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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

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

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