René Guénon’s assertion, culled from
ancient esoteric sources, that in the remote past humanity’s first
civilization arose in an ice-free Arctic zone is not without geological
support. According to the well-known researcher J.S. Gordon, “there
is no scientific doubt that the polar ice caps have melted and reformed
many, many times over and that this has always affected human society
(plus animal and plant species) , often catastrophically.”
He points out that the great Ice Age that lasted about two million
years, ending about twelve thousand years ago, was made up of thirty or so
minor Ice Ages, with warm intervals of polar deglaciation in between them,
each creating periods of thousands of years of temperate conditions at the
poles. Any one of these warm intervals would have been hospitable to a
Charles Hapgood, who in the mid-sixties
was the Professor of the History of Science at Keene University in New
Hampshire, U.S.A., became convinced that humanity did indeed enjoy a
sophisticated civilization a hundred thousand years or more ago, and that
it must have been at least partly in a polar location. He derived his
theory from cartographic research conducted on ancient portolans or
seafaring maps, one of which had been in the possession of a l6th-century
Turkish admiral, Piri Re’is.
“This map (and others also researched), “ Gordon comments, summarizing
Hapgood’s conclusions, “clearly showed…that the polar regions had been
cartographically surveyed when no ice cap existed,”
and that in the case of the Antarctic Circle rivers and mountains had been
mapped in such detail that the land must have been inhabited – and by a
people who understood spherical trigonometry.
Other researchers, sifting and
re-examining existing archaeological data from the past 150 years, have
concluded from the evidence of human artefacts and fossil bones found
under deep geological layers, that anatomically modern humans with a
modern intellectual capacity have existed from the beginning of the
Quaternary period, some 1.65 million years ago – and that they were taller
than modern man and with a brain capacity 15 – 20 per cent larger.
In The Secret Doctrine, Helena
Blavatsky said that in primeval times the earth had still not densified
fully and was therefore larger than at present. All body forms would have
been considerably lighter in weight and of a more plastic nature, the
skeleton still not having hardened by then; and accordingly human beings
could have been less affected by gravity and as much as twenty feet or
more taller than they are today. She believed that over vast ages there
have been several violent changes in earth’s climatic conditions, with
corresponding diminutions of human stature, accompanied by many variations
in human civilization and culture.
Mainstream science has no real conception
of how long modern homo sapiens has been in existence, or under what
physical conditions, but certainly, archaeologists are aware that homo
sapiens skulls of an entirely modern type have been found that are over a
hundred thousand years old. Swanscombe man from England is a quarter of a
million years old, while Vertesszollos man from Hungary, equally modern in
type, dates to an amazing four hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand
Such dates leave ample room in our human record for many modifications of
climate and variations in phyical stature, cultural development and living
The Hebrew bible tells us:
There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after
that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men,
and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which
were of old, men of renown. (Genesis 6: 4)
The information given in the Book of Genesis regarding the Sons of God,
the giant-sized Elders who once lived on earth – “mighty men of old, men
of renown” – was derived by Hebrew scribes from the scriptures of older
surrounding races, such as the Indian Vedic texts, the Vedas and Puranas,
and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. In the Sumerian
illustrations of the doings of the gods it can readily be seen that the
relative height of the Elders and ordinary humans was that of adult and
child: in one such instance, a god is holding a human on his lap as though
nursing an infant. The Egyptians also created statues of god-kings of
enormous height juxtaposed to little figures of normal human stature; and
while these statements in stone may have been intended symbolically the
alternative possibility exists that an entirely realistic rendition was
intended, as more than one researcher has suggested.
Helena Blavatsky, for example, contended
that not only were the polar regions the cradle of humanity millions of
years ago, but that due to a decrease of velocity in the Earth’s rotation
conditions at the poles changed, and the size and weight of all the
organisms living there was accordingly modified.
The axle of the Wheel tilted… People [for the first time] knew
snow, ice and frost, and men, plants and animals were dwarfed in
their growth. Those that did not perish remained as half-grown
babes in size and intellect.
The other outstanding characteristic
imputed to the Elders, whom Blavatsky called the Kumaras, was their
huge skulls. Although there is less evidence in the ancient texts to
support this legend, it is an astonishing fact that several such enormous
skulls, relative to the size of the face, have been unearthed in Peru: one
is on display in the museum in Lima.
According to report, others of similar immensity have been found in and
around Egypt and Tibet.
Furthermore, carved busts of the family members belonging to the Egyptian
pharoah Akhenaten of the eighteenth dynasty demonstrate the same anomalous
feature, including equally huge ears. Found in the underground desert
ruins of Tel el Amarna in Egypt, little known statues of this strange
family, which included Nefertiti, Akhenaton”s wife, and their daughters,
exhibit other unusual features, including great body height. The body of a
statue of Nefertiti is described below:
She’s not wearing clothes because they didn’t believe in that
at the time. She has a huge head, large ears, a long, skinny
neck and a high waist. She also has a kind of bulging tummy. And
…she has skinny legs and wide thighs.
This in fact is an equally good
description of her husband’s famously strange appearance. The carved or
painted likenesses of Nefertiti’s daughters, down to the youngest, a mere
toddler, show exactly the same peculiar characteristics of enormous
hairless skulls, high waists, skinny calves and huge ears.
Could this Egyptian royal family, then,
have been a throwback to the ancestral offspring of the Elders? And more
pertinently, could its anomalous physical features support the idea of a
race alien to ours, either from another stellar system or a previous
These Elders, also known as the
ha-elohim, the godlike Sons of God or Sons of the Fire Mist whom the
Sumerians claimed had brought civilization to humanity, are a perennial
mystery. G.I. Gurdjieff regarded them as palaeolithic shaman adepts, men
and women whose evolution due to their superior spiritual practices put
them far in advance of their fellows. But occult tradition goes a great
deal further, contending the Elders were a wise and powerful race that
came from the stars – possibly, say some, from the giant star Sirius. In
the ancient Egyptian tradition they are called the “Watchers of Pe”,
divine Intelligences who watch over and guide humanity, their progeny,
from celestial heights Alternatively, could they have been, as the noted
Theosophist G. de Purucker suggests, the left-over remnant of an earlier
human race that had incarnated on Earth but had originally come from the
Pleiades system, and which had ended its racial cycle perhaps millions of
If the latter were the case, would it
explain the worldwide belief among traditional societies, repeated ad
nauseum in their scriptures, that the Elders were different in physical
type from our species, giants in stature and with huge hairless craniums –
features that seemed to separate them entirely from our current humanity?
. Until recently such questions about the Elders could not profitably
be asked exxcept in the context of a closed initiatory society. Even
stranger, until recently the rest of the world was not even aware that
such questions entailed proscribed temple material that had been forbidden
to the outside world for thousands of years. As already mentioned in the
first Part of this article, René Guénon, one of the foremost esotericists
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, struggled as far as
he dared against this occult embargo, believing that the time was fast
approaching when humanity would be in need of a higher level of
anthropological, cosmological and metaphysical understanding than was
possible in his day.
“This study,” he wrote, concerning the advanced Elder race that
according to Theosophical lore had migrated from the Arctic zone to
Central Asia many hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions of years ago,
“has gone deeper than any preceding it, inviting reproach, perhaps, from
some. We do, however, believe we have not said too much, nor anything that
should not be disclosed…”
Yet much knowledge regarded as too arcane or too dangerous for the profane
populace would, Guénon was convinced, soon have to be released into the
public domain. And it would seem he was right.
A new order is dawning in this post-millennial
era in which a great deal of the once proscribed sacred knowledge is being
made available to all. Among many of yesterday’s underground secrets now
freely emerging into the light of day are the secrets of human evolution
and its tandem relationship to the evolution of earth and cosmos, and
these secrets have a direct relevance to the unknown Elders, the gods of
ancient mythology. The removal of the occult embargo, allied to an
explosion of new scientific discoveries and hypotheses, makes it possible
to approach the subject in an entirely new way.
The Fifth Kingdom
The medieval classification of nature into
four universal kingdoms, mineral, vegetable, animal and human, has been
rendered obsolete by modern science, which has inductively evolved its own
hierarchical system of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules before the
mineral, and combined the animal and human in one category. Nevertheless,
the old system of four kingdoms, based on an intuitive deductive
vision of the truth and seen as an example of the Perennial Philosophy, is
still entrenched in most of the western esoteric schools that have emerged
since medieval times: Theosophy, Anthroposophy, Rosicrucianism, modern
Sufism, various New Age channellings, the Sri Aurobindo school and others.
Four-kingdom proponents see the
progression therein as a natural succession from inert mineral to the
plant that is alive but not apparently conscious to the animal that has a
limited reasoning power but is not self-aware and to the human being who
alone has self-awareness and conscious free will; and to these four
classifications a fifth is sometimes added under variously named, rather
obscure and even misleading headings. Medieval philosophers included this
fifth category as that of the angelic hierarchies, and Anthroposophy
(Rudolph Steiner) does likewise with somewhat greater clarity, calling the
fifth a trans-human category. Rosicrucians cling to the four-kingdom
format, referring vaguely to a fifth category as the “Pure Spirit” of will
and imagination. Theosophy calls the fifth a post-human stage of spiritual
evolution; Teilhard de Chardin calls it Omega, the divinized transhuman
stage; and the Indian sage, Sri Aurobindo, calls it the divinized
The fifth kingdom has other names; but
whatever the designation, in esoteric circles the distinction between the
transhuman and lower human stage is only vaguely delineated and rarely
given the emphasis or clarity it requires.
The ancient Egyptians made the matter a
great deal clearer. They illustrated the resurrectional transition from
the fourth to the fifth kingdom with admirable precision on the ceilings
of certain very old tombs.
In their depiction of the neters, or gods, undergoing spiritual
resurrection, they show a row of animal-headed human figures marching
along a horizontal base line, a red oval – the “egg of metamorphosis” -
above each head, until suddenly the base line turns by 90 degrees to the
vertical and one figure swings into ascension along it. Achieving “a rapid
biological change into a different life form,” he has transformed into the
royal fifth kingdom: armed with what appears to be the staff of spiritual
authority and lacking the oval over his head, which has been absorbed into
his being, he has metamorphosed into a king.
From being a collective being of a lower order, he has become a royal
The Egyptians clearly understood the goal
of human evolution as a transition or resurrection into a higher state, a
higher natural kingdom. Ancient petroglyphs of sun-headed men found in
various parts of the world, but especially in Central Asia, tell the same
In this two-Part article I would like to
suggest that, because of the occult secrecy that has enshrouded the
subject of the fifth kingdom over the past 2000 years at least, we have
failed to understand its crucial significance. We have not adequately
understood that a fifth kingdom consummates the fourth, that it is our
true evolutionary goal and our key to all those questions we have never
been able to answer. The inclusion of a fifth kingdom in the natural order
turns the fourth kingdom that we humans presently inhabit into a mere
corridor of becoming, a transitional episode in which we are driven
forward in a process of transformation from the animal state behind us to
that of the true human ahead, as indeed Gautama Buddha recognized. Life,
human life, he said, is never-ending change and the suffering of change –
and indeed it is if viewed as a journey of relentless development of
consciousness into the truly human kingdom, the fifth, wherein alone lies
repose well earned.
The idea of a potential fifth
kingdom, a state of spiritual felicity and repose we may hope to enjoy
some time in the future, is not new to us. But what the ancient mystery
temples through to modern esoteric teachers like Guénon have been
reluctant to disclose is that the fifth kingdom is not a future potential
but a presently existing reality, a supremely enlightened human state
beyond our own, which, like the other four kingdoms of nature, has and
always will extend back into the illimitable past and forward into an
equally illimitable future, with its own archetypal place in the cosmos.
Indeed, it is esoterically acknowledged
that beyond the fifth kingdom others also exist. Gordon speaks of the
fourth, fifth, sixth and even the seventh kingdom of our planetary Nature.
“All of these kingdoms exist together (even if we are unaware of the
fact), and all of them together comprise the evolving nature of Man. Hence
humankind is but one partial expression of Man in general.”
Given such a perspective, many possibilities open up that were not
previously viable in our philosophy.
According to this view, the Elders of
Akkadian-Sumerian legend and the gods of the Babylonians and the Assyrians
were the higher-level flowering of a previous human cycle many millions of
years old, their privilege being to guide the evolution of the next cycle
– our own. Freed by their advanced development from the limiting
conditions of transitional fourth-level humanity, the universe was open to
them, for fifth-kingdom spacetime is said to possess multiple dimensions
incomprehensible and inaccessible to the lower kingdoms. These so-called
gods could travel between the stars on supramundane energy currents
unknown to us, incarnating on other stellar bodies or on planet Earth as
the need arose, and withdrawing as they chose into dimensions invisible to
their charges on Earth.
In the above scenario a higher order of
human being, known as god, angel, demi-god or extraterrestrial
intelligence, is inextricably interwoven in our own history. But not only
is our past implicated in this new perspective; our future is equally
involved. As we ascend with increasing rapidity into higher states of
consciousness and hence into proximity with the fifth kingdom, we find the
Elders in their various otherworld guises descending to meet us. As a part
of the great human order, they are our future as well as our past.
Because time and space are functions of
consciousness, their value changes progressively as we change. We shall
find humanity is at home everywhere in the universe and transcends linear
time. It has no beginning and no ending; it is co-eternal with the cosmos.
I am suggesting, then, that it is time we gathered together all our
modern ideas of aliens, extraterrestrials, Sirian cosmonauts and angelic
visitors along with their supernatural repertoire of space vehicles, UFOs,
crop circles, orbs etc., and categorize them all as members of our own
human species who, along with their advanced technology, have arrived in
the fifth kingdom before us. In other words, as with increasing speed we
approach in consciousness the threshold of the spiritual world, it is
highly probable we will discover a fifth domain not of gods but our own
kin already established in majesty and power - already, like the Egyptian
priest-kings of old, free to traverse the cosmic pathways at will as Lords
of the Universe.
How, then, is such a metamorphosis achieved? The secret teachings of
the very earliest sages of which we have cognisance claim that all life,
all wisdom and creative power is transmitted to the earth plane via a
spiritual energy flowing from the heavenly higher planes, and that it is
by ascending this sacred current, symbolized as a Pillar or a World Tree
connecting earth to heaven, that humanity comes to its most sublime
Another traditional occult symbol of this divine energy current is the
Qabalistic Tree of Life, defined astrologically. The well-known British
author Trevor Ravenscroft likens the Tree of Life to “the Yggdrasil tree
of Norse mythology, the world-Ash which binds together heaven, earth and
hell.” The crown of the tree, he says, “comprises the twelve
constellations of the Zodiac, the spiralling branches symbolize the
planets and the roots of the trunk dig deeply into the elements of the
The Tree is thus intended as a metaphor for the archetypal structure of
the cosmos in which every element of it is part of a living functional
whole, one in which humanity, by ascending the Tree and thus uniting the
earth plane to the heavenly, plays a crucial evolutionary role.
The destiny of man is therefore seen as the ultimate return of his
soul to the realm of the stars. This idea of returning home to the Source
above is implicit in all the tribal totem systems found in early shamanic
societies around the world, but was more fully realized in its religious
form when the idea of kingship – of hierarchical rule from above - seized
neolithic societies at the end of the last Ice Age.
Scholars of ancient traditions around the globe speak of a previous
time of worldwide peace when there was only one culture, one religion, one
Supreme Deity and one language on the planet, and when all humans were
equal. And indeed Guénon’s rendition of prehistory, as we have seen,
implies that such a universal egalitarian accord was maintained when the
Hyperboreans first migrated southward, bifurcating into Central Asia on
one hand and into the southern Atlantic continent on the other. But in
time the Pillar ideology of the two cultures deviated more and more from
their common root and planet-wide conflict developed as a consequence.
These events were eventually to be mythologized in the biblical story of
the Tower of Babel.
Blavatsky’s account of the great Atlantean migrations closely
parallels that of the eighteenth-century historian Jacob Bryant, who
concluded that the Trojans were ancient Atlanteans who, driven from their
sinking homeland in the southern Atlantic, spread eastward and northward
into the vast Eurasian corridor. Bearing with them their hierarchical Sun
cult with its royal dynasties, warlike bull cult and defensive, concentric
city planning, they were opposed by the indigenous population. Thereafter,
kingship – rule from above - became the cause of bitter ideological wars,
which in a sense have still not ceased to rupture the peace of our planet.
Around the fifth millennium BCE a great climatic change in Central
Asia, where the greatest concentration of settled human life, both
Hyperborean and Atlantean, had gathered, forced renewed migrations to
other parts of the world. It was in that period, says Guénon, that the
Solar mystery religions and secret Sun societies began to proselytize more
widely and the cult of the sacrificed and resurrected god-king took hold
of communities in every land.
In the limited space at our disposal it’s not possible to do justice
to the complexity of this subject. But briefly, it can be said that
according to the Solar teachings of the Pillar religion, kingly authority
and the power to rule wisely rests on the royal initiate’s ability to
ascend the axis mundi or World Tree to the divine centre of
creation at the zenith of the heavens. There, and only there, he will find
deification; there he will be able to access the heavenly powers from
which all impulses of rulership, creativity and wisdom emanate; there he
will become godlike. John Major Jenkins, a leading researcher of ancient
Sacred knowledge is won or achieved by undertaking visionary
journeys up the World Axis to the cosmic centre. A ruler, having
thus become fused with the divine source and emanating power of
life and wisdom, constellates the beings and objects of lesser
Such a monarch stands as far more than an
exemplary figurehead or an administrative symbol at the heart of his
kingdom; he has become, by virtue of his conquest of the World Tree, a
way-shower into a new order of being for the whole of his society. In the
same way, so Jenkins believes, at certain critical junctures of the
Earth’s history, this odyssey of transformation up the cosmic Pillar to
the divine Centre at the zenith is possible for the race as a whole, which
thereby advances further towards its next evolutionary goal - the supernal
kingdom, the fifth.
Revisiting the Pillar Religion
Where on the planet, then, is the cosmic
Pillar or World Axis that the Hebrews called Jacob’s Ladder? Although it
would be natural to assume it is synonymous with the earth’s north-south
axis of rotation, such is not the case. According to Guénon, there have
been several successive locations of the World Axis on the surface of the
globe that distinguish it from either the north-south axis of rotation or
the magnetic axis.
Sacred geography, he says, is based on an
open model of the world. Our present scientific world model is
closed: its referent system is not open to any dimension higher than
itself, and this makes its study much easier to deal with. But the
esoteric reality, expressed long ago in the Pillar teachings, is that the
earth incorporates a principle that connects it at all times to a greater
spiritual world in the same way that a mirrored reflection is
intrinsically connected to the reality. By virtue of this fact, the earth
is hyper-dimensional in structure – as indeed the physicist David Bohm has
proposed in his theory of an implicate universal order lying behind the
explicate physical order as its energetic template - and this radically
modifies everything we can say about the planet, in the way we can measure
and describe it. Opening up the secret scientific tradition, Guénon
asserts that basically nothing less than a new model of the world is
needed if we are to understand the true nature of the World Axis.
The Pillar religion projected a worldview
very different from our own. The planet was regarded as a living organism
with its own hierarchy of elemental intelligences at work in the manifold
organization and running of the whole, and which we call today the work of
Nature. The World Tree, in India known as Mt. Meru, was believed to be at
the very heart of this great dynamic complex, a channel of evolutionary
energy, a planetary path of psychospiritual transformation of the same
order as the seven-fold spinal path of consciousness in human beings.
In fact, the name Meru is connected to the
Sanskrit word merudanda, meaning a backbone, and hence the World Tree can
be further qualified as the backbone of the planet, a chakric system
analogous to that of the human spinal system, with seven or nine nodes of
increasing psychospiritual awareness culminating in the Cosmic Centre at
the summit. These nodes were clairvoyantly perceived as a succession of
gateways up the trunk of the Tree leading into higher planes of existence,
and the final entrance to the Cosmic Centre was therefore called the North
Guénon’s Neoplatonic thesis contains the
concept of a universal ether, renamed “the quantum fluid” by modern
science. His theory states that behind the physical body of the earth lies
its spiritual template, a permanent prephysical or etheric web of forces
delineating the planetary structure in its essential form. In this inner
light body – or, as Vedic cosmology calls it, the vajra body - is
located the World Axis, the etheric source and intelligent regulator of
all the energies of the planet. At the beginning of each great temporal
cycle – and by that Guénon means at the very least one round of the
Zodiac, one Sidereal Year of 25,920 years – the two bodies are in
virtually perfect alignment, but as the cycle proceeds a separation occurs
and the physical body falls increasingly out of alignment with its
spiritual template – (a change that corresponds to Blavatsky’s image of a
tilting of the axle of the zodiacal Wheel).
This non-alignment or tilting away of the
planetary body from its inner template has the effect of creating all the
earthly stresses and vicissitudes of time and change that we know so well,
yet is the necessary precondition for evolutionary growth. The two bodies,
the spiritual archetype and its physical reflection, will not again
achieve alignment until the end of the temporal cycle.
From this circumstance comes all the suffering of becoming, all the
so-called evil, of our earthly existence.
In such a spiritual cosmology the universe
as a whole is at rest. Containing the unchanging essential templates of
form – the Platonic Forms or Ideas - it is in a state of ideal harmony and
order and is never disturbed. But although the spiritual world of pure
Being is changeless, the natural state of its reflection, holographically
projected onto a lower plane, even at its least displaced is to become
off-centre in relation to it and therefore in perpetual compensatory motion. This is the biblical “fall” of mankind without which there
would be no evolutionary process. With the separating out of the physical
plane, motion is created and the suffering of change begins, for
the process of increasing differentiation of the physical body from its
spiritual background inflicts on the planet and all its life-forms a local
disturbance, the angst of movement, of disequilibrium, of continual
adjustment to new conditions and new evolutionary demands – but also the
possibility of attaining a greater state of being.
We can sum up this occult cosmology thus:
At the beginning of the great precessional cycles, the north-south axis
and the magnetic axis are in virtually perfect alignment with the World
Axis and with each other. All three stand at that time apparently united
at true North, so that the supreme spiritual centre is in a literally
polar location; but as the cycles proceed, the poles fall progressively
out of alignment with the World Axis and terrestrial changes develop.
Today the World Axis has apparently relocated southward and is
situated in Middle Asia, where it has been for many thousands of years.
In Galactic Alignment John Major
Jenkins presents a similar cosmological picture. He calls the World Axis
the evolutionary axis, by implication a third terrestrial axis presently
unknown to science. Clairvoyantly visible, this great current of
psychospiritual intelligent energy is thought to run through the planet
between (roughly) latitudes 45 to 50 degrees north, emerging north of
Kashmir, possibly in the Pamirs.
It is in that vicinity, at the foot of the World Tree, that the peoples of
Central Asia have traditionally located the hidden kingdom of the Elders
known as Shambhala, an initiatory centre accessible on both a physical, an
etheric and an astral plane.
Jenkins’ seminal research, based as it is
on the cosmology of ancient mystery traditions around the world, leads to
the conclusion that a large part of the apparent diversity of forms in the
universe is achieved by a single structural template (such as the axis
mundi) being given manifest form in a vast multiplicity of different
contexts or points of view, yielding something like the illusory effect of
a hall of mirrors. Thus the North Gate, he contends, can be viewed as
analogous at a cosmic level to the pineal gland in the human system, which
is the most interior and creative centre in man and “the point from which
spiritual gifts are given.”
He sees the Cosmic Centre at the head of the World Axis as fulfilling the
same function in a planetary context.
However, while René Guénon has postulated
a major polar-to-solar shift of the Cosmic Centre in man’s worship at some
remote time in antiquity, Jenkins has argued that this shift would be
better understood as a polar-to-galactic one. Thousands of years ago, he
says, priest-astronomers realized that approximately every 6,450 years the
North Gate was aligned with the galactic centre, and that such times
offered a priceless evolutionary opportunity for the whole race. Gordon
too observes that the earth is subject to celestial seasons of about 6,480
years, “which have a dramatic effect upon both the climate…and also upon
the many and varied cultures and civilizations which exist at the time.”
It is an astronomical fact, says Jenkins,
that alignments of the solstices and equinoxes with the plane
of our Milky Way galaxy occur periodically over the 26,000-year
precession cycle. Such alignments, in fact, occur every 6,450
years. Joseph Campbell pointed out that knowledge of the
precessional cycle is implied by the importance given the number
25,920 in Hindu, Nordic and Babylonian doctrines.
Jenkins equates the spiritual evolution of
humanity with this periodic alignment of the Earth with the galactic plane
and the Galactic Centre. The idea that it stimulates consciousness on this
planet is, he says, “an intriguing and profound concept” that finds echoes
in Mayan, Vedic and Egyptian cosmology.
Jenkins regards the Tree as a planetary
chakric system analogous to that of the individual tantrica in the
practice of kundalini yoga. Even as the yogic consciousness ascends the
spinal system, so activating a sequence of seven hierarchically ordered
chakras or psychospiritual energy vortices which alter in subtle ways the
entire spectrum of consciousness, so the ascension of the racial soul up
the World Tree at certain precessional intervals of c.6,450 (or c.6,480)
years corresponds with the opening up of a succession of celestial
At each open gateway the flooding down of
divine creative energies precipitates certain psychological and cultural
modifications in society; the human body typology changes; new deities,
new mores appear; the material technology advances or changes its base, a
new civilization is launched founded on newly imperative truths. It is a
moment of supreme evolutionary importance, a collective initiation perhaps
best conveyed by the teachings of the Mithraic mystery religion.
This important Greco-Roman cult flourished
until the fourth century CE, when it was extinguished by Christianity.
Seven planetary spheres were opened up to the seeker through the seven
grades of Mithraic initiation; allowing him ultimately to ascend to the
highest, the Father (Saturn). However, beyond the seventh level was a
secret teaching revealing an eighth and ninth level or “house” where the
Hypercosmic Sun was located. This hypercosmic luminary, this “Star of
stars,” as the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus of
Alexandria called it, was identified with the Galactic Centre, to which
access was gained only through the eighth and the ninth celestial
“doorway” above that of Saturn.
This secret means of escape from Earth’s gravity into the freedom of the
universe has been closely guarded by occult tradition and is still not
fully unveiled to our understanding.
The doctrine of the Hypercosmic Sun,
according to Jenkins, is ”fundamentally about the soul’s passage through
the galactic gateways that open during eras of galactic alignment,” when
the divine light of the Milky Way Centre pours down through the opened
valves of the World Axis and irradiates the earth and all its inhabitants
for a certain interval of time. It is in that critical interval that the
great evolutionary mutations take place, civilizations are overthrown and
reinstated in radically new forms and the potential exists for the fifth
kingdom to be realized by at least some members of fourth-kingdom
Jenkins is only one of countless observers
who believe such an historic time has once again come around. Indeed, by
now millions of people are watching and waiting for the end-of-the-world
Mayan date of 2012 CE, believing it to be the beginning of a new World
Age…a further stage on the journey towards the fifth kingdom.
Realizing the Eurasian Ideal
In February of 1962 astrological
pundits announced a major planetary conjunction that occurs only once in
every c.6,500 (or 6,480) years – the previous one therefore having taken
place in c.4,500 BC, and the one before that in c.11,000 BCE, both of
which occasions were prophetic of great earth changes.
I remember well the report in the media, because immediately a cry of
distress and foreboding went up right across India; for it was known by
most Hindu astrologers that this rare stellar event, occurring only four
times in the precessional cycle of 26,000 years, does indeed foreshadow
great floods and catastrophic climatic changes.
In response, the dawning New Age movement
of the time predicted the return of the Elder race, the possibility of a
pole shift, the birth of a new race of clairvoyants. To esotericists
generally the conjunction signified a new World Age and an impending
psychospiritual initiation of collective humanity, with all the social and
ideological tumult such an event implied. And confirming John Major
Jenkins’ later theory to the hilt, the conjunction was seen by some
star-gazers as the first sign of a coming revolution in geo-political
world affairs, with the rise of Asia and the decline of the Western
At the time, all these predictions were
regarded as amazing and pretty farfetched. But nearly fifty years on, the
events presaged in 1962 are now crystallizing as post-millennial
realities. Ominously, the ice caps and glaciers are melting, the seas
rising, earth’s resources shrinking; the Anglo-American world order, built
on predatory economic corporations, is unravelling, Asiatic power
inexorably rising. A transformation in human consciousness is well
underway; and there is increasing evidence that the vast natural,
socio-political and consciousness changes we are seeing are now
irreversible, for good or ill.
Perhaps the most significant sign of the
times is to be found in the growing vision of a unified Eurasia among the
major Asian nations such as China, Mongolia, India, Iran (and also
Brazil), as well as Kazakhstan and many other of the Central Asian Muslim
states. Included in this growing Eastern bloc is Russia which, since the
collapse of the Soviet regime, is increasingly turning away from Western
Europe and towards Asia in its quest for identity, and is thus
rediscovering its Slavic roots and its deep Mongol,/Turkic connections.
Across the steppes, where for countless centuries a melting pot of peoples,
religions and empires from every quarter has traded and warred and sunk
beneath desert sands, a spirit of renaissance, of ecumenical reform, is
taking hold. A countervailing force that can be identified with the
invisible spiritual powerhouse in the heart of High Asia is stirring
throughout the region. Muslim, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Christian, Jew,
Taoist and shaman are finding common ground in a unitive vision of the
future. Claiming to be in response to the militaristic Anglo-American
colonisation that has long dominated it, this new regional climate bodes
well for the rebalancing of the globe’s spiritual, cultural and economic
The move to turn the tenuous Eurasian
concept into a geo-political reality composed of numerous independent but
strongly affiliated nations committed to world amity must be regarded as a
force for renewal, for the healing of the Atlantean/Hyperborean rupture
that long ago shattered the primal unity of the life of the planet. It
seeks instead to recapture the ancient Arctic accord and to set forth new
terms for a viable future for humankind.
What is truly remarkable is that we are
witnessing all this happening in Central Asia at the very time of great
astrological significance, when the stars again portend extreme danger and
extreme opportunity for the life of Earth. Are we then seeing once again a
mysterious intervention from the East, a salvific influence arising in the
heart of Asia that seeks to sow the seeds of a new global order and a new
type of civilization in the face of apocalyptic geophysical change? Can
the Elder race be coming to our aid yet again?
 J.S. Gordon.
The Rise and Fall of Atlantis,
and the Mysterious Origins of Human Civilization,, Watkins
Publishing, London, 2008, 131.
Maps of the Ancient Sea
Turnstone Press, London, 1979.
Gordon, op. cit., 131.
Lake of Memory Rising,”
Council Oaks Books, LLC, San Francisco, 2000, 203.
The Secret Doctrine,
2., Theosophical Publishing House, Los Angeles, 1947, 324.
 Drunvalo Melchizedek.
The Ancient Secret of
the Flower of Life, Light Technology Publishing, Flagstaff, AZ,
1990 – 8, 143.
The Lord of the World,
Coombe Springs Press, U.K., 1983, 66.
Melchizedek, op. cit., 43.
J.S. Gordon, op. cit., 85.
Trevor Ravenscroft & T. Wallace-Murphy.
Mark of the Beast,
Vol. 3, Sphere Books, U.K., 1990, 67.
John Major Jenkins.
Bear & Co., Rochester, Vermont, 2002, 150.
René Guénon, op. cit.,
Illinois, 1996, 180.
Jenkins, op. cit., 140, citing Valentinia
Straiton, The Celestial Ship of the North,
J.S. Gordon, op. cit., 130.
Sky and Telescope Magazine, December 1961, 320.
On February 5, 1962, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn were all
within 13 degrees of the eclipsed Sun.