Arthur’s Slow Wain

Dancing with Myths: An A – Z
VIII: H is for Hyperborea

When I first read Malory’s Morte Darthur (I managed to get a copy from the library with modernised spelling, which meant I didn’t have to bother with retellings for children anymore), I was immediately struck by an adventure which I had not come across before: the invasion of King Arthur’s Britain by five kings, led by the King of the Isle of Longtains. I had enough French to know that this king ruled a ‘distant’ (lointaine) island – but where could it be?
When I came, years later, to read the vast prose cycles on which Malory had drawn for his works, I came across several references to Distant, Far or Faraway Isles – islands, I now realised, which could not be found on any terrestrial map. They were islands of the imagination…
Or were they? In the early Eighties, a few years after I first moved to Wales, a friend gave me a copy of a book by an author I had never heard of: Lord Of The World by René Guénon, which had only recently been published in English translation. By then I had started to read widely on myths and symbolism, principally in Jung, Joseph Campbell and Robert Graves; but I really did not know what to make of Guénon. Like those authors, he was positing a common, universal origin for myths, religious beliefs and initiatory practices. But whereas Jung looked to the depths of the psyche, to the archetypes of the collective unconscious of humanity, Guénon identified a particular place and time as the sacred centre and spiritual origin of human civilisation; and whereas Graves looked back thousands of years to a prehistoric, matriarchal Europe, Guénon went back tens of thousands of years to a northern homeland...Hyperborea, the Land at the Back of the North Wind.
I was familiar with Hyperborea from Graves’ work on Greek myths, where it is sometimes equated with Britain; his Hyperboreans are a cult who believe that when they die their souls are taken off to the Corona Borealis, to the “calm silver-circled castle at the back of the North Wind, of which the bright star Alpheta was the guardian”. I had also read George Macdonald’s sometimes profoundly moving, sometimes irritatingly sentimental fantasy At the Back of the North Wind; and Robert E. Howard’s essay, ‘The Hyborian Age,’ which gives a pseudo-historical background for his tales of Kull and Conan. Here the Hyperboreans are nomadic barbarians who flee north to escape the cataclysm which destroys Atlantis: “There are few more dramatic events in history than the rise of the rude, fierce kingdom of Hyperborea, whose people turned abruptly from their nomadic life to rear dwellings of naked stone, surrounded by cyclopean walls…”
Those cyclopean walls get me every time…
But the idea that Hyperborea rose after the fall of Atlantis is in direct contradiction to the cosmology presented by Guénon and his disciples. René Guénon (1886–1951) was a French metaphysician who, from the Twenties onwards, published a stream of articles and books excoriating the modern world with an intellectual passion which has been described as the Sword of Gnosis, cutting away the cultural detritus to reveal the primordial Tradition buried beneath it – a Tradition which is also known as the Perennial Philosophy or Wisdom (Sophia perennis). All surviving religions in the contemporary world preserve just fragments of this Tradition, whose supreme spiritual centre is the Hyperborean Thule, a land at the North Pole which is the archetypal ‘sacred isle’; all the others, “although everywhere bearing names of equivalent meaning, are still only images of the original.”
This World Centre, in Christian symbolism, is both the Earthly Paradise and the Heavenly Jerusalem. These manifest at the beginning and the end of time or, in the Hindu Tradition, at the beginning and end of every temporal cycle (Mahayuga). Guénon describes how, in the course of the cycle of manifestation, humanity is increasingly distanced from the paradisal centre; and that this distancing (éloignement) is what is known in the Judaeo-Christian Tradition as ‘the Fall.’ He writes that ‘paradise’ can mean both région suprême and région lointaine since, in the unfolding of cyclical procession, it becomes in effect inaccessible to ordinary humanity.
This inaccessibility has been described by Guénon’s Italian disciple Julius Evola as “the alignment of a physical and a metaphysical fact,” as if a disorder of nature was reflecting a spiritual one: “ice and eternal night” descends on the North Pole; and the Boreal Race emigrates, carrying with them their symbols: some, to northern Eurasia; others, establishing on an island in the Atlantic a secondary spiritual centre.
The Golden Age gives way to the Silver Age of humanity…and so to the Middle Ages of our conventional chronology, where the Distant, Remote or Far-Away Isles (Lontaignes Iles) of Arthurian romance reveal the preservation, albeit in disguise, of the Hyperborean Tradition.
In the Grail Cycle, the first Christian King of Wales, being the youngest son of Joseph of Arimathea, marries the daughter of the King of the Distant Isles. This realm, as we have seen, can be equated with Thule; and its king, therefore, with the figure that Guénon calls the Lord of the World, “the primordial and universal legislator ... In reality the name describes not a figure that is more or less historical and legendary, but a principle, a cosmic Intelligence that reflects pure spiritual light and formulates the Law (Dharma) appropriate to the conditions of our world and of our cycle of existence. At the same time, it is the archetype of man in his uniqueness…” This figure, the ‘celestial pole,’ is represented down here on Earth by the leader of an initiatory organisation “responsible for preserving integrally the repository of sacred tradition which is of ‘non-human’ origin … and through which primordial Wisdom communicates across the ages to those capable of receiving it.”
This leader, the ‘terrestrial pole,’ assumes “the name and attributes” of the Lord of the World; and, although the individual who takes on that mantle changes depending on the earthly “spiritual centre” where he dwells, it is always the same principle with which he identifies – “the principle of which he is the human expression, and before which his own individuality disappears.”
In the Grail romances, the Lord has a daughter whom we can see, following the Celtic Tradition which lies behind so much Arthurian lore, as the Sovereignty of Thule. The wedding (hierogamy) of a member of the Grail family with the Princess of the Distant Isles can be interpreted symbolically as an alliance between the newly imported Christian Grail cult and the aboriginal, indigenous religious tradition of the British Isles which, according to Guénon, was a fusion of Atlantean and earlier Hyperborean elements.
So, we are now in a position to understand the symbolism hidden, alchemically, in a neglected episode of the early reign of King Arthur. It is significant that, in Malory’s version, the invasion of the five kings follows immediately on the disappearance of Merlin, representing the sacerdotal power of the Druids complementing Arthur’s regal power (or, in Blakean symbolism, Imagination in harmony with Reason). Is what follows an initiatory test of his fitness to rule?
The five kings, we are told, rule Denmark, Ireland, the Vale (of Avalon?) and Surluse; and the Isle of Longtains (the Far Isle). But if we consider these five kingdoms as symbolic topoi, rather than geographical places, they may be understood as the five divisions of the archetypal Sacred Realm (constituting the four quarters and the centre or ‘quintessence’), which is known in the Judaeo-Christian tradition as the Earthly Paradise and its four rivers.
King Arthur and three of his knights, including his nephew Gawain (the subject of the seventh Letter) kill the five kings; but, according to the law of mythic identification, the hero appropriates the nature of what he has overcome. Thus, by defeating the five kings, the British heroes transform their realm into an image of the fivefold Sacred Land; and Arthur himself becomes the symbolic Lord of the Distant Isle… the quintessential ‘supreme master.’
Arthur’s right to that title will not go unchallenged: The giant Galahalt, the Prince of Surluse, invades Arthur’s kingdom; but he is turned into an ally by the intervention of Lancelot who, in a German poem, is said to marry the Princess of Thule.
During the Grail Quest, Gawain comes across a mysterious White Island where he sees the Holy Vessel brought to Britain by Joseph of Arimathea. This lost or hidden Vessel is, for Guénon, a symbol of the primordial Tradition itself; and the White Island, one of the names of Thule, white being the colour of spiritual authority. It is also striking that when Gawain sees the Grail Lord, known as the Fisher King, on his holy island – the Abode of the Blest, the Land of the Living – the king is not maimed, as he is when he is encountered elsewhere, in the fallen world.
Should we see the Grail King as the celestial Pole, as Arthur is the terrestrial? After the Grail Quest, the Fisher King withdraws from this world and is never seen again; and Arthur is transported to Avalon; but his chariot remains visible to all in the sky – except on a cloudy night, as Sir Walter Scott’s Last Minstrel laments in his Lay:

Arthur's slow wain his course doth roll,
In utter darkness round the pole;
The Northern Bear lowers black and grim…

But the northern Thule, the Land at the Back of the North Wind, Hyperborea, is not lost forever. A new Gawain will find the White Island; and Arthur will return from Avalon, in the hour of his country’s greatest need. The Northern Bear will shine again…

Next month: I is for Ialdabaoth