind of

sense it makes also stretches from the relatively eternal to the relatively temporal. Near to

the eternal end of the spectrum, a yuga (the Satya-Yuga or Golden Age) is symbolic; at

the temporal end of the spectrum, a yuga (the Kali-Yuga or Iron Age), touches upon and

embraces history as we understand it. Thus the true significance of the “end of this

world” cannot be grasped without an understanding of both the symbolic and the quasi-

historical aspects of cyclical manifestation, which necessarily includes an understanding

of the quality and meaning of the “prior” states of the cycle, states which from one

perspective are earlier in a temporal sense – given that we recognize that the quality of

time was different in earlier ages – but according to another have “priority” not in a

historical sense, but in an ontological one.

Legends of ancient and mysterious lands, “long ago and far away,” legends of

Agarttha, Shambhala, of the Terrestrial Paradise, the seat of Prester John, Atlantis,

Lemuria, the Mount of the Prophets – stories like these always seem to collect around

profound spiritualities, especially esoteric ones. On one level they are mere “exoticism”

or “spiritual romanticism.” Those who entertain such dreams may never grow beyond

them; they are in danger of letting their spiritual lives be trapped on the level of barren

imagination.

But what of those who never allow themselves to entertain such dreams? Will,

intelligence, sentiment are nothing without Grace – and one of the channels of Grace, at

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least in the initial stages of the Path, may be the Imagination itself, which Blake called

“an Intellectual Fountain.” In apophatic contemplation (contemplation of God’s

Transcendence, based on the denial of His comparability to anything in the domain of

manifestation), the profane imagination, based on individual fear and desire and its

collective extensions, is negated; God is recognized as an unknowable Essence beyond

all thought and feeling, beyond all name and form. But in cataphatic contemplation (the

contemplation of God’s Immanence, the recognition that He is in a sense comparable to

all things, since without His Reality, no thing would be), Divine Imagination is born.

Divine Imagination is objective Imagination, manifesting as the Imaginal Plane or alam

al-mithal, the place where the “image-exemplars” of Divine Realities appear as

conscious, living symbols – as they do, on another level, in material reality.

So the mythopoetic lore of imaginal worlds, manifest on the psychic or

intermediary plane, may have a valid and spiritually operative relationship to the world

of metaphysical Principles, the intelligible plane – and this is definitely true of the

“cyclical mysteries,” the legends of earlier aeons which were (and are ) less constricted,

less materialized than the world we presently inhabit. To project our contemporary

concept of linear historical time backwards into earlier world ages is problematic, since

different ages have different essential qualities; to consider previous yugas to be nothing

more than earlier historical periods as we presently define them is to blind ourselves to

these qualities. Yet earlier worlds are not mere allegories of higher ontological levels;

they were (and are) real manifested worlds – formal worlds, not transformal intelligible

Principles.

Traditional cosmology sees the present world and the present generation as

“descended” from the heroes and fathers of earlier ages who were ontologically more

exalted than we are. They were taller than we are, lived for hundreds of years, were free

from disease, etc. And these heroes, ancient kings, fathers, patriarchs or demigods were

in turn descended from the gods, the celestial paradises, then from the intelligible

Principles, and ultimately from the Creator Himself. God-as-Creator, in other words, was

almost universally viewed in traditional cosmologies as the First Ancestor – literally

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“God the Father.” And this hierarchicalization of history is also clearly discernable in the

cyclical lore of many nations and religions – the Hindus, the Greco-Romans, the Mayans,

the Hopi, the Lakota, the Australian Aborigines, and many African tribes. The “earlier” a

world-age is, according to these cosmologies, the more clearly it appears as eternal level

of Being; the “later” an age is, the more closely it resembles our idea of an historical

period. So the “trajectory” of a given cycle-of-manifestation is not a straight line, or even

a circle, but rather a helix. Turning three times, it descends through four levels; and when

it returns to its compass-point of origin for the third time – in other words, when it

reaches its nadir -- it undergoes a “pole shift” from accelerating history to motionless

simultaneity; the perspective changes from that of the last grains of sand speeding

through the neck of the hourglass to the nearly motionless mass of sand below it, after

which the glass is inverted: nadir becomes zenith. In Guénon’s words, from The Reign of

Quantity and the Signs of the Times , pp. 159-160:

It is sometimes said, doubtless without any understanding of the real

reason, that today men live faster than in the past, and this is literally true.... If

carried to an extreme limit the contraction of time would in the end reduce it to a

single instant, and then duration would really have ceased to exist, for it is evident

that there can no longer be any succession within the instant. Thus it is that "time

the devourer ends by devouring itself", in such a way that, at the "end of the

world", that is to say at the extreme limit of cyclical manifestation, "there will be

no more time"; this is also why it is said that "death is the last being to die", for

wherever there is no succession of any kind, death is no longer possible. As soon

as succession has come to an end, or, in symbolic terms, "the wheel has ceased to

turn", all that exists cannot but be in perfect simultaneity; and this can also be

expressed by saying that "time has changed into space". Thus a "reversal" takes

place at the last, to the disadvantage of time and the advantage of space: at the

very moment when time seemed on the point of finally devouring space, space in

its turn absorbs time….

Atlantis and Hyperborea - An Inquiry Into the Cyclical Mysteries by Charles Upton.pdf

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