“In summary, anthropogenesis was a process of devolution, not evolution. Sixty-five thousand years ago, a race of gods described as ‘Golden’ lived harmoniously with a race of advanced early humans, characterized by fair skin, fair hair, and light eyes, in a joyous, orderly Golden Age somewhere in the Arctic. At some point, the two races intermixed and bred giant demigods. As the Arctic seat froze over in one of the Ice Ages, these demigods led the remaining human survivors south into the Atlantic, with some remaining in different lands along the way. Those who did so, encountered autochthonous races with whom they ultimately mixed, debasing their divine nature and giving rise to a new, Silver Age that corresponded to the Atlantean civilization vividly described by Plato and remembered by many traditions as a ‘Western’ land. It sent explorers out across the world from the Americas to the Far East. Thousands of years later this second super-civilization floundered due to continued mixing between the demigods and their human companions, generating the Upper Paleolithic proto-Nordic race.”
—Michael Bell1
I began my career in a field that is very far removed from the one in which I now find myself.
I suppose there are many who can say the same thing; perhaps it merely shows that my mindset is one that is capable of changing—of evolving, so to speak—or perhaps it merely shows that I am fickle and unserious.
Either way, I took my college degree in physical anthropology, and for the very simple reason that I have always been fascinated by the stories we tell ourselves about the origin of our own species. The field of anthropology, with its sweeping, geological vistas of human evolution across vast epochs of time, seemed to me the most epic and grandiose of man’s many creation myths to date, and I ate the stuff up with relish.
In retrospect, I see, evolutionism and its pat story of human origins is merely the latest and most elaborate of mankind’s many origin myths; one has only to look at such books as Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men—probably the great epic poem of progressivist eschatology—to recognize the remarkable mythological potency that the story of evolutionism possesses. It is the one unassailable foundational myth of our culture and our civilization; it is, in its way, sacrosanct, and transcends analysis and critical examination among the elite strata of our civilization in the same way that the story of Genesis did among the intellectual clerisy of the Middle Ages.
It is the sine qua non of modern intellectualism; to question it is to brand oneself instantly some sort of “denier”—a “science-denier,” to stand aside the motley ranks of “election-deniers,” “climate-deniers,” “vaccine-deniers,” “Holocaust-deniers,” and other such disagreeable and disreputable refuseniks who fail to get out of the way of our civilization’s grand march toward a glorious and progressive future.
So it’s no great surprise, really, that evolutionism should be the preferred origin myth of our civilization—after all, we pride ourselves on notions of democracy, egalitarianism, the self-made man, and endless technological progress as the miracle panacea for all our many ills and ailments. As Julius Evola observed, evolutionism is a myth perfectly suited to the Kali-Yuga, to the spiritual empery of the last and most degraded caste, and to a civilization that prizes mere work and drudgery above everything else:
“…this [spirit] is reflected in the…modern ideologies of ‘progress’ and ‘evolution,’ which have distorted with a ‘scientific’ irresponsibility any superior vision of history, promoted the definitive abandonment of traditional truths, and created the most specious alibis for the justification and glorification of modern man. The myth of evolutionism is nothing else but the profession of faith of the upstart. If in recent times the West does not believe in a transcendent origin but rather an origin ‘from below;’ and if the West no longer believes in the nobility of the origins but in the notion that civilization arises out of barbarism, religion from superstition, man from animal (Darwin), thought from matter, and every spiritual form from the ‘sublimation’ or transposition of the stuff that originates the instinct, libido, and complexes of the ‘collective unconscious’ (Freud, Jung), and so on—we can see in all this not so much the result of a deviated quest, but rather, and above all, an alibi, or something that a civilization created by both lower beings and the revolution of the serfs and pariahs against the ancient aristocratic society necessarily had to believe in and wish to be true.”2
Evola, true to form, does not mince words, and that passage is a powerful condemnation of the whole evolutionist myth that underlies the self-image of the modern world and modern man. It is also, of course, entirely accurate. There’s something unspeakably pedestrian in the evolutionary origin story that the moderns tell themselves.
The story, naturally, comes in two main variants, both of which are comforting in varying degrees to the materialists who promulgate them. The first, and most popular, is the “Out of Africa” hypothesis, which essentially holds that men evolved from apelike creatures in Plio-Pleistocene Africa, and thence emigrated to conquer and inhabit much of the known world, including the Americas. Some even invoke a recurrent process of “centrifugal speciation,”3 in which different species expanded into the Old World, before retreating back to the human cradlelands in the “Motherland” of Africa; this is said to explain the profusely variegated likes of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and even the so-called “Hobbits” (H. floresiensis) of Indonesia.
Of course, we shouldn’t overlook the convenient moral symmetry of this theory, which is highly gratifying to modern anthropologists—namely, the fact that mankind originated in Africa, the perennial victim in leftist passion plays, and thus that all human beings, of whatever race or color, are perforce the descendants of black Africans. This leads us naturally to the other variant of the story, the much-less-popular “Multiregional Hypothesis,” which holds that the various races of mankind evolved in situ from previously existing, autochthonous hominin species in each region of the globe.
Whether each of these indigenous human species evolved from some more primitive African ancestor, in an even remoter period of time, is a question that is conveniently unaddressed. It is probably needless to point out that this particular hypothesis is popular with the more racist evolutionists, and of course the Chinese, who—although committed materialists—will never admit to owning any kinship with the rest of mankind, and will certainly never concede to having evolved from black Africans.
So much for the materialist myth of evolutionism.
But it turns out there are other anthropologies and anthropogonies, which eluded me during my university days. Admittedly, I would probably have scoffed at them then had I known of their existence. Alas, such is the overconfidence of youth; we are all the product of the culture that forms our minds, and indoctrination has never been more powerful than it is today.
I opened this essay with a rather lengthy epigraph derived from Michael Bell’s essay “Man’s Devolution Across Cycles: Radical Traditionalism on Anthropogenesis,” which appeared in the Spring 2010 issue of The Occidental Quarterly. This is a fascinating and highly-recommended essay that explores the matter of human origins from a Traditionalist perspective.
In short, the essay explains that the Traditionalists posit a theory of devolutionism, rather than evolutionism, to explain man’s origins; rather than a “profession of faith of the upstart,” this theory asserts that man has declined, both in physical and intellectual qualities, from a whilom height in some fantastically remote prehistoric period. This is a theory that is entirely in keeping with traditional notions of the cyclicity of time (something I’ve discussed in previous essays), and accords very well with traditional data—including stories out of Vedic and Avestic sources, the Old Testament, Greek and Roman poets, and even ancient Chinese literature.
Moreover, the geographic homeland of the human race is never located by Tradition in Africa or indeed any other southern or equatorial continent, but rather in “Hyperborea”—that is to say, the land of the North Polar region, which is today nonexistent, and the home only of thick pack ice. But Tradition asserts something very different, and this is a fascinating theme that is explored in another important essay of Traditionalist anthropology, “On the Hyperborean Tradition,” by Arvo of the mysterious Gruppo di UR.
In this seminal work, Arvo demolishes the evolutionistic doctrine of human origins, and expatiates at length about the Hyperborean tradition:
“First we must remove the limitations due to supposedly ‘positive’ researches into prehistory and to the current views of paleoethnology and geology. Some other time I will show how ‘evolutionism’ is a bad joke, because if one wants to define the direction of humanity’s overall course during the terrestrial cycle in which we find ourselves, one must speak not of evolution but of involution. It is equally contestable that a purely animal and apelike humanity was all that existed in distant prehistory. Even the so-called caveman is the result of a misunderstanding: men of the earliest period (pre-Stone Age) did not so much inhabit the caves as use them as suitable places for certain rituals…4
[…]
“But I am not going to dwell on these problems, beyond mentioning that ancient peoples, much closer to their origins than we, never knew or remembered anything of an animal past, but always spoke of superior races, often even considered ‘divine,’ which preceded them and to which they owed their religions, their laws, and their culture. The recurrent motif among ancient peoples is never that of ‘evolution’ but always of a ‘fall’ or ‘decline’ in one form or another.”5
Arvo then proceeds to explain that esoteric traditions unite in seating mankind’s origins in the region of the North Pole, which has come to be known by many names—including “Hyperborea” and “Thule:”
“Esoteric doctrine teaches that the original center of all that in the present cycle is tradition, in the higher sense, was Hyperborean, i.e., Arctic or polar. The North Polar region was therefore the original homeland of the races whose successive migrations created secondary or derived traditional centers and cultural forms in a series of other regions. The apparent absurdity of this idea vanishes if one thinks of the inclination of the earth’s axis and the so-called precession of the equinoxes, which allows for the possibility that the Arctic regions did not always have a climate that now renders them uninhabitable…Glaciation did not come until a later period—and supporting memories of that cataclysm are found in various traditions, especially clearly and precisely in the Aryo-Iranian, which also says that the airyanem-vāejò, the original homeland or ‘seed’ of the Aryan race, was actually located in the extreme North.”6
The author then proceeds to elucidate a theory, from an esoteric and traditional perspective, that seems in many ways to anticipate the hypotheses of “crustal displacement” and “cataclysmic pole shift” which were later advocated by the likes of Charles Hapgood:
“Originally, that spirituality which had, has, and will always have the function and significance of a center, hence of a pole or axis for all of human life, both individual and collective, was equally ‘polar’ in the geographic sense. This fatidic concordance between symbol and reality would be broken in later times, due to the climatic changes caused by the inclination of the terrestrial axis: an inclination which, as some have noted, seems not to have existed at the beginning, but occurred at the start of the present cycle as the cosmic consequence of a spiritual fact, a deviation of mankind.”7
There is, then, some basis for the migrational hypotheses of the evolutionists, but their theories are all hopelessly at sea—it is a matter of involution, not evolution, and the racial seat is in the Arctic, not Africa. Furthermore, the “centrifugal speciation” of Hyperborean mankind led to the population of continents and the formation of civilizations not recognized by modern scientism:
“The existence of Atlantis is also part of esoteric teaching, setting aside the fantasies that have been spun around it in recent times. However, we need to distinguish the location of Hyperborea from that of Atlantis, and likewise their traditions. When the Hyperborean cycle closed, it seems that a spiritual and traditional center was founded in Atlantis that reproduced the Boreal center, so to speak, for a certain cycle, adopting many of its symbols because it was a sort of image of it. But the two centers should not be confused. The Atlantean center already had a secondary and particular character, and many traditional centers on the Eurasian continent were founded independently of it, deriving directly from the Hyperborean.”8
As Bell further observes in his article “Man’s Devolution Across Cycles,” the destruction and final submergence of the “Atlantean center” led to the final degenerescence of the races of mankind, culminating in the present-day “moderns” and their debased and degenerate “civilization”:
“With the sinking of Atlantis, these beings, now human in nature but still retaining a divine spark, migrated in an East-West trajectory. On this second great exodus, corresponding to a Bronze Age, some intermarried with indigenous peoples and further debased their line while others maintained their purity. The latter would later erect the most revered civilizations and empires of recorded history, such as Sumeria, Vedic India, Egypt, Hellas, Rome, China, and much later, the feudal regimes of Western Europe. The mixed peoples would be remembered as the Pelasgians, Minoans, Etruscans, Hebrews, Arameans, Iberians, and all other chthonic ethnicities that were subdued and restricted to a plebeian caste. Unfortunately, the vast empires noted above served as little more than dim reflections of the original Hyperborean civilization, precluded from fulfilling their true potential by the prevailing metaphysical conditions of the age in which they flourished.”9
I’ll wrap up this discussion with a final note about Traditionalist anthropogony.
In a previous essay, we saw that the great metaphysicist René Guénon had more or less assigned a specific period of time for the duration of the current cycle, or Manvantara. That number was 64,800 years, and since it was Guénon’s understanding—as well as the understanding of many other eminent metaphysicists and esotericists—that our cycle was very near to its close, we can estimate that the Krita-Yuga (or Satya-Yuga), the “Golden Age,” of our own Manvantara must have begun around 64,000 years ago. And since each Manvantara is born from the rectification of a previous cycle, it stands to reason that the Golden Age of our cycle—that halcyon era of a glorious Hyperborean civilization—was preceded by a Kali-Yuga, the Iron Age of decadence and degeneracy of the previous cycle.
It is a fascinating, if rather fruitless, exercise to wonder about the nature of the peoples and civilizations of that preceding cycle. Guénon makes it clear that Tradition preserves their memory only faintly; for instance, in the “seven kings of Edom,” which are spoken of in the Zohar:
“…the close resemblance of Edom to Adam may be one of the reasons why this name is taken here to designate the vanished peoples, that is, those of the previous Manvantaras. We also see the relationship that this last point presents with the question of what has been called the ‘pre-adamites’: if one takes Adam as being the origin of the red race and its particular tradition,10 it can simply be a matter of the other races that have preceded the former in the course of the present human cycle. If we take it in a more extended sense as the prototype for the whole of present humanity, it will be a case of these earlier humanities to which precisely the ‘seven kings of Edom’ refers.”11
Speculating on these races is quite vain, as Guénon says, for their number is too vast to count, as Islamic tradition affirms—“in which there exists an ḥādith ( saying of the Prophet) that ‘before the Adam whom we know, God created a hundred thousand Adams’ (that is, an undetermined number), which is as clear an affirmation as can be of the multiplicity of the cyclical periods and of the corresponding humanities.”12
Did the “new barbarians” in the Kali-Yuga of that anterior cycle possess a materialistic, technological civilization of their own? Did they build flying machines, like the vimāna of the Hindu epics, or construct spacecraft to explore the planets, even as we do? In the Spiritualist channelings of Jane Roberts, known as the “Seth Material,” there is talk of so-called “reincarnational civilizations,” which existed long ago, and some of which were even said to far surpass our current state of technological development.
That is precious little to go on, but then it’s important to recall the detailed prehistoric chronologies of the Theosophists, which chronicle the histories of the Atlantean and Lemurian civilizations over spans of hundreds of thousands of years. And even the College of Seth13 claims to have records of advanced and highly sophisticated races and civilizations that preceded our own by tens and even hundreds of millions of years. So perhaps there really is something to those theories of a “Civilization One,” whence all others have derived; or maybe there is a mind-boggling indefinitude of them, extending far back into the past and far forward into the future. It is something I wonder about often enough, and this train of thought always leads to its ineluctable corollary—what memories will remain of our own civilization, after it meets its inevitable eschaton, and a new cycle begins? Are we to be utterly forgotten, as were those who went before us? Or are there some among us who will reckon among their descendants the nucleus of that “Golden Age” race that is destined to appear at the beginning of the next Manvantara?
As for the apparent dearth of archaeological evidence…this doesn’t trouble me a whit. After all, if my friends at the College of Seth are to be believed, there is plenty of it—if one only knows where to look, and possesses the right connections in places of power.14 Even so, I suspect, evidence will come soon enough.
As René Guénon sagely observed:
“…it is nonetheless true that many vestiges of a forgotten past are coming out of the earth in our age, and perhaps not without reason. Without risking the slightest prediction on what can result from these discoveries, the possible importance of which those who make them are generally incapable of suspecting, we must certainly see in this a ‘sign of the times.’ Must not everything be found again at the end of the Manvantara, to serve as a starting-point for the elaboration of the future cycle?”15
“Man’s Devolution Across Cycles: Radical Traditionalism on Anthropogenesis,” The Occidental Quarterly (vol. 10, no. 1, Spring 2010), 50.
Julius Evola, Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1969) [Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International, 1995) trans. Guido Stucco, pg. 333].
Cf., for instance: Jaquith, T. M. (2010), “The Earliest Hominin Dispersals from Africa: A Case for the ‘Long Chronology’ in Out of Africa 1” [Unpublished manuscript]. Department of Anthropology, Florida Atlantic University.
Even modern archaeologists and anthropologists have been forced to concede as much in recent years.
Julius Evola and the UR Group, Introduzione alla Magia, Volume Secondo (Rome: Edizioni Mediterranee, 1971). [Introduction to Magic, Volume II: The Path of Initiatic Wisdom, trans. Joscelyn Godwin. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2019, pg. 370.]
Ibid., pg. 371.
Ibid., pg. 372.
Ibid., pg. 373. Cf. René Guénon, in “The Place of Atlantean Tradition in the Manvantara”:
“The very position of the Atlantean center on the East-West axis indicates its subordination with respect to the Hyperborean center, located at the North-South polar axis. Indeed, although in the complete system of the six directions of space the conjunction of these two axes forms what one can call a horizontal cross, the North-South axis must nonetheless be regarded as relatively vertical with respect to the East-West axis, as we have explained elsewhere. In conformity with the symbolism of the annual cycle, one can still call the first of these two axes the solstitial axis and the second the equinoctial axis; and this helps us understand that the starting-point given to the year may not be the same in all the traditional forms. The starting-point that one can call normal, as being in direct conformity with primordial tradition, is the winter solstice; the fact of starting the year at one of the equinoxes indicates the attachment to a secondary tradition, such as the Atlantean tradition” (Formes Traditionnelles et Cycles Cosmiques (Éditions Gallimard, 1970) [Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles (Hillsdale NY: Sophia Perennis, 2001) pg. 24]).
See also the tenth chapter of Guénon’s King of the World for a further discussion of the Atlantean tradition.
Bell, op. cit., 51.
The Atlanteans were said to be the “red race;” cf. “The Place of Atlantean Tradition in the Manvantara” in Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles (pg. 25). Guénon further makes the point that there is a discernible linkage between the Hebraic and Atlantean traditions.
Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles, “A Few Remarks on the Name Adam,” pg. 31.
Ibid.
I feel it’s necessary to make it clear that there is no direct connection between the “College of Seth” and the “Seth Material,” beyond the purely superficial coincidence of names; nevertheless, the observable concordance between certain of the “deep-time” histories of the Seth Material and the College might not be altogether accidental.
As I mentioned in last week’s article, this material is much more plausibly explained as the fossil residua of advanced civilizations belonging to anterior Manvantaras—which is fully in keeping with the anthropologies and anthropogonies of Tradition—rather than as the remnants of time-traveling races. As for the College’s vehement assertion of the existence of non-human—or, in some cases, ab-human—races in the earth’s far past and far future…well, I am hardly qualified to speak with any authority about that.
Traditional Forms & Cosmic Cycles, “The Place of the Atlantean Tradition in the Manvantara,” pg. 26.