René Guénon’s assertion, culled from ancient esoteric sources, that in the remote past humanity’s first civilisation arose in the 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.”1
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 circumpolar civilisation.
Charles Hapgood, who in the mid-sixties was the Professor of the History of Science at Keene University in New Hampshire, USA, became convinced that humanity did indeed enjoy a sophisticated civilisation 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.2
“This map (and others also researched),” Gordon comments, summarising Hapgood’s conclusions, “clearly showed… that the polar regions had been cartographically surveyed when no ice cap existed,”3 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....<<<Read More>>>...