Excerpt from "The American Cycle and the Eastern Mediterranean Cycle" -- Revolt Against the Modern World

By Julius Evola

[ Gracias a Dustin por proveer el siguiente articulo. ]

En Español

For obvious reasons I cannot include in the present work a metaphysics of history of the main ancient civilizations. I will limit myself to pointing out some of their most characteristic aspects and meanings, thus providing a common thread to those who want to pursue their own special research in any one of them.

In any event, my scope will be confined to the Western world, since outside our hemisphere the great majority of civilizations retained, in one way or another and until recent times, a traditional character ("traditional" in the widest sense of the term, which includes all of the previously described forms of civilization and associates them in a common opposition to the "humanist" cycle of the last ages), which they eventually lost due to the eroding action exercised upon them by Western countries that had themselves fallen victim to a degenerative process. Thus, in order to understand the processes that played a decisive role in the genesis of the modern world, it is necessary to look at the West.

The traces of the Northern and solar spirituality can be found in historical times mainly in the area of the Aryan civilizations. Considering the abuse that has been made of the term aryan in some contemporary milieus, such a term should be used with some reservations; in other words, it should not be made to correspond to a merely biological or ethnic concept (in this regard it would be more appropriate to talk about a boreal or Northern-Atlantic race, depending on the case at hand), but rather to the concept of a race of the spirit, whose correspondence to a physical race has varied from one civilization to another. "Aryan" corresponds more or less to "heroic"; the connection with the origins still exists as a dimmed legacy, but the decisive element is the tendency toward inner liberation and the reintegration in an active and combative form. The fact that in India the term rya was the synonym of dvija, "twice-born" or "regenerated," supports this point. ⁽¹⁾

Concerning the area proper to the Aryan civilization there is the interesting testimony of the Aitareya Brhamana. This text relates that the struggle between the deva, the luminous deities, and the asura, the enemies of the divine heroes, began in the four regions of space. The region in which the deva triumphed and that received the name of sa-esa dig aparajita, or "unconquered region," was the region situated between North and East, which corresponds to the direction of the Northern-Atlantic migration. On the other hand, the South has been considered in India as the region inhabited by demons, by the forces hostile to the gods and to the ryas; the "southern fire," of the ritual of three fires is aimed at exorcising these forces. ⁽²⁾ As far as the Western world is concerned, a reference can be made to the so-called battle-axe cultures that are usually associated with the megalithic culture of the dolmen. To the profane sciences, the original seat of these races still remains shrouded in mystery, like the seat of the first races that were clearly superior to Neanderthal man and who have been called the "Greeks of the Paleolithic."

There is a connection between the appearance of the "battle-axe cultures" of the Neolithic and the more recent expansion of the Indo-European populations ("Aryans") in Europe; they are believed to have originated the political and military institutions and forms of government that opposed the Demetrian, peaceful, communitarian, and priestly type of culture and that often replaced it. ⁽³⁾

Other civilizations in addition to the Aryan ones have displayed traces of the primordial tradition up to historical times. To follow closely the interplay of the two opposite themes of South and North, however, with reference to an ethnic element, would take us too far afield and cause us to formulate uncertain hypotheses.

In any event, with regard to pre-Columbian America, we must consider first of all the archaic substratum of a telluric, Southern cycle of civilization related to the Atlantean cycle. In this cycle we find the civilizations of the Maya, the Tiahuanaco (Tiwanaku), and the Pueblo as well as those of other stocks or minor centers; its traits are very similar to those that can be found in the prehistoric traces of some sort of Southern belt extending from the Pelasgian Mediterranean to the vestiges of the pre-Aryan civilization of Mohenjo-Daro (India) and to analogous traces in predynastic China.

Such a civilization is prevalently of a Demetrian, priestly type; solar symbols survive together with a strong chthonic component, though in altered and weakened forms, so much so that one would search in vain for elements that are traceable to the principle of spiritual virility and Olympian superiority. This applies also to the civilization of the Maya where we find prominent figures of priests and deities who assume the insignia of supreme sovereignty and royalty. There is a very characteristic Mayan figure in the Dresden Codex of the god Kukulcán, adorned with the insignia of royalty and with a priest kneeling before him, performing a bloody and mortifying ritual on himself. The Demetrian principle thus leads to forms of a "religious" type, in which fasts and bodily mortifications characterize the fall of man from his original dignity. Though the Maya built an empire called "the Kingdom of the Great Snake" (nachan was a frequent and highly representative symbol of this civilization), it had a peaceful rather than a warrior and heroic character; the priestly sciences were highly developed, but once the empire reached a high stage of opulence, it slowly but increasingly degenerated into the forms of a hedonistic and Aphrodistic civilization. It seems that among the Maya originated the figure of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was a solar Atlantean god who came to be worshiped in an emasculated type of cult that was of a peaceful, contemplative, and self-mortifying nature. According to a tradition, one day Quetzalcoatl left his subjects and withdrew to the Atlantic seat whence he had come.

This should probably be related to the invasions of the races of the Nahuas, Toltecs, and finally of the Aztecs who overcame the Maya and their crepuscular civilization, forming new states. These are races that retain in a more distinct way the memory of Tula and Aztlan, that is, of the Northern-Atlantic seat, and thus can be considered part of the "heroic" cycle. Their last creation was the ancient Mexican empire, the capital of which (Tenochtitlan), according to a legend, was built on the site of an apparition of an eagle holding in its claws a snake. The same can be said of those Inca stocks who were sent as conquerors by the "sun" and who created the Peruvian empire after subjugating races of lower types of civilizations and their animistic and chthonic cults (which had survived in the lowest strata of society). ⁽⁴⁾ There is a very interesting legend about the race of the giants of Tiahuanaco / Tiwanaku--whose heaven included only the moon (lunar cycle with its Titanic counterpart)--a race that killed the Sun's prophet only to be massacred and turned into stone by the ensuing apparition of the Sun; this legend can be related to the advent of the Incas. ⁽⁵⁾ In Mexico, the following pairs of contrasting elements are very revealing: (1) a solar calendar opposed to a lunar one, which apparently belonged to the more ancient stratum of the aboriginal civilization and was mainly employed by the priestly caste; (2) an aristocratic and hereditary system of property that was opposed to a communist, plebeian type; and finally, (3) the opposition between the cult of fierce warrior deities, such as Huitzilopochtli and Tezcatlipoca, and the surviving traces of the cult of Quetzalcoatl. In the most distant memories of these civilizations we find again--as in the Edda--the theme of the struggle against the giants and a recent generation affected by the Flood.

As in the case of the Incan empire...factors of a general degeneration coupled with internal political strife brought about the collapse of Mexican civilizations--which undoubtedly had a glorious and solar past--at the hands of a few groups of European adventurers. The vital and inner potential of these cycles had been depleted for a long time, and thus we cannot verify any subsistence or revival of the ancient spirit in the times following the conquest.

Nevertheless morainic fragments of the ancient heritage endured for a longer time in the spirit and in the race of some North American stocks. For the most part, it is possible to subscribe to the view of Frithjof Schuon, who spoke about the singularly complete human type of the American Indian: his dignity, his pride, his moral uprightness and strength, his generosity and his heroism, which are all dimensions of an inner beauty represented both by the sun and by the eagle, command our respect and bespeak a spirituality without which these virtues would appear unintelligible and lacking a sufficient reason. ⁽⁶⁾

Notes

1. For an overview of the notion of "Aryan," see my Sintesi di dottrina della razza. [Editor: Aryan here is not meant in Hitler's sense, but in the archetypal Vedic understanding.]

2. In the Rig Veda the South is the direction of the sacrifice performed in honor of the forefathers (pitr-yna); conversely, the North is the direction of the sun and of the gods (deva-yna).

3. C. Dawson, The Age of the Gods.

4. According to an Inca law, every new king had the duty to increase the size of the empire and to replace the indigenous cults with the solar cult.

5. See L. Spence, The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru (London, 1914). Analogous legends are found in North America too. From scientific researches on the blood types applied to the problem of the race, it seems that among the Indians of North America and the Pueblos the blood remnants are more similar than that between Scandinavian people.

6. F. Schuon, Études traditionnelles (1949), 3.64.