A Brief Critical Note on the Work of Herman Wirth : 'Der Aufgang der
Menschheit (Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Religion, Symbolik und
Schrift der Atlantisch-nordischen Rasse)', Iena, 1928.
It is no simple matter to evaluate Wirth's work. To retrace his
steps, through his colossal reconstitution of history, religion, and
the symbolism of the 'Nordic-Atlantean race', while checking its
validity step by step, is absolutely impossible here. We will thus
limit ourselves to a glance at the thesis as a whole, and add a few
words on the 'method'.
Wirth starts by inverting the idea of the 'evolutionary' development
of culture. In the darkness of prehistory (and as far back as the
Stone Age), there was no coarse and savage humanity, but a great
culture, of a cosmically symbolic type, carried by a single race.
This race originated in the Arctic regions. Twice, during periods of
glaciation, there were emigrations from North to South. Hence, there
were also genetic mixings : the Aryans themselves were a late product
of 'isovariations' of the primordial white Arctic stock. More
recently, there was a further movement, from West to East, from
America and Atlantis (our author admits its existence, hence his
expression "Nordic-Atlantean race") to Europe and Western Africa.
There was subsequent colonisation of the Mediterranean basin,
which is the unitary phenomenon behind the pre-historical findings of
the Magdalenian culture, of Altimira and Gourdain, of the ancient
black cultures of Vai and Jorubi (Frobenius), of white Berber stocks,
of very ancient linear writing (such as the pre-dynastic Egyptian,
the South Arabian, and the Minoan), of the culture of El-Hosch, etc.
There followed developments of this wave towards the East, along
various routes which Wirth sought to identify, culminating in the
white Maori stocks, who possess involuted remains of this culture.
Various meetings and mixings with Southern races occurred, as well as
with those peoples which had come directly from the North in the
first emigrations.
Following the destruction of Atlantis (which was the centre of this
culture), the unitary link of the unique tradition to the unique
prehistoric stock was first broken, then lost to memory. But the
various colonies, up to historical times, would continue to testify
to it, both by their racial make-up and by their language roots,
symbols, myths, and cults. It is precisely these many correspondences
that led Wirth to reconstitute it, inductively, as the most immediate
explanatory hypothesis.
In the sphere of religion, at the centre of the Nordic-Atlantean
tradition, lay the understanding of the yearly course of the sun as
being an expression in the realm of the senses of the supreme cosmic
law of death and rebirth, the year-god in his death and resurrection.
The Winter Solstice, the critical point of the solar cycle, was the
key to the ritual, symbolic and linguistic system of these races.
Wirth's idea was that the various 'moments' of the sun-god in the
year, as related to the zodiacal signs, constituted a 'sacred
series', the skeleton of a unique primordial system of symbols, and,
in conjunction with certain fixed speech roots, of a unique
primordial language.
However, since the Winter Solstice is subject to a shift over time in
relation to the zodiac, caused by the precession of the equinoxes, so
in each successive epoch a new typical mode of writing the 'sacred
series' appeared, characterised by the corresponding zodiacal sign :
after the Lion, [the Crab is omitted here - Ed.], the Twins, the
Bull, and finally the Ram. Hence there came about corresponding
variations and modifications of signs and words, as well as the
passage from the motifs of one cult to those of another.
Wirth considers that the cycle of myths in which a divine figure dies
and is born again, or rises, recurrently, represents the echo of the
one great prehistoric Nordic-Atlantean myth, and in this cycle he
includes Christianity. In the Virgin, the Cross, the Lamb, the date
of birth of the God, and so on, Wirth is certain he can recognise its
traces.
How much importance should we accord to Wirth's construction? The
first thing to be said is that Wirth is neither a 'theosophist' nor
an 'esotericist'. However daring his syntheses, he remains a
specialist, an expert, whose erudition regarding prehistory,
primitive cultures, comparative philology, paleology, and mythology,
is absolutely extraordinary. The material he has used in this volume
(to be followed by another one, which will reproduce five thousand
illustrations in support of his thesis) is immense and complex :
anthropology, even the most recent research into blood types,
symbolism, etymology, archeology, the texts of the great traditions
such as the Veda and the Avesta, all provide him with convergent roads
towards the unitary goal. Is this goal 'scientific'? It is difficult
to answer : but if, in the positive sciences, some truth is conceded
to those working hypotheses which best facilitate explanation and
unitary systematisation, then accordingly a certain right to exist
should not be denied to Wirth's imposing hypotheses. One may choose
to dismiss certain principles a priori, such as the hypothesis of the
'sacred series', with the variations which appear in it in over the
course of time because of the precession of the equinoxes. But if one
does not do so, one finds oneself in front of an enchanted castle,
which one can refuse to enter, but from which it is difficult to
escape once one has crossed the threshold : from signs to words, from
words to symbols, from symbols to words and signs again, through
idols, spells, calendar notations, names of gods and demons,
ornaments, rites and ritual objects, inscriptions, masks, prehistoric
drawings found on rocks or in caves, funerary ornaments, and findings
of every sort, enriched with elements collected on the ground by
Wirth himself over years of research - the author does not give us
any rest. And even if one reduces the whole thing to a 'myth', one
must still recognise the power and vast scale of a living synthesis,
which, in these fields, otherwise monopolised by dry and
particularistic erudition, is second to none.