There exists no greater mystery in human existence than the mystery of life and death, dying and becoming. For man, the Year is the supreme Revelation of divine action in the Universe. The Year is the expression of God’s providential cosmic law, in accordance with which occurs the becoming of the world in the infinite and everlasting return. The most magical and profound phenomenon before us in nature is the Year of God. A number of days makes up the Year, and in each of these days is opened the image of the Year: the birth of the Light from which comes all life, its climb to the highest peak, and its descent, death, and sinking, only to rise again. The morning, noon, evening, and night in a day correspond to spring, summer, autumn, and winter in the Year.

There exist several points of view as to what runes are. Some believe that runes are an altered version of the Latin alphabet that appeared in the 5th-6th centuries among the Scandinavians and Northern European Germanic peoples. Others suggest that runes were the ancient characters used for divination and recording texts which emerged only at a later stage and under the influence of Latin writing. These two points of view on the nature and origin of runes are considered to be the “scholarly” and “orthodox” ones. 

But there is another theory of runes proposed by the German scholar, Professor Herman Wirth. We should mention from the outset that this theory is not recognized by broader scholarly circles. The reason for this neglect of Wirth is not so much his paleo-epigraphic and runological works as his assessment of the text famously known as the Oera Linda Chronicle, the story behind which resembles that of the Book of Veles. The Oera Linda Chronicle was discovered at the beginning of the 19th century and allegedly presented the most ancient history of the Germanic peoples (the Frisians) stretching back centuries to many millennia. The text was written in a special quasi-runic script and contained tales of pre-Christian mythology and the sacred history of the Germanic people. The Book of Veles (discovered only at the beginning of the 20th century) represented a precise analogue of the Oera Linda Chronicle, only applied to the Slavs.

The West believes that only its path of development, only its logic, and only its values are universal and common to all of mankind, and that all other peoples have simply not yet understood this. This means that the West, albeit temporarily (until they understand this), can and is even obliged to rule others. With such a blatant agenda, the West has in practice managed to colonize the East. This is no easy feat, but it managed to. But the West faltered in the face of Russia, Eurasia. We, Russians, opposed the West with something that stopped it in its tracks. It repeatedly tried to take us by force and ruse, but we held on. The East fell, but we didn’t. And we are holding out to this day. This is Eurasia as an idea.

Eurasia means not succumbing to the West’s claims to universality, rejecting its hegemony, and insisting that no one has a monopoly on truth, especially not the West. Eurasia is the possibility for peoples and civilizations to follow their own path and, if the logic of the path demands such, not only a non-Western one, but even an anti-Western path. This is Eurasia. This idea was understood by the first Eurasianists, Trubetzkoy, Savitsky, and Alekseev in the 1920’s. We too understand it. And Vladimir Putin understands it, since there is no other meaning of Eurasia.

The point is that both the Slavs and the Rus (like the Franks and Celts) ethnologically belonged to one Northern Aryan ethnos today known as the Veneti. In the days of old, one could stumble upon the name mentioned by Strabo – Vindelicum or Vendelicum (and the Baltic Sea was the Sinus Venedicus). Moreover, one of their names was Franks (the “free ones”) and the other was Slavs. As Eckhard wrote, “The Franks once dwelled near the Baltic Sea, where there is now the Vagria” (Franci olim ad mare Balthicum, ubu nune est Vagria). It should thus be clearly borne in mind that all of these ethnonyms are from later times. “The Franconian Slavs,” writes the 19th century Russian scholar Y.I. Venelin (Gutsa), “did not call themselves Vindelicum, just as they did not call themselves Slovene as the name existing only in ethnographic books. The very word Franks is a modern ethnonym derived from one of the names of the kings who ruled the ancient Vagria called Reges Francorum and who, according to Fredegar and the later chroniclers, were the descendants of the Trojan kings (the line of Priam). These are the Trojan Veneti settlers who formed the ruling, princely caste of whom Polybius wrote. According to him, they “differ little from the Celts, but speak their own language. The writers of tragedies often mention this people and speak of its many miracles.”

European modernity, which abolished religion, faith in the King and the Heavenly Father, the castes, the sacred understanding of the world, and essentially patriarchy, was the beginning of the fall of Indo-European civilization. Capitalism, materialism, egalitarianism, and economism are all the revenge of those societies against which the Indo-Europeans waged war, subjugated, and strove to remedy, which composed the essence of all Indo-European peoples’ history. Modernity was the end of Indo-European civilization. It naturally corresponds to the nadir. This is not an abstraction, for it affects us in the most direct ways. 

No compromises will help us. Either we will disappear and be dissolved, or we must restore our Indo-European civilization in its entirety, with all of its values, ways, and metaphysics. If we want to preserve ourselves as a people, as an Indo-European people, we must wake up and be reborn in contrast to all that has been taken for granted in the world of modernity. To hell with this world of modernity.

We are no less different from Europe than Iranians or Indians. Sure, we share common roots with Greco-Roman civilization, but this civilization underwent a schism that began in the 6th century when the Western Empire fell away from Byzantium and then disappeared under attack by Germanic tribes. Already back then, two identities formed: a Catholic identity in the West, and an Orthodox identity in the East. The two gradually drifted away from one another further and further until, in 1054, the Orthodox and Catholic worlds parted ways once and for all. We, Russians, adopted Christianity from Byzantium and have kept none other than this Eastern Christian tradition to this day.

After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, we took over the Byzantine mission. This is not merely the mission of a country, Trubetzkoy asserted, but the pole of self-conscious and independent Orthodox civilization, its center.

The symbolism of the Dormition icon (if we juxtapose it to the Mother of God icon) also has analogies outside of a Christian context. The clearest such similar spiritual concept of the structure of being is reflected in the Chinese symbol of Yin-Yang, in which the white dot against the black background signifies the diminishing of the spirit in matter, while the black dot against the white background is, conversely, matter in spirit. However, the Chinese tradition is characterized by contemplation and and the absence of an eschatological orientation. Thus, the Chinese are inclined to consider this symbol as a sign of eternal harmony while Christians see ontological plans in an historical and eschatological perspective, hence Christianity’s distinctly ‘dynamic’ character supposing the personal, volitional engagement of man in the outcome of the fate of the spirit. The Chinese believe that this volitional aspect is not so important insofar as the Tao ultimately arranges everything in the best way. Undoubtedly, similar symbolism can be found in many other traditions in reference to the correlations between the material and spiritual worlds, but the Chinese example represents something so clear and comprehensive that all similar parables can be reduced to it.

Within the Abrahamic line religions there is a kind of hierarchy that allows you to distribute them according to the criteria of immanentism and transcendentalism.

The religion, which can be called a religion par excellence, is, of course, Judaism. And especially, the form of Judaism, which developed after the arrival of Jesus Christ, after Judaism rejected not only the person and mission of Jesus, but the principle of the immanent God, Emmanuel (which in Hebrew means "God with us"). The abyss between the Creator and the creation in Judaism is maximal, and generally the concept of creation itself, "creationism", is of Jewish origin. Judaism embodies abrahamic apophaticism and carried up to its logical extreme.

By all principle parameters, the Russian Federation is the geopolitical heir of the preceding historical, political and social forms that took shape around the territorial of the Russian plain, from Kievan Rus through the Golden Hordes, the Muscovite Czardom, The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.  This continuity is not only territorial, but also historical, social, spiritual, political and ethnic.  From ancient times, Russian government began to form in the space of the Heartland, gradually expanding more and more, until it occupied the whole Heartland entirely, together with the zones adjoining it.  This spatial expansion of Russian control over Eurasian territories was accompanied by a parallel sociological process: the strengthening in Russian [Russkii] society of "land-based" social arrangements, characteristic of a civilization of the continental type.  

According to Guenon, Tradition (the entirety of sacred knowledge dating back to the primordial and inhuman divine source) has, in the final period of our cycle – the Kali Yuga, which has already been counting down for several millennia – been divided into two parts: exotericism and esotericism. Exotericism can manifest itself in the form of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) or in a non-religious form (Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, etc.) and represents the socio-psychological, ordering aspect of Tradition, i.e., the face of Tradition oriented exclusively outwards toward people and made available to all members of traditional society without exception. Esotericism, for its part, is the purely spiritual sphere. On this level, Tradition appeals to the “elite” and the “chosen” who have been called to go deep into sacred doctrines and myths. Esotericism is the underside of Tradition, while exotericism remains the outer side. 

In Samuel Huntington’s famous article describing the impending “clash of civilizations”, Huntington mentions a very important formula: “modernization without westernization.” This formula describes the relationship to problems of socio-economic and technological development experienced by some countries (as a rule, those of the Third World) who, while understanding the objective necessity of the development and improvement of their social systems’ political and economic mechanisms, refuse to blindly follow the West, instead striving to put some of Western technology – in isolation from its ideological content – in service of their traditional value systems and national, religious, and political characters. Many representatives of the elites of the East, having received higher Western educations, return to their home countries with important technical knowledge and methodologies which they then use to strengthen their own national systems. Thus, instead of the rapprochement between civilizations expected by liberal optimists, what ensues is the arming of certain “archaic,” “traditionalist” regimes with new technologies which render civilizational confrontation all the sharper. 

The role of the USA, the last remaining superpower in the world, is central to global geopolitics today. Beginning with the end of the 19th century, this peripheral, marginal continent, previously but a European province secondary and complimentary to the Old World, increasingly became an independent political and cultural power. After the Second World War, the USA even came to act as the paradigmatic, universal model for the countries of Europe themselves and even Asia. The significance of the steady growth of America and the totality of the American ideological, cultural, psychological, and even philosophical complex goes beyond the framework of purely economic or military influence. “Mythological America,” “America as a concept,” and “America as the American Ideal” are today manifesting themselves all the more visibly. 

There must be compelling reasons why the “American idea” has taken root and implanted itself as something “neo-sacred” in global geopolitical consciousness connected to the collective unconsciousness of humanity and the mysterious continental geography that can be traced back millennia, the memory of which still lives in the archetypes of the psyche. Considering the “mythological” underpinnings of America as an “internal continent” is the main task of this chapter.

The Traditionalists’ (Guenon, Evola, Georgel, etc.) perception of the relationship between the paleo-continents, cardinal directions, and cyclical periods of ancient civilizations boils down to the following [30]: the North was the original orientation whose ancient paleo-continent located at the North pole was Arktogeya, or Hyperborea, with its sacred capital as Thule or Tula (for the Greeks and Aztecs) or Vara in the Zoroastrian Iranian tradition. It is important to note the similarity between the Iranian “Vara” – the northern city, capital of Aryan-Vedj, and the homeland of the Persians’ ancestors – and the Hindu term Varahi (literally “boar”, or “land of the boars”), as well as the Nordic designation of the continent. The Golden Age of mankind, lasting 25,920 years [31] is associated with this ancient, primordial continent. In the ancient tradition, the New Year came at the point of the winter solstice (or winter eclipse), i.e., the most obvious moment in the transition of the sun and light’s movement from descent to ascent. The priority of the northern orientation and celebrations of the New Year on the day of the winter solstice are signs of the Primordial Tradition itself. 

The second cardinal direction was that of the South and the southern paleo-continent conventionally called Gondwana. The period of the southern orientation’s predominance falls on the Silver Age lasting 19,440 years. The New Year that falls on the day of the summer solstice corresponds to this orientation. Thus, the initial periods of our cycle, the Manvantara, were moved by way of the main migrations of the sacred proto-peoples along the vertical axis from North to South, which corresponds to the priority of the vertical over the horizontal (the axis of East-West) as a qualitative space in sacred geometry. 

As the point of departure of our investigation we shall take the extremely interesting data concerning the sacred geography of the southernmost (or, more precisely, the south-western) territorial sector of Gardariki (the Galician principality) gathered in the book Hyperborean Dacia [13] by the Romanian Traditionalist author of a Guenonian orientation, Geticus (Basil Lovinescu). In this work, the author convincingly demonstrates on the basis of sacred toponymies and a deep analysis of Romanian folklore that ancient Dacia (modern Romania and Moldova) was once the sacred center of the Hyperborean tradition, albeit secondary in regards to Polar Hyperborea which was far more original than other indirect spiritual centers of traditional civilizations. In our opinion, the thesis of Hyperborean Dacia looks quite convincing and we would especially like to dwell on the mystery of the Danube delta which, according to Geticus, was the location of one of the main sanctuaries of Hyperborean Apollo. 

The author of Hyperborean Dacia notes the following peculiarity of the Danube delta and its cult center: river Danube flows into the Black Sea on the 45th parallel, i.e., on the belt dividing the entire northern hemisphere in half. Thus, the cult center of Apollo in Dacia was located in the far north for the entire southern half of the northern hemisphere whose establishment has only recently become known to modern historians of civilization. We note that the 45th parallel in general plays an extremely important role for Eurasia and in the far West. In France, two of the most important sacred centers, Lyon (the “city of meadows, i.e., the center of the geographical spiral of the druids as examined in Louis Charpentier’s book The Giants and the Mystery of the Origin [14]) and Grenoble (the “land of the Dauphins” [15] whose solar, Hyperborean symbolism was researched by the scholars Eugene Canseliet – Sevren Bafrue and Guy Beatrice in the book Land of the Dauphin [15]). At the same time in the Far East, in Mongolia, at approximately the same latitude is located the sacred center of Genghis Khan’s empire, the city of Urga. In addition, it is interesting note that the borders of the Russian Empire also more or less followed this parallel over a gigantic space resembling a sinusoid with a recess in the South in the Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and in the Pamir mountains, and a rise in the North in South-Eastern Siberia, Altai, and across the Amur River. In addition to such an important parallel at which the center of the Apollonian cult of “Hyperborean Dacia” was located, what is also extremely important for us is that the longitude of this place was 30 degrees east. It can be said that this meridian, in its northern part, was the axis of the Slavs’ settlement. To its west were the Poles, Czechs, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Ukrainians, and Belarussians, and to its east are the Great Russians. Thus, in addition to the “extremely northern” location of “Hyperborean Dacia” in relation to the mediterranean world, the extreme South of its situation can also be considered in regards to the Slavo-Baltic-Scandinavian world and Gardariki Rus. In fact, the mouth of the Danube was always the southern sacred-geographical pressure point of the “masses” of the Slavic, Russian world to the north. 

Sacred geography differs substantially from conventional, physical geography. We are accustomed to consider the earth as an orb, as a globe (in Latin, globus means “orb”). For us, the North is the top of the orb, and the South is the bottom. A globe can be rotated and, consequently, concepts of East and West slip away from our geographical attention. But when we present our earth as rotating in the solar system and in outer space, we generally digress from such concepts as cardinal directions. All of this seems to be so conventional! Understanding the world as standing on three pillars and the earth appearing to be a disk are relics of the “dark ages.” 

For a long time, scientific discoveries which have opened new horizons and succeeded each other at a furious pace have been accepted by people uncritically and with excessive enthusiasm. In turn, many have come to treat our ancestors’ map of the world with disdain and disgust and we have been inclined to consider our ancestors to be “dark,” “wild,” “primitive,” or having only recently ceased to be “apes.” 

Such a positivist attitude quickly finds itself confronted with a number of contradictions. The development of science has arrived at the problem of consciousness and the human factor in relation to natural phenomena. Here everything changes. It turns out that the mythological archetypes and systems of consciousness formed by culture, history, the environment, geography, and language have a strong influence on scientific methodology to the point that they “deform” these so-called “objective” material studies.