Where are they and what is known about Shambhala, Hyperborea, Lukomorye and other countries that are difficult to find on the map

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

People often imagined their dream of an ideal society as a separate country that had realized all the brightest dreams of mankind. In different eras and in different cultures, there have been legends about beautiful lost countries. For the sake of searching for this bright dream, many spent years of their lives and multimillion-dollar fortunes, and we are talking about serious researchers and not so distant times (the last expeditions to search for Shambhala, for example, were organized in the XX century).

Atlantis

Undoubtedly, the most famous of the mythical countries is the mysterious Atlantis. The first author to describe it in detail was Plato. However, according to him, the location of the country was indicated very vaguely: A strong earthquake and the tragic death of the beautiful island occurred, in his opinion, nine thousand years ago (i.e. around 9500 BC). Atlantis was also mentioned by other ancient authors. Probably no country was searched so hard. There are many hypotheses about its location, and not all of them are completely refuted today. There are no less pseudo-scientific, occult interpretations of this legend.

The versions about the location of the legendary country are incredibly diverse. Most scientists, of course, tried to look for Atlantis in the Atlantic Ocean - after all, it was there that it was located in Plato's opinion. Others tried to connect this legend with a real volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini and the subsequent decline of the highly developed Minoan civilization in the Mediterranean Sea or with the Black Sea Flood - a sharp rise in the Black Sea level, which, according to some researchers, occurred about 7, 5 thousand years ago. The most unusual hypotheses suggest that Atlantis is Antarctica, Brazil, or trying to place it in Peru (on the Altiplano plateau in South America). In art, the image of this mythical country is exploited with such constancy that it has already become a slightly hackneyed cliche. Despite this, all new generations of science fiction writers "master" this island-continent in their works.

Hyperborea

This is another mythical country described by ancient Greek authors. It was believed that its inhabitants were a people close to the gods. They spent their lives in feasts and entertainment, although, being priests of Apollo, they found time for prayer. Pliny the Elder wrote about the Hyperboreans in his Natural History:

Much later, various researchers tried to find this legendary country and placed it in a wide variety of areas: in Greenland, not far from the Ural Mountains, on the Kola Peninsula, in Karelia and on Taimyr. The last expeditions to find Hyperborea were organized by the Soviet writer and philosopher Valery Demin in 1997 and 1998. Searches were carried out in the far north of our country.

Lemuria

Lemuria was the name given to a huge continent that was allegedly located and subsequently sank in the Indian Ocean. This hypothesis was put forward not by the ancient Greek author, but by the zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864. He needed a non-existent island-continent to explain the habitats of lemurs in Africa, Madagascar, India and the islands of the Indian Ocean (unlike modern ideas, several different species of monkeys were then taken for lemurs). For about a hundred years, this theory has existed as a completely scientific one. It was completely refuted only in 1960, having proved the possibility of continental drift, but during this time the hypothesis of Lemuria has already been used in several occult teachings.

At the end of the 19th century, the occultist and founder of Theosophy, Helena Blavatsky, placed the disappeared continent at the basis of her esoteric constructions, giving it the role of the cradle of humanity. This is how the myth of the Lemurians - ape-like humanoids-hermaphrodites - who multiplied by laying eggs, appeared. The decline of this race, according to the occultist, occurred at the time of their appearance of sexual dimorphism. After the publication of such a bright idea, Lemuria became a popular (almost necessary) element of many esoteric teachings. Later, they tried to find the Lemurians on the islands of the Pacific Ocean, and, oddly enough, on Mount Shasta in Northern California (the latter myth, by the way, turned out to be unusually tenacious).

Fenugreek

Ancient Tibetan and Hindu texts are the source of modern legends about this mythical country. Sambhala is a mythical village, a village, mentioned in the "Mahabharata". Here we see an example of how two great religions borrowed an idea from each other, and from them, in turn, the same Blavatsky borrowed it again. In her teachings, Shambhala became the seat of great teachers who advance the evolution of humanity. However, the history of the study of this myth is associated with the names of other famous Tibetologists, orientalists and public figures. At various times, Lev Gumilyov and Nicholas Roerich, for example, were fond of searching for it. There is a version that it was Shambhala that the Nazi expedition was looking for in Tibet. In a mythical country, they allegedly tried to find the origins of the Aryan race.

Lukomorye

The name itself means only "sea bow" - a bay, a bay, a bend of the sea coast. However, in the mythology of the Eastern Slavs, this was a very special place. Lukomorye was a reserved country on the outskirts of the world (or, according to another interpretation, on the contrary, in its center), where the world tree stands. Connecting heaven, earth and the underworld, this axis of the universe allowed the gods to descend into our world. Collectors of folklore also found other legends, for example, those where the distant northern kingdom was also called. People in this mythical country fell into hibernation for six months.

It is interesting that we can find the area with this name on old European maps. The authors constantly placed Lukomorye on the banks of the Ob Bay. But in the "Lay of Igor's Campaign" its completely different location is mentioned - as one of the Polovtsian habitats. Scientists define this area presumably near the bends of the Azov and Black Seas, in the lower reaches of the Dnieper. Today, by the way, there is a geographic object with this name - it is a spit near the urban-type settlement Bezymennoe, Novoazovsky district of Donetsk region, located on the shores of the Sea of Azov, 30 km east of Mariupol and 80 km west of Taganrog.

Probably, mythical countries are looking with such persistence, because sometimes the seas and oceans really surprise people, giving them the opportunity to look into the sunken cities, which, unlike Atlantis, really exist