Aryan racial superiority, and the concept of the survival of the fittest was readily applied to the interaction between racial groups (however spurious and misguided this system of grouping might have been). Darwin’s assumption that evolution through natural selection would necessarily result in gradual improvements to each species was inverted by Aryan racism, which maintained that the White Race had long ago reached perfection and was being corrupted and undermined through miscegenation with inferior races.
As Godwin informs us, plans were being laid in some quarters for the biological ‘improvement’ of the human race back in the late nineteenth century. The French writer Ernest Renan believed that selective breeding in the future would result in the production of ‘gods’ and ‘devas’:
A factory of Ases [Scandinavian heroes], an Asgaard, might be reconstituted in the center of Asia. If one dislikes such myths, one should consider how bees and ants breed individuals for certain functions, or how botanists make hybrids. One could concentrate all the nervous energy in the brain … It seems that if such a solution should be at all realizable on the planet Earth, it is through Germany that it will come. (6)
In their desire to rediscover the ultimate mythical and cultural roots of their self-designated master race, the proponents of Aryanism turned away from the heat of the biblical Mesopotamian Eden and looked instead to the cool and pristine fastness of the Far North. The eighteenth-century polymath Jean-Sylvain Bailly (1736–1793) had already done much of the groundwork for a radical re-interpretation of humanity’s origin with his highly original combination of Eastern mysticism and astronomy. According to Bailly, the ancient cultures of Egypt, Chaldea, China and India were actually the heirs of a far older body of knowledge, possessed in the distant past by a long-lost superior culture living in the antediluvian North. (7)
Bailly believed that it was this ancient culture that invented the zodiac in around 4600 BC. After the Flood, members of this civilisation moved from northern Asia to India. For Bailly, this assertion was supported by the similarity of certain legends in later cultures living far from each other: for example, the legend of the Phoenix, which is found both in Egypt and in the Scandinavian Eddas (discussed in Chapter One). Bailly equated the details of the Phoenix’s death and rebirth with the annual disappearance of the Sun for 65 days at 71° North latitude. He went on to compare the Phoenix with the Roman god Janus, the god of time, who is represented with the number 300 in his right hand, and the number 65 in his left (corresponding, of course, with the 300 days of daylight and 65 days of darkness each year in the far northern latitudes). Bailly thus concluded that Janus was actually a northern god who had moved south with his original worshippers in the distant past. In support of his theory, Bailly also cited the legend of Adonis, who was required by Jupiter to spend one third of each year on Mount Olympus, one third with Venus and one third in Hades with Persephone. Bailly connected this legend with conditions in the geographical area at 79° North latitude, where the Sun disappears for four months (one third) of the year. (8)
To Bailly, this strongly suggested the preservation of the ancient knowledge of a hitherto unknown Nordic civilisation, which had been encoded in numerous legends passed down to subsequent cultures. These ideas corresponded somewhat with the work of one Comte de Buffon, who had concluded in 1749 that the Earth had formed much earlier than the Christian date of 4004 BC (although Buffon’s date of 73,083 BC is still quite far from the Earth’s actual age of approximately 4,000 million years). Buffon made the logical suggestion (within his scheme of creation) that the polar regions would have been the first to cool sufficiently to allow the development of life, and therefore placed the first human civilisation in the far northern latitudes. For Bailly, this was ample justification for his own ideas concerning the Arctic region as the cradle of humanity. The reason for the southerly migration of this first civilisation became obvious: since temperate climates are the most conducive to social, intellectual and scientific advancement, it clearly became necessary to move away gradually from the polar regions as they became too cold and the temperatures in the southern latitudes cooled from arid to temperate. The migration was finally complete when Chaldea, India and China were reached. (9)
The idea of a polar homeland for humanity was also elaborately developed by the Indian Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920) who wrote an epic work, The Arctic Home in the Vedas, while in prison in 1897 for publishing anti- British material in his newspaper, The Kesan. Published in 1903, Tilak’s book concentrates on the age and original location of the Indian Vedic civilisation, from its origin in the Arctic around 10,000 BC, through its destruction in the last Ice Age; the migration to northern Europe and Asia in 8000–5000 BC and the composition of the Vedic hymns; the loss of the Arctic traditions around 3000–1400 BC; to the Pre-Buddhistic period in 1400-500 BC. (10)
Tilak’s reading of the ancient Vedic texts supported his assertion of a prehistoric homeland in the far north, describing as they did a realm inhabited by the gods where the sun rose and fell once a year. Godwin has this to say regarding Tilak’s interpretation of the Vedic hymns:
The hymns are full of images that make nonsense in the context of a daily sunrise, such as the Thirty Dawn-Sisters circling like a wheel,’ and the ‘Dawn of Many Days’ preceding the rising of the sun. If, however, they are applied to the Pole, they fall perfectly into place. The light of the sun circling beneath the horizon would be visible for at least thirty days before its annual rising. One can imagine the sense of anticipation felt by the inhabitants, as the wheeling light became ever brighter and the long winter’s night came to an end.”
Tilak’s ideas on the origin of humanity were further developed by the Zoroastrian scholar H. S. Spencer in his book The Aryan Ecliptic Cycle (1965), in which he examines the Zoroastrian scriptures in much the same way that Tilak examined the Vedic texts. Spencer compared events in the scriptures with the various positions of the sun during the precession of the equinoxes. (At this point, we should pause briefly to examine this phenomenon. The rotational axis of the Earth is not perpendicular to the plane occupied by the Solar System: instead, it is tilted at an angle of 23 1/2 0. Due to gravitational forces from the Sun and the Moon, the axis of the Earth’s rotation ‘wobbles’ very slightly; or, to be more precise, it describes a circle. As the planet rotates, its axis also rotates, describing a complete circle once every 26,000 years.) In this way, Spencer was able to date with considerable accuracy the events described in the Zoroastrian scriptures. Spencer set the date for the first appearance of the Aryans in the polar regions at 25,628 BC, during the Interglacial Age. The Aryans were forced to leave their homeland as the environment grew steadily colder and more hostile, and enormous reptiles began to appear. (How the reptiles themselves could have withstood the cold is another matter.) According to Spencer, the advent of the Ice Age that scattered the Aryans from their pleasant homeland was just one of a number of global catastrophes that proved the downfall of at least three other ancient civilisations: Atlantis, Lemuria and the culture occupying what is now the Gobi Desert. (12) According to Spencer, the Aryan tradition influenced the great civilisations of Egypt, Sumer and Babylon.
The great Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, whom we met in Chapter One, had considerable information to divulge on the nature of the lost civilisations whose philosophy and knowledge were passed down, in frequently garbled form, to the great civilisations of the Middle and Far East. According to Blavatsky, who claimed to have consulted a fantastically old document entitled the Stanzas of Dzyan while in Tibet, our remote ancestors occupied a number of lost continents, the first of which she describes as ‘The Imperishable Sacred Land’, an eternal place unencumbered by the sometimes violent fates reserved for other continents, that was the home of the first human and also of ‘the last divine mortal’.
The Second Continent was Hyperborea, ‘the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole to receive the Second Race, and comprised the whole of what is now known as Northern Asia’. The ‘Second Race’ refers to one of the Root Races. Blavatsky continues:
The land of the Hyperboreans, the country that extended beyond Boreas, the frozen-hearted god of snows and hurricanes, who loved to slumber heavily on the chain of Mount Riphaeus, was neither an ideal country, as surmised by the mythologists, nor yet a land in the neighbourhood of Scythia and the Danube. It was a real continent, a bond-fide land which knew no winter in those early days, nor have its sorry remains more than one night and day during the year, even now. The nocturnal shadows never fall upon it, said the Greeks; for it is the land of the Gods, the favourite abode of Apollo, the god of light, and its inhabitants are his beloved priests and servants. This may be regarded as poetised fiction now; but it was poetised truth then. (13) [Original emphasis.]
The Third Continent was Lemuria (so called by the zoologist P. L. Sclater in reference to a hypothetical sunken continent extending from Madagascar to Sri Lanka and Sumatra). Blavatsky claimed that the gigantic continent of Lemuria actually existed, its highest points now forming islands in the Pacific Ocean.
