Traditional doctrines of many peoples speak of a northern or polar homeland of the spirit. Hyperborea, the land of the sun that does not set, the mountain at the center of the world: these are not geographical claims in the modern sense. They are symbolic expressions of a qualitative origin. The north stands for the direction of light, of purity, of the unchanging, of the solar against the southern and equatorial currents of dissolution and mixture.
The modern mind treats such ideas as mythology to be dismissed or as racial material to be politicized. Both treatments miss the point. The northern origin names a spiritual fact: that the highest forms of Traditional order appear as if descending from a center that is cool, distant, and hierarchical rather than warm, fertile, and formless. The quality is what matters.
For the young man the idea has a practical value. It orients him away from every current that seeks to dissolve clear form into the tropical, the emotional, the collective, and the nocturnal. It gives him a direction of preference. He learns to favor the hard, the clear, the limited, and the ranked over the soft, the diffuse, the unlimited, and the equalized.
This preference will set him against the dominant taste of the age. The age prefers the southern and the telluric under progressive names. The man who holds to the northern quality will therefore appear severe or remote. That appearance is the cost of remaining aligned with a different origin. The cost is real. The alternative is to lose the sense of height altogether.