from sacred geography to geopolitics_aleksandr dugin

8/12/2019 From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics_Aleksandr Dugin

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From Sacred Geography to Geopolitics

Aleksandr Dugin

This text appeared under the title Ot sakralnoy geografii k geopolitike in

Elementy n. 4, and as the chapter 7 of Misterii Evrazii (Moscow 1996).

Geopolitics as intermediate scienceGeopolitical concepts became the major factors of modern politics since a long

time ago. They are built on general principles allowing to easily analyze the situation of

any particular country and region.

Geopolitics in its present form is undoubtedly a worldly, profane, secularized

science. But maybe, among all modern sciences, it saved in itself the greatest

connection with Tradition and traditional sciences. Ren Gunon said that modern

chemistry is the outcome of the desacralization of a traditional science -alchemy, as

modern physics is of magic. Exactly in the same way one might say that modern

geopolitics is the product of the laicizing and desacralizing of another traditional science

-sacred geography. But since geopolitics holds a special place among modern sciences,

and it is often ranked as a pseudo-science, its profanizing is not so accomplished and

irreversible, as in the case of chemistry or physics. The connection with sacred

geography here is rather distinctly visible. Therefore it is possible to say that

geopolitics stands in an intermediate place between traditional science (sacred

geography) and profane science.

Land and sea

The two primary concepts of geopolitics are land and sea. Just these two

elements -Earth and Water- lie at the roots of human qualitative representation of

earthly space. Through the experience of land and sea, earth and water, man enters into

contact with the fundamental aspects of his existence. Land is stability, gravity, fixity,

space as such. Water is mobility, softness, dynamics, time.


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These two elements are in essence the most obvious display of the material

nature of the world. They stand outside of man: everything is heavy and fluid. They

are also inside him: body and blood. (The same happens also at a cellular level.)

The universatility of the experience of earth and water generates the traditional

concept of Firmament, since the presence of the Higher Waters (the source of rain) in

the sky also implies the presence of a symmetric and necessary element -earth, land, the

celestial vault. Anyway, Earth, Sea, Ocean are in essence the major categories of

earthly existence, and for mankind it is impossible not to see in them some basic

attributes of the universe. As the two basic terms of geopolitics, they preserve their

significance both for civilizations of a traditional kind and for exclusively modern

states, peoples and ideological blocks. At the level of global geopolitical phenomena,

Land and Sea generated the terms: thalassocratia and tellurocratia, i.e. power by means

of the sea and power by means of the land .

The force of any state and any empire is based upon the preferential

development of one of these categories. Empires are either thalassocratic, or

tellurocratics. The former imply the existence of a mother country and colonies, the

latter of a capital and provinces on common land. In the case of thalassocracy its

territory is not unified into one land space -which creates an element of discontinuity.

The sea here lies both strength and weakness of thalassocratic power. Tellurocracy,

vice-versa, has the quality of territorial continuity.

But geographical and cosmological logics would at once complicate the

seemingly simple scheme of this division: the pair land-sea, by reciprocal

superimposition of its elements, gives birth to the ideas of maritime land and of land

water. The maritime land is the island, i.e. the basis of maritime empire, the pole of

thalassocracy. Land water or water within land are the rivers, which predetermine the

development of overland empires. Just on the river is located the city, that is the capital,

the pole of tellurocracy. This symmetry is symbolic, economic and geographical at the

same time. It is important to notice that the status of Island and Continent is defined not

so much on the basis of their physical magnitude, than on the basis of the peculiar

typical consciousness of the population. So the geopolitics of the US has an insular

character, despite of the size of Northern America, while insular Japan geopolitically

represents an example of continental mentality, etc.


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One more detail is relevant: historical thalassocracy is linked to the West and the

Atlantic Ocean, while tellurocracy to the East and the Eurasian continent. (The above

mentioned example of Japan is explained, thus, by the stronger attractive effect of

Eurasia.)

Thalassocracy and Atlantism became synonyms long before colonial expansion

of Great Britain or Portuguese-Spanish conquests. Already since the beginning of sea

migrations waves, the peoples of West and their cultures began their Eastward

movement on from the centres located on the Atlantic. The Mediterranean also did rise

from Gibraltar to the Near East, rather than the other way. And on the contrary,

excavations in Eastern Siberia and Mongolia prove that exactly here were the most

ancient centres of civilization -that is, the central lands of the continent were the cradle

of the Euroasian mankind.

Symbolism of landscape

Besides these two global categories -Land and Sea- geopolitics operates also

with more particular definitions. Among thalassocratic realities, there is a

differentiation between sea and oceanic formations. So, for instance, the sea civilization

of the Black Sea or Mediterranean Sea are rather qualitatively different from the

civilization of the oceans, i.e. insular powers and peoples dwelling on the shores of the

open ocean. More particular divisions exist also between river and lake civilizations,

linked to continents.

Tellurocracy too has its particular forms. So it is possible to distinguish a

civilization of the Steppe and a civilization of the Forest, a civilization of the Mountains

and a civilization of the Plains, a civilization of the Desert and a civilization of Ice. The

varieties of landscape in sacred geography are understood as symbolical complexes

linked to the specificity of state, religious and ethical ideology of the different peoples.

And even in that case, when we deal with universalistic ecumenical religion, its

concrete embodying in such or such people, race, or state will be identically subject to

adaptation according to the local sacred-geographical context.

Desert and steppes represent the geopolitical microcosm of the nomads.

Precisely in deserts and steppes the tellurocratic tendency reaches its summit, as the


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water factor here is minimally present. The empires of Desert and Steppe should

logically be the geopolitical bridgehead of tellurocracy.

As an example of the empire of Steppe, one might consider the empire of Gengis

Kahn, while a typical example of the empire of Wilderness is the arabian khalifat, arisen

under direct influence of the nomads.

Mountains and the civilizations of mountains more often represent archaic,

fragmentary. Mountain countries not only are not sources of expansion; on the contrary,

there are concentrated the victims of the geopolitical expansion of other tellurocratic

forces. No empire has its centre in mountain regions. Hence the so often repeated

motive of sacred geography: mountains are populated by demons. On the other hand,the idea of the conservation of the residuals of ancient races and civilizations on the

mountains is shown in the fact that precisely on the mountains the sacred centres of

tradition are placed. It is even possible to say that in tellurocracies a mountain

corresponds to some spiritual power.

The logical combination of both concepts -mountain as a hieratic image and

plain as a regal image- became the symbolism of the hill, i.e. a small or average height.

The hill is a symbol of imperial might raising above the secular level of the steppe, but

not reaching the limit of supreme power (as it is in the case of mountains). A hill is a

dwelling place for a king, a count, an emperor, but not for the priest. All capitals of

large tellurocratic empires are placed on a hill or on hills (often on seven hills -the

number of the planets; or on five- the number of elements, including ether; and so on).

The forest in sacred geography is close to the mountains in a definite sense. The

symbolism of the tree is related to the symbolism of the mountain (both the former andthe latter designate the world axis). Therefore in tellurocracies the forest also plays a

peripheral function -it, too, is the place of the priests (druids, magi, hermits), but also

at the same time the place of demons, i.e. archaic residuals from a vanished past.

Neither the forest zone can be the centre of the overland empire.

The tundra represents the northern analogue to the steppe and the desert,

although the cold climate makes it much less significant from a geopolitical point of

view. This periphericity reaches its apogee with ices, which, similarly to the


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mountains, are deeply archaic zones. It is indicative that the eskimo shamanic tradition

implies departing alone among ices, where to the future shaman the world beyond is

opened out. Thus, ices are a hieratic zone, the threshold of a different world.

From these primary and most general characteristics of the geopolitical map, it is

possible to define the various regions of the planet according to their sacred quality.

This method can also be applied to the local features of the landscape at a level of single

countries or even of single localities. It is also possible to trace the likeness of

ideologies and traditions of the most (apparently) different peoples, in the event that the

native born landscape is the same.

East and West in sacred geography

Cardinal Ponts in the context of sacred geography have special qualitative

characteristic. In the various traditions and in the various periods of these traditions, the

picture of sacred geography can vary according to the cyclical phases of development of

the given tradition. Thus the symbolic function of Cardinal Points often varies also.

Not going deep into details, it is possible to formulate the most universal law of sacred

geography with reference to East and West.

Sacred geography on the basis of space symbolism traditionally considers the

East as the land of Spirit, the paradise land, the land of a completeness, abundance,

the Sacred native land in its fullest and most perfect kind. In particular, this idea is

mirrored in the Bible text, where the eastern disposition of Eden is treated. Precisely

such understanding is peculiar also to other abrahamic traditions (Islam and Judaism),

and also to many non-abrahamic traditions -Chinese, Hindu and Iranian. East is the

mansion of the gods, states the sacred formula of the ancient Egyptians, and the same

word east (neter in aegyptian) meant at the same time god. From the point of

view of natural symbolism, East is the place where ascends, vos-tekeat [in russian] the

sun, Light of the World, material symbol of Divinity and Spirit.

The West has the opposite symbolical meaning. It is the country of death, the

lifeless world, the green country (as the ancient Egyptians called it). West is the

empire of exile, the pit of the rejected, according to the expression of Islamic

mystics. West is anti-east, the country of zakata [in russian], decay, degradation,


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transition from the manifest to the non-manifest, from life to death, from completeness

to need, etc. West [Zapad, in russian] is the place where the sun goes, where it sinks

down [za-padaet].

According to the given logics of natural cosmic symbolism, the ancient

traditions organized their sacred space, founded their centres of cult, burial places,

temples and edifices, and interpreted the natural and civilizational features of

geographical, cultural and political territories of the planet. In this way, the structure

itself of migrations, wars, campaigns, demographic waves, building of empires etc. was

defined by the original, pragmatic logics of sacred geography. Along the East-West

axis were drawn peoples and civilizations, possessing hierarchical characters -closer to

the East were those closer to Sacral, to Tradition, to spiritual wealth. Closer to West,

those of a more decayed, degraded and dying Spirit.

Of course this logicis was not absolute, but at the same time it was neither minor

nor relative -as it is today wrongly considered by many profane scholars of ancient

religions and traditions. As a matter of fact, sacred logics and the following cosmic

symbolism were much more consciously realized, understood and practised by the

ancient peoples, than it is agreed to esteem today. And even in our antisacred world, at

an unconscious level almost always archetypes of sacred geography are preserved in

their integrity, and are awoken in the most relevant and critical moments of social

cataclysms.

So, sacred geography univocally affirms the law of qualitative space, in which

the East represents the symbolic ontological plus, and the West the ontological

minus. According to the Chinese tradition, the East is Yang, the male, bright, solar

principle, and the West is Yin, the female, dark, lunar principle.

East and West in modern geopolitics

We shall observe how this sacred-geographical logics is mirrored in geopolitics,

which, being an exclusively modern science, is only focused upon the factual situation,

leaving out of the frame the most sacred principles.


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Geopolitics in its original formulations by Ratzel, Kjellen and Mackinder (and

later by Haushofer and the Russian eurasists) just refrained from connecting the features

of the different kinds of civilizations and states to their geographical disposition.

Geopoliticians stared at the fact of a fundamental difference between insular and

continental powers, between western, progressive civilization and eastern,

despotic and archaic cultural forms. Since in general the question about Spirit in its

metaphysical and sacred comprehension never arose in modern science, geopoliticians

left it aside, preferring to evaluate the situation in different, more modern terms, rather

than through the concepts of sacred and profane, traditional and antitraditional

etc.

Geopoliticians established the major differences between political, cultural and

industrial development of Eastern and Western in the last centuries. The final picture is

the following. The West is the centre of material and technological development.

At the cultural-ideological level, there liberal-democratic tendencies, individualistic

and humanist world views are prevailing. At the economic level, priority is given to

trade and technical modernization. In the West theories about progress, evolution,

progressive development of history for the first time appeared, completely alien to the

traditional Eastern world (and also to those periods of Western history, when a rigorous

sacred tradition existed there too - as it was, in particular, in the Middle Ages).

Coercion at a social level in the West acquired only an economic character, and the Law

of Idea and Force was gradually replaced by the Law of Money. Gradually a peculiar

Western ideology was cast in the universal formula of ideology of human rights,

which became a dominant principle in the most western regions of the planet -Northern

America, and first of all the US. At an industrial level, to this ideology corresponded

the idea of developed countries, and at an economic level the concept of free market,of economic liberalism. The whole aggregate of these features, with the addition of

the purely military, strategical integration of the different sectors of the Western

civilization, is defined today by the concept of atlantism. In the past century

geopoliticians spoke about an Anglo-Saxon kind of civilization or about capitalist,

bourgeois democracy. In this atlantist type the formula of geopolitical West found

its most pure embodying.


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Geopolitical East represents in itself the straight opposition to geopolitical West.

Instead of economic modernization, here (in the less developed countries) traditional,

archaic modes of production of corporative, shop-manufacturing type prevail. Instead

of economic coercion, more often the state uses moral or simply physical coercion

(Law of Idea and Law of Force). Instead of democracy and human right the East

gravitates around totalitarianism, socialism and authoritarianism, i.e. around various

types of social regimes, whose only common feature is that the centre of their systems

there is not the individual, man with his rights and his peculiar individual

values, but something supra-individual, supra-human -be it society, nation,

people, idea, weltanschauung, religion, cult of the leader etc. The East

opposed to western liberal democracy the most various types of non-liberal, non-

individualistic the societies -from authoritarian monarchy up to theocracy or socialism.

Moreover, from a pure typological, geopolitical point of view, the political specificity of

this or that regime was secondary in comparison with the qualitative dividing between

western (= individualist-mercantile) order and eastern (= supra-individualist-

based on force) order. Representative forms of such anti-western civilization were the

USSR, communist China, Japan about 1945 or Khomeinis Iran.

It is curious to notice that Rudolf Kjellen, the first author to use the term

geopolitics, illustrated the difference between West and East in this way. A typical

pet phrase of the Americans, -wrote Kjellen- is go ahead, that literally means

forward. In it the interior and natural geopolitical optimism and progressism of the

American civilization, being the extreme form of the western pattern, is mirrored.

Russians usually repeat the word nechego [nothing] (in Russian in Kjellens text -

A.D.). In it are shown pessimism, contemplation, fatalism and adherence to

tradition, all peculiar features of the East.

If we now return to the paradigm of sacred geography, we shall see the direct

contradiction between the priorities of modern geopolitics (such concepts as progress,

liberalism, human rights, mercantile order etc., are today positive terms for the

majority of people) and the priorities of sacred geography, evaluating the various kinds

of civilizations from a completely opposite point of view (concepts like spirit,

contemplation, resignation to superhuman force or superhuman idea, ideocracy

etc. in sacred civilizations were exclusively positive, and so remain till now for the


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Eastern peoples at the level of collective unconscious). So modern geopolitics

(except for Russian eurasists, German followers of Haushofer, Islamic fundamentalists

etc.) evaluate the picture of the world from an opposite perspective than traditional

sacred geography. But thus both sciences converge in the description of fundamental

laws of the geographical picture of civilizations.

Sacred North and sacred South

Besides the sacred-geographical determinism on an East-West axis, an

extremely relevant problem is represented by the other, vertical, orientation axis -the

North-South axis. Here, as well as in all remaining cases, the principles of sacred

geography, the symbolism of cardinal points and the related continents, has its direct

analogue in the geopolitical picture of the world, which either is naturally built up in the

course of the historical process, or is consciously and artificially formed as a result of

purposely actions of the leaders of such or such geopolitical formations. From the point

of view of the integral tradition, the difference between artificial and natural is

generally rather relative, as Tradition never knew anything similar to carthesian or

kantian dualism, strictly separating the subjective from the objective

(phenomenal and noumenal). Therefore the sacred determinism of North or Southis nor just a physical, natural, landscape-climatic factor (i.e. something objective) or

just idea, concept generated by the minds of such or such individuals (i.e.

something subjective), but something of a third kind, exceeding both the objective

and subjective poles. One might say that the sacred North, the archetype of North,

halving itself in history in northern natural landscape, on the one hand, and in the idea

of North, nordism, on the other hand.

The most ancient and original layer of Tradition univocally affirms the primacy

of North above the South. The symbolism of North relates to a Source, to an original

northern paradise, from where all human civilization originates. Ancient Iranic and

Zoroastrian texts speak about the northern country of Aryiana Vaeijao and its capital

Vara, from where the ancient arians were expelled by glaciation, which sent them

Ariman, spirit of Evil and oppositor to the bright Ormudz. The ancient Veda too speak

about the Northern country as the ancestral home of the Hindu, about a Sveta-dipa,

White Land laying in the far north.


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The ancient Greeks spoke about Hyperborea, the northern island with capital

Thule. This land was considered as the motherland of the bright godApollon. And in

many other traditions it is possible to detect most ancient tracks, often forgotten and

become fragmentary, of a nordic symbolism. The basic idea traditionally linked to the

North is the idea of Centre, Immobile Pole, point of Eternity around which the cycle

turns not only of space, but also of time. North is the land where the sun never goes

even at night, a space of eternal light. Any sacred tradition honors the Centre, the

Middle, the point where contrasts appease, the symbolical place not subject to the laws

of cosmic entropy. This Centre, whose symbol is the Swastika (stressing both

immobility and constancy of the Centre, and mobility and changeability of the

periphery), received a different name according to each tradition, but it was always

directly or indirectly linked to the symbolism of North. Therefore it is possible to say

that all sacred traditions are in essence the projection of a Single Northern Primordial

Tradition adapted to every different historical condition. North is Cardinal Point

chosen by the primeval Logos in order to reveal itself in History, and each of its further

manifestations only restored that primeval polar-paradise symbolism.

Sacred geography correlates North to spirit, light, purity, completeness, unity,

eternity.

The south symbolizes something directly opposite -materiality, darkness,

mixture, privation, plurality, immersion in the stream of time and becoming. Even from

the natural point of view, in polar areas there is one long semi-annual Day and one long

semi-annual Night. It is the Day and Night of the gods and heroes, of the angels. Even

decayed traditions remembered this sacral, spiritual, supernatural Cardinal North,

including the northern regions as the dwelling place of spirits and forces from

beyond. In the south the Day and Night of the gods are fragmented into a set of human

days, the original symbolism ofHyperboreais lost, and its memories become a piece of

culture, of legend. South generally often corresponds to culture, i.e. to that sphere

of human activity where the Invisible and the Purely Spiritual acquires material,

hardened, visible outlines. South is the reign of substance, life, biology and instincts.

The South corrupts the northern purity of Tradition, but preserves its traces in

materialized features.


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The North-South pair in sacred geography is not reduced to an abstract

opposition of Good and Evil. It is rather the opposition of Spiritual Idea to its coarsened,

material embodying. In normal cases, as the primacy of North is recognized by the

South, between these parties of a light there exist an harmonious relation -the North

spiritualizes the South, the nordic messengers give the southerners Tradition, lays the

foundations of sacred civilizations. If the South fails to recognize the primacy of North,

the sacred opposition, the war of continents begins, and from the point of view of

tradition the South is responsible for this conflict by breaking the sacred rules. In the

Rama-Yana, for instance, the southern island Lanka is considered as a home of the

demons which have stolen the wife of Rama, Sita, and declared war to the continental

North with capitalAyodjya.

Thus it is important to mark that in sacred geography the North-South axis is

more relevant than the East-West axis. But being the more relevant one, it corresponds

to the most ancient stages of cyclical history. The great war of North and South,

Hyperborea and Gondvana (ancient paleo-continent of the South) refers to

antidiluvian times. In the last phases of the cycle it becomes more hidden, veiled.

The paleo-continents of North and South themselves disappear. The testimonial sign of

opposition is passed to East and West.

The shift from the vertical North-South axis to the horizontal East-East axis,

typical of the last stages of the cycle, nevertheless saves the logic and symbolical

connection between these two sacred-geographical pairs. The North-South pair (i.e.

Spirit-Matter, Eternity-Time) is projected on the East-West pair (i.e. Tradition and

Profanity, Origin and Decay). East is the horizontal downward projection of North.

West is the horizontal upward projection of the South. From such transference of

sacred meanings one can easily obtain the structure of the continental vision peculiar to

Tradition.

The people of the North

Sacred North defines a special human type, which can have a biological, racial

embodying, but can also not have it. The substance of nordism is consist in the

capability of man to raise each object of the physical, material world to its archetype, toits Idea. This quality is not a simple development of rational origin. Vice-versa,


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carthesian and kantian pure intellect for its nature is not able to overcome the thin

border between phenomenon and noumenon -but just this ability lies at the bases of

nordic thinking. The man of North is not simply white, arian or indoeuropean for

his blood, language and culture. The man of North is a particular kind of being

possessing a straight intuition of the Sacred. To him the cosmos is a texture of symbols,

each of them called out of secret by the eye of the Spiritual First Principle. The man of

North is the solar man, Sonnenmensch, not absorbing energy, as black holes do, but

outlining it, pouring out light, force and wisdom from its spiritual flow of creation.

The pure nordic civilization disappeared with the ancient Hyperboreans, but its

messengers have laid the bases of all present traditions. This nordic race of Teachers

stood at the origins of religion and culture of the peoples of all continents and colours of

skin. Traces of an hyperborean cult can be found among the Indians of Northern

America and among the ancient Slaves, among the founders of the Chinese civilization

and among the natives of the Pacific, among the blond Germans and among the black

shamans of Western Africa, among the red-skinned Aztecs and among the Mongols

with wide cheek-bones. There is no such people on the planet, which would not have a

myth about the solar man, Sonnenmensch. True spirituality, supra-rational Mind,

divine Logos, capacity to see through the world its secret Soul -these are the defining

qualities of the North. Wherever there is Sacred Purity and Wisdom, there invisibly is

the North -whatever the point in time or space we are in.

The people of the South

The man of the South, the gondvanic type, is directly opposed to the nordic

type. The man of the South lives in a circle of effects, of secondary manifestations; he

dwells in the cosmos, which he venerates but does not understand. He worships

exteriority, but not interiority. He carefully saves tracks of spirituality, its embodying in

the material environment, but is not able to proceed from symbolizing to symbolized.

The man of the South lives by passions and rushes, he puts the psychic above the

spiritual (which he simply does not know) and worships Life as a higher authority. The

cult of the Great Mother, of the matter generating the variety of forms, is typical of the

man of the South. The civilization of the South is a civilization of the Moon receiving


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the light from the Sun (North), preserving and diffusing it for some time, but

periodically losing contact with it (new moon). The man of the South is aMondmensch.

When the people of the South stay in harmony with the people of North, i.e.

recognize their authority and their typological (not racial!) superiority, harmony reigns

among civilizations. When they claim their supremacy because of their archetypical

relation to reality, there arises a distorted cultural type, which can be globally defined

by adoration of idols, fetishism or paganism (in the negative, pejorative sense of this

term).

As in the case of paleocontinents, pure northern and southern types existed only

in remote ancient times. The people of North and people of the South opposed oneanother at the origins. Later all peoples of North penetrated into southern lands,

founding sometimes bright expressions of the nordic civilization -ancient Iran, India.

On the other hand, those of the South sometimes went far northward, bearing their

cultural type -Finns, Eskimos, Chuckchi etc. Gradually the original clearness of the

sacred-geographical panorama became muddy. But in spite of everything the

typological dualism of the people of North and the people of the South was

preserved in all times and epochs -but not as much as an external conflict of two

miscellaneous civilizations, as an internal conflict within the framework of the same

civilization. The type of North and the type of the South, since some moment in sacred

history, oppose each other everywhere, irrespective of the concrete place of the planet.

North and South in East and in West

The type of the people of North could be projected in the South, East and West.

In the South, the Light of North generated great metaphysical civilizations such as the

Indian, Iranian or Chinese, which in the situation of the conservative South for a long

time saved the Revelation, entrusted by it. However, the simpleness and clearness of

northern symbolism turned here into a complex and miscellaneous tangle of sacred

doctrines, sacraments and rites. However, the further to the South, the feebler are the

traces of the North. And among the inhabitants of the Pacific islands and Southern

Africa, nordic motives in mythology and sacraments are saved in an extremely

fragmentary, rudimentary and even distorted form.


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In the East, North is shown as the classic traditional society founded on the

univocal superiority of the supra-individual above the individual, where the human

and the rational are erased before the supra-human and supra-rational Principle. If the

South gives the civilization a character of stability, the East defines its sacrality and

authenticity, the major guarantor of which is the Light of the North.

In the West, North was shown in the heroic societies, where such tendency,

peculiar to the West, to fragmentation, individualization and rationalization surpassed

itself, and the individual, becoming the Hero, grew out of the narrow framework of the

human-too-human personality. North in West is personified by the symbolical figure

of Heracles who, on the one hand, releases Prometheus (the pure western, titanic,

humanist tendency), and on the other, helps Zeus and the gods to defeat the rebellion

of the giants (i.e. serves for the sake of sacred rules and spiritual Order).

The South, on the contrary, projects itself on all three orientations according to

an opposite image. In the North, it gives the effect of archaism and cultural

stagnation. Even the most northern, nordic traditions under the southern influence,

paleo-asiatic, Finnish or Eskimo elements acquire the characters of idol-

worshipping and fetishism. (This is characteristic, in particular, of the German-

Scandinavian civilization in the epoch of the Skalds.)

In the East, the forces of the South are shown in despotic societies, where

normal and fair eastern indifference to the individual turns into the denial of the great

Supra-human Subject. All forms of Eastern totalitarianism, both typological and racial,

are linked to the South.

And at last, in the West the South is shown in the extremely rough, materialisticforms of individualism, when the atomic individuals reach the limit of antiheroic

degeneration, worshipping only the golden veal of comfort and egoistical hedonism.

That exactly such combination of the two sacred-geopolitical tendencies gives the most

negative type of civilization is obvious, since in it two attitudes, already in themselves

negative -the South on the vertical line and the West on the horizontal line- are laid one

upon the other.


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From continents to meta-continents

If from the perspective of sacred geography the symbolical North univocally

corresponds to positive aspects, and the South to negative, in an exclusively modern

geopolitical picture of the world everything is much more complex, and to some extent

even turned upside down. Modern geopolitics understands the terms North and

South as wholly different categories than sacred geography does.

Firstly, the paleocontinent of North, Hyperborea, since many millennia already

does not exist on a physical level, remaining a spiritual reality, on which is directed the

spiritual look of the initiated, exacting the original Tradition.

Secondly, the ancient nordic race, the race of the white teachers, coupled with

the pole in the primordial epoch, does not coincide at all with what is commonly agreed

to call today the coupled with white race, based only on physical characters, on the

colour of the skin etc. Northern Tradition and its original population, nordic

autochtones since a long time do not represent any more a concrete historical-

geographical reality. By common judgement, even the last remains of this primordial

culture have disappeared from physical reality already some millennia ago.

Thus, North in Tradition is a meta-historical and meta-geographical reality. The

same can be said also about the hyperborean race -a race not in the biological, but

in pure spiritual, metaphysical sense. (This theme of metaphysical races was in detail

developed in the works of Julius Evola).

The continent of the South and the whole South of Tradition, too, since a long

time ago do not exist any more in the pure state, no lesser than its most ancient

population. Somehow, the South from some moment onwards became practically the

whole planet, as the influence of the original polar initiatic centre and its messengers on

the world diminished. The modern races of the South represent a product of multiple

mixtures with the races of North, and the color of the skin for a long time already ceased

to be the distinctive sign of belonging to such or such metaphysical race.

In other words, the modern geopolitical picture of the world has very little in

common with the principial vision of the world in its supra-historical, meta-temporal


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cut. The continents and their populations in our epoch have gone extremely far from

those archetypes, which corresponded to them in primordial times. Therefore between

real continents and real races (the realities of modern geopolitics), on the one hand, and

meta-continents and meta-races (the realities of traditional sacred geography), on the

other hand, today there exist not just a simple discrepancy, but almost an inverse

correspondence.

The illusion of the rich North

Modern geopolitics uses the concept of north most frequently with the

definition rich -the rich North , and also the advanced North . This connotates

the whole aggregate of the western civilization, giving its basic attention to the

development of the material and economic side of life. Rich North is rich not for

being cleverer, or more intellectual, or more spiritual than the South but because it

builds its social system on the principle of maximizing the material which can be taken

from the social and natural potential, from the exploitation of human and natural

resources. The racial image of Rich North is linked to those peoples having white

skin, and this feature lays at the roots of the various versions, explicit or hidden, ofwestern racism (in particular Anglo-Saxon). The success of rich North in the

material sphere was raised to a political and even racial principle in those countries

which were the avantgarde of industrial, technical and economic development -i.e.

England, Holland, and later Germany and the US. In this case, material and quantitative

welfare was equalled to a qualitative criterion, and on this base the most ridiculous

prejudices about barbarism, primitiveness, underdevelopment and

untermenschlichkeit of southern (i.e. not of belonging to rich North) peoples were

developed. Such economic racism was especially clearly shown in the Anglo-Saxon

colonial conquests, and afterwards its embellished version was introduced in the most

rough and contradictory aspects of the national-socialist ideology. Thus, often Nazi

ideologists simply blended vague guesses about pure spiritual nordism and spiritual

arian race with vulgar, mercantilistic, biological racism of the English kind. (By the

way, precisely this substitution of categories of sacred geography with categories of

material and technical development was also that most negative side of national-

socialism which led it, eventually, to its political, theoretical and even military


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collapse). But even after the defeat of the Third Reich, this kind of racism of the rich

North has not disappeared at all from political life. However its bearers became first of

all the US and their atlantic partners in Western Europe. Certainly, in the most recent

mondialist doctrines of rich North the question of biological and racial purity is not

stressed, but nevertheless, in practice, in its relations with the undeveloped and less

developed countries of the Third world, the rich North also today shows only racist

haughtiness, typical both of the English colonialists and of the German national-

socialist orthodox followers of Rosenberg.

Actually, rich North geopolitically means those countries where forces

directly opposite to Tradition have won -forces of quantity, materialism, atheism,

spiritual degradation and emotional degeneration. Rich North means something

radically distinct from spiritual nordism, from hyperborean spirit. The substance of

North in sacred geography is the primacy of spirit above substance, the definitive and

total victory of Light, Equity and Purity above the darkness of animal life, the arrogance

of individual passions and the mud of base egoism. Rich North mondialist

geopolitics, on the contrary, means exclusively material welfare, hedonism, consumer

society, the unproblematic and artificial pseudo-paradise of those whom Nietzsche

called the last men. Material progress of the technical civilization was accompanied

by a monstrous spiritual regress just of sacred culture, and consequently, from the point

of view of Tradition, the wealth of modern advanced North cannot serve as a

criterion of genuine superiority above material poverty and technical backwardness of

modern primitive South.

Moreover, material poverty of the South quite often is conversely linked to the

conservation in southern regions of the genuinely sacred forms of civilization; this

means that behind such poverty a spiritual wealth is sometimes disguised. At least

two sacred civilizations still exist today in the Southern space, in spite of all attempts

from rich (and aggressive!) North to impose on everyone its own measure and path of

development. These are Hinduist India and the Islamist world. As the Far East

tradition is concerned, there are various points of view: some see even under the layer of

Marxist and Maoist rethorics some traditional principles, which were always

undiscussed for the Chinese sacred civilization. Anyway, even those southern regions

inhabited by peoples saving their devotion to very ancient and almost forgotten sacred


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traditions, all the same in comparison with atheized and utterly materialistic rich

North, exhibit spiritual, rigorous and normal features -whereas the rich North

itself, from a spiritual point of view, is completely abnormal and pathological.

Paradox of the Third World

The Poor South in mondialist projects is actually synonym of the Third

world. This world was called Third during the cold war, and this concept supposed

that the other two worlds -advanced capitalist and less advanced Soviet- are more

relevant and significant for global geopolitics, than all remaining regions. Basically, the

expression Third world has a pejorative sense: according to utilitarian logics of the

rich North, such definition actually equates countries of the Third world to

nobodys bases of natural and human resources, which should only obey, be exploited

and be used for its own purposes. Thus rich North skillfully manoeuvered the

traditional political-ideological and religious features of the poor South , trying to

asserve to its exclusively materialist and economic concerns those forces and structures,

which on spiritual potential much more exceeded the spiritual level of North. This

was almost always possible to it, as the same cyclical moment of development of our

civilization favors perverted, abnormal and unnatural tendencies -since, according to theTradition, we are now in the latest period of the dark century, Khali-Yuga. Hinduism,

Confucianism, Islam, the autochthonous traditions of the not white peoples became

for the material conquerors of the rich North simply a drag on the accomplishment of

their purposes, but at the same time they have often used the separate aspects of

Tradition for achieving their mercatilistic purposes -exploiting contradictions, religious

features or national problems. Such an utilitarian use of the various aspects of Tradition

for exclusively antitraditional purposes was an even greater evil, than the straight denial

of all Traditional values, since the highest perversion consists in that the great is

asserved to the insignificant.

Actually the poor South is poor at a material level precisely because of its

spiritual attitudes, always giving the material aspects of existence a minor and

unimportant place. The geopolitical South in our time saved in general an

exclusively traditionalist attitude towards the objects of the external world -a quiet,

detached and, eventually, indifferent attitude- in stark contrast to the material obsession


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of the rich North, to its materialistic and hedonistic paranoia. The people of the poor

South normally dwell into Tradition, and till now their existences are fuller, deeper and

even more magnificent, as the active co participation in sacred Tradition bestows on all

aspects of their personal lives that sense, that intensity, that saturation of which have

been deprived for a long time the representants of the rich North, -made hysterical by

nevroses, material fears, internal desolation, complete aimlessness of existence,

representing just a bright glass kaleidoscope, only an empty picture.

It could be said that the correlation between North and South in original times is

polarly opposite to their correlation in our epoch, as it is the South that today still

preserves some links with the Tradition, whereas the North has definitively lost them.

Nevertheless this statement does not absolutely cover the whole picture of reality, since

the true Tradition cannot admit in relation to itself such humiliating reference, as the

practices of aggressive-atheistic rich North with the Third world. The fact is that

Tradition is preserved in the South only in an inertial, fragmentary, partial way. It holds

a passive position and resists, only defending itself. Therefore the spiritual North does

not fully transfer itself to the South at the end of times -in the South there is only an

accumulation and preservation of spiritual impulses, never coupled with the sacred

North. In line of principle, the active traditional initiative cannot emanate from the

South. And on the contrary, the mondialist rich North has managed so to harden its

pernicious effect on the planet due to the specificity of northern regions, predisposed to

activity. North was and remains the elective place of force, therefore true efficiency

belongs to the geopolitical initiatives coming from the North.

The Poor South possesses today all spiritual priority before the rich North,

but it thus cannot serve as a serious alternative to the profane aggression of the rich

North, nor can offer the radical geopolitical project capable to subvert the pathological

picture of modern planetary space.

The role of the Second World

In the bipolar geopolitical picture rich North-poor South there always

existed an additional component having self-supporting and very relevant meaning. It is

the second world. Under the expression second world it is conventionallyunderstood to mean the socialist camp integrated into the Soviet system. This second


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world was neither the present rich North, as definite spiritual motives secretly

influenced the nominally materialistic ideology of the Soviet socialism, neither the

present Third world, since as a whole the attitude to material development, progress

and other only profane principles laid at the roots of the Soviet system. The

geopolitically eurasian USSR is located both on the territories of poor Asia, and on

the lands of sufficiently civilized Europe. During the socialist period, the planetary

belt of the rich North was broken in eastern Eurasia, complicating the clearness of

geopolitical relations on the North-South axis.

The end of the Second world as a special civilization leaves to the Euroasian

space of the former USSR two alternatives -either to be integrated in the rich North

(that is, the West and the US), or to be thrown down to the poor South, i.e. to turn into

the Third world. As a compromise variant, the separation of regions (part to the

North, and part to the South), is also possible. As always has been in the last

centuries, the initiative of redistributing geopolitical spaces in this process belongs to

the rich North, which, cynically using the paradoxes of the same concept of Second

world, fixes new geopolitical borders and breaks zones of influence. National,

economic and religious factors serve the mondialists only as instruments in their cynical

and deeply materialistically motivated activity. It is not surprising, that besides false

humanist rethorics the racist reasons invoked to inspire the Russians a complex of

white superiority in relation to the Asian and Caucasian south will even more often

and almost openly be used. To this is correlated the inverse process -the definitive

rejection of southern territories of the former Second world to the poor South is

accompanied by playing the card of fundamentalist tendencies, peoples inclination to

Tradition, and the revival of religion.

The Second world, being disintegrated, is broken along the lines of

traditionalism (the southern, inertial, conservative kind) and antitraditionalism (the

actively northern, modernist and materialist kind). Such dualism, which is only planned

today, but in the near future will become the dominant phenomenon of the Euroasian

geopolitics, is predetermined by the expansion of mondialistic understanding of the

world in terms of rich North-poor South. Any attempt to save the former Soviet

Great Space, any attempt simply to save the Second world as something self-

supporting and balancing halfway between North and South (in their exclusive modern


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meaning), cannot be crowned with success, without putting into doubt the fundamental

polar conception of modern geopolitics, understood and realized in its real nature,

leaving aside all deceitful declarations of humanitarian and economic mood.

The Second world disappears. There is no more place for it on the modern

geopolitical map. At the same time, the pressure of the rich North on the poor

South increases, being one with an agressive materialistic technocratic society in the

absence of an intermediate power, that existed till yesterday -the Second world. Any

different destiny for the Second world, than the total partition according to the

dictating rules of the rich North, is possible only through a radical waiving of the

planetary logics of a dichotomic North-South axis, considered in a mondialist key.

The project of the Rising North

The Rich mondialist North globalizes its domination over the planet through

partition and destruction of the Second world. In modern geopolitics this is also

called as the new world order. The active forces of antitradition consolidate their

victory over the passive recalcitrance of southern regions, preserving their economic

backwardness and defending Tradition in its residual forms. The internal geopolitical

energies of the Second world are put before a choice -either to be incorporated in the

system of the civilized northern belt and definitively to tear off any connection with a

sacred history (project of leftist mondialism), or to turn into an occupied territory being

allowed a partial restoration of some aspects of tradition (project of the rightist

mondialism). In this direction the events today are developing and will develop in the

near future.

As the alternative project it is possible theoretically to formulate a different path

of geopolitical transformation based on rejecting the North-South mondialist logics and

on returning to the spirit of genuine sacred geography -as far as it possible at the end of

dark era. It is the project of the Great Return or, in different terminology, of the

Great War of Continents.
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In its most general features, the essence of this project is as follows:

1)The Rich North is opposed not to the poor South, but to the poor North.

The Poor North is an ideal, the sacred ideal of returning to the nordic sources of

civilization. Such North is Poor because it is based on total ascetism, on radical

devotion to the highest values of Tradition, on the complete despise of the material for

the sake of the spiritual. Poor North geographically exists only on the territories of

Russia, which, being in effect, by the Second world, socio-politically resisted until the

last moment to the final adoption of a mondialist civilization in its most progressive

forms. Northern eurasian lands of Russia are the only territories on earth which have

been not completely mastered by the rich North, inhabited by traditional peoples and

being a terra incognita of the modern world. The path of Poor North for Russia

means the refusal of incorporating in the mondialist belt, of achaicizing its own

traditions and of reducing them to the folkloric level of an ethno-religious reserve.

Poor North should be spiritual, intellectual, active and aggressive. In other regions of

the rich North a potential opposition of the poor North is also possible too -which

can be shown in a radical sabotage on part of the intellectual western lite to the

establishied course of the mercantilistic civilization, in the rebellion against the world

of finance for the ancient and eternal values of Spirit, equity, self-sacrifice. Poor

North starts a geopolitical and ideological fight with the rich North, rejecting its

projects, blasting from the inside and from the outside its plans, bating its stainless

efficiency, crashing its social and political manipulations.

2) The Poor South, unable to counter itself the rich North, engages a radical

alliance with the poor (eurasian) North and starts a liberation struggle against

northern dictatorship. It is especially important to strike the representants of the

ideology of the rich South, i.e. those forces which, working in the rich North, stand

up for development, progress and modernization of traditional countries, which

practically will mean only an increasing withdrawal from the remains of sacred

Tradition.

3) The Poor North of the eurasian East, together with the poor South,

extending on a circle around the whole planet, concentrate the forces struggling

against the rich North of the atlantist West. Thus an end is forever put to the

ideologically vulgar versions of Anglo-Saxon racism, hailing the technical civilization


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of the white peoples and echoing the mondialist propaganda. (Alain de Benoist

expressed this idea in the title of his famous book The Third world and Europe: the

same fight [LEurope, Tiersmonde-mme combat]; its argument is, of course, spiritual

Europe, the Europe of the peoples and traditions, instead of the Maastricht Europe

of goods.) Intellectuality, activity and the spiritual profile of the genuine sacred North

make the traditions of the revert to a nordic Source, and raise the South to a planetary

revolt against the only geopolitical enemy. The passive recalcitrance of the South

acquires thus a fulcrum in the planetary messianism of the nordics, radically rejecting

the degenerated and antisacred branch of those white peoples which followed the path

of technical progress and material development. Flares the planetary supra-racial and

supra-national Geopolitical Revolution based on the fundamental solidarity of the

Third world with that part of the Second world which rejects the project of the rich

North.

During the struggle, the flame of the resurrection of the spiritual North, the

flame ofHyperboreatransforms the geopolitical reality. The new global ideology is the

ideology of Final Restoration, putting the final dot to the geopolitical history of

civilization -but not that dot, which wanted to put the mondialist spokesmen of the End

of History. The materialistic, atheistic, antisacral, technocratic, atlantist variant of the

End is turned into a different epilogue -the final Victory of the sacred Avatar, the

coming of the Terrible Destiny, giving those who chose voluntary poverty a reign of

spiritual abundance, and to those who preferred wealth founded on assassination of

Spirit, eternal damnation and torments in hell.

The missed continents are lifted from the abysses of the past. Invisible meta-

continents appear into reality. A New Earth and New Heaven arise.

This path is not from sacred geography to geopolitics, but on the contrary, from

geopolitics to sacred geography.

from sacred geography to geopolitics_aleksandr dugin

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