Neither by ship nor on foot could you find the marvellous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans.
Pindar, Pythian Odes It seems to me that there has been another spiritual stream in the West, parallel to Christianity, that I call the “Polar Tradition.”
Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth
Legends of lost continents peopled by advanced races of beings had long been a theme of the European imagination when J. R. R. Tolkien cre-ated his intricate fantasy world of Middle-earth. The legend of Atlantis has remained embedded in the European mind and even today is the subject of numerous speculations. The legend has been expanded with further lost continents such as Lemuria and Mu being added to this mythical geography. In creating these realms modern writers have
For Review Only
followed an extremely ancient tradition. Its roots can be traced far back into the prehistoric period of the Indo-Europeans. Legends of a home-land in the far north are preserved in the most ancient scriptures of both India and Iran.
THE ANCIENT MYTH OF HYPERBOREA
The oldest sacred texts of the Iranian tradition are known collectively as the Avesta and have many parallels to the ancient Vedas of the Indian tradition. This clearly shows that much of the mythology con-tained in these two sets of scriptures belongs to a common tradition that existed before the Indians and the Iranians split into two sepa-rate cultural streams in the second millennium BCE. In the Iranian Avesta we are told of a place known as the Airyanem Vaejah—the original homeland of the Aryan Iranians. Much ink has been spilled trying to find a geographical location for this mythologized place with little agreement among the scholars. Henry Corbin, an oriental-ist and specialoriental-ist in the spiritual traditions of Iran, has put forward his reasons for this confusion: “Those who have attempted to deter-mine its position on geographic maps have run into great difficulties;
no convincing solution has been obtained in this way, for the ftrst and good reason that the problem of locating it lies in the realm of vision-ary geography.”1 Corbin goes further, describing it as a primordial and archetypal image. In other words, this lost northern homeland is part of the psychic map of the Indo-European peoples, existing within rather than without—it is to be found not on the map of the Earth but the map of the soul.
The ancient Iranian myths tell of Yima, the greatest of mortals, who was commanded by the gods to create an enclosure within which the most spiritual beings would take refuge from a lethal winter to be released by demonic forces. When this catastrophe had finally passed, those humans within the enclosure could reenter the world outside and people it anew. This northern refuge of the Iranians is described as a fortified citadel within which houses and storerooms allow its
For Review Only
occupants to survive through these terrible times. Corbin tells us that it has “Luminiscent windows which themselves secrete an inner light within, for it is illuminated by both uncreated and created lights. Its inhabitants see the stars, moon, and sun rise and set only once a year, and that is why a year seems to them only a day.”2 As has been men-tioned, Corbin sees the citadel as a spiritual rather than an earthly location, but this passage does seem to preserve some folk memory or knowledge of the earthly realm of the far north, for at the poles there is only one day and one night per year—six months of darkness and six months of light. This is fascinating but here is not the place to pur-sue this line of enquiry; our present interest is to outline the mythical dimensions of this polar paradise.
Some features of this Iranian myth echo those of northern European mythology. Asgard, the home of Odin and the other mem-bers of the Aesir family of gods, is a fortified enclosure. The unusual mythical account of a lethal winter preserved by the Iranians can also be found in Norse myths. The Fimbulwinter (from the Old Norse fimbulvetr meaning “great or terrible winter”) is said to last for three years with no break in its harsh monotony. Throughout this time there are constant snowstorms and frost. It is said to herald the com-ing Ragnarok and in some versions of the myth even to be identical to it.
Corbin sees this lost northern homeland of the Iranians as an archetypal symbol:
The threshold of a supernatural beyond: there are uncreated lights;
a world that secretes its own light . . . a shadowless country peopled with beings of light who have reached spiritual heights inaccessible to earthly beings. They are truly beings of the beyond; where the shadow which holds the light captive ends, there the beyond begins, and the very same mystery is enciphered in the symbol of the North.
In the same way the Hyperboreans symbolize men whose soul has reached such completeness and harmony that it is devoid of negativ-ity and shadow.3
For Review Only
There are parallels with such legends in the Indian tradition. Hindu myth speaks of the people of the northern sun, the Uttara-kurus, who inhabit a polar paradise and whose perfection is symbolized by their being formed as twins joined together.
One of the most prominent figures in the quest for Indian indepen-dence from the British Empire was Bal Gangadhar Tilak (1856–1920).
In 1897 he was imprisoned as a result of his anti-British activities. While incarcerated he was allowed to spend his time writing on a less seditious subject, thanks to the intervention of the orientalist Max Müller. The result of his literary labor was The Arctic Home in the Vedas, completed in 1897 and published in 1903, in which he proposed that the original homeland of the Aryans was not somewhere in central Asia, as received wisdom had it, but in the far north. He claimed that many otherwise inexplicable passages in ancient Hindu scriptures became clear once this polar homeland was accepted. For example, the mythical imagery of the Vedas speaks of “Thirty Dawn-Sisters circling like a wheel” and the
“Dawn of Many Days”—which precedes the rising of the sun—both of which reflect conditions at the poles.4
Greek literature abounds with references to Hyperboreans.
Sometimes these passages are couched purely in mythical terms while others attempt to locate them in a more mundane geography. Hecataeus wrote that “the Land of the Hyperboreans lies on the Atlantic sea, oppo-site the land of the Celts.” Most sources are more vague but all agree that Hyperborea is in the far northern zone of the world, understood to be either part of continental Europe or beyond it farther toward the North Pole. Others tried to locate them in relation to other semimythi-cal races. Some sources talk of a people semimythi-called the Arimphians who were said to dwell to the south of the Riphean Mountains. These mountains were envisaged as a vast stone girdle encircling the Earth. To the north of this mountainous barrier was the homeland of the Hyperboreans.
This mention of a circular stone barrier echoes the citadel of the Iranian homeland.
The Greek historian Herodotus of the sixth century BCE noted that his writings on the Hyperboreans were not based on eye-witness
For Review Only
accounts of this northern civilization since neither he nor anyone he knew (or had even heard of) had actually been to Hyperborea (Histories, 4.16). The name Hyperborea means “beyond the north wind.” It is described as a fertile country with a temperate climate. The Hyperboreans are said to live in a state of perpetual bliss in their uto-pian country, to worship Apollo (the Greek name for the sun god) and to have built circular temples. Although it is possible to draw paral-lels between the Bronze Age peoples of northern Europe—which the Greeks had a vague awareness of—and the Hyperboreans, it is clear that most of their accounts contain more mythic imagery than fact. The sun-worshipping Hyperboreans also present us with a close parallel to the spiritually enlightened beings of the Iranian tradition.
The archetypal symbol of the far north has many layers of mean-ing. Fundamental to the symbolism is the underlying idea of a vertical ascent. The Hyperboreans, the perfect beings who dwell at the pole, represent those who have attained enlightenment. The spiritual jour-ney expressed in these mythical traditions is one of traveling up to the north, the way to enlightenment. In many archaic cosmologies the heav-ens are symbolized as being held up by a pole or a pillar and we find such beliefs in the Norse tradition. The Old Norse term áss, meaning god—hence the Aesir family of gods—also means pole.
Among the pagan Saxons the huge pole or pillar of the Irminsul was central to their religion. It symbolized the mystical center of the world and its felling by the Christian Charlemagne was seen by them as an act of great sacrilege. As a symbol the Irminsul seems to be closely connected to Yggdrasill, the world tree of Norse myth, and probably to the veneration of poles and tall wooden idols, which can be traced back at least to the Bronze Age. All these symbols show the importance of the vertical axis in Northern paganism; the Norse gods were invoked facing north. The Hyperborean myth was still current at the time of the Vikings. Even as late as the eleventh century the historian Adam of Bremen, who wrote about the pagan rites he witnessed in Sweden, repeated the myth that the most northerly people in the world were the Hyperboreans.
For Review Only
So in these various ancient Indo-European mythologies a northern homeland and paradise was a common feature; we can say without exag-geration, that this polar myth can be traced back to the peoples of pre-historic Europe and parts of Asia. In northern Europe it was integral to Germanic myths and thus part of the inner geography of the Northern imagination. Hyperborea is indeed the lost continent of the European imagination. It was the union of this concept of the lost continent of Hyperborea along with an in-depth study of the culturally dormant runes that marked the origin of a conscious pagan revival in Europe.
THE RUNE CROSS
The origins of the pagan revival and the resurgence of the ancient sym-bolism of the runes can be traced to Johannes Bureus (1568–1652), the greatest Swedish scholar of his day (see plate 6). His studies ranged far and wide but his central focus was on the esoteric. Alongside his mystical interests Bureus was also a fervent antiquarian with a desire to understand the ancient Swedish past. He was the first to make a sys-tematic study of rune stones and the other monuments that adorn the Swedish countryside. The runic revival was not just an esoteric matter for the learned Bureus and his circle; it was also a much larger social project. The Reformation was a cultural reaction to the dominance of the Roman Catholic Church and in Sweden some Protestants planned to replace the Latin alphabet with runes. In 1611 Bureus published his runic ABC, designed for use in schools across Sweden.5 He also revolu-tionized printing in Sweden by designing runic typefaces. He became director general of the national archives and director of the royal library and exerted a powerful intellectual and spiritual influence over his monarch Queen Christina (1626–1689), who was herself a practitioner of alchemy and an avid collector of magical manuscripts.
During his lifetime the Rosicrucian movement, a mystical and alchemical fraternity, was sweeping across Europe, radically transform-ing the face of Western esotericism. Bureus was also a profound stu-dent of the Kabbalah. The Kabbalah involved the mystical study of
For Review Only
the Hebrew letters in conjunction with their symbolic and numerical significance in order to decipher the hidden meanings of the Bible and other religious and mystical texts. Bureus thought that the runes, like the Hebrew alphabet, contained esoteric knowledge. As the Kabbalah revealed the way to read the inner teachings of the Bible, so Bureus hoped that he could decipher the spiritual meanings contained within the runes.
The influence of both the Kabbalah and the Rosicrucians (also known as the Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross) can also be seen in the symbol that Bureus created at the center of his magical and esoteric system—the Rune Cross.6 The cross is made up of fifteen runes (see figure 6). These are the first fifteen runes of the Younger Futhark, the runic alphabet used in Sweden and other parts of Scandinavia. The two arms of the Rune Cross each consist of four runes in a horizon-tal line—the right arm spelling out t-r-o-n (faith) and the left arm
Figure 6. Bureus’s Rune Cross
For Review Only
a-f-u-l ( honorable). Faith and honor are the essential requirements on the spiritual journey of ascent up the vertical axis of the cross. The eight runes of the arms of the cross are complemented by seven runes on the vertical axis. These symbolize seven symbolic steps on the spiritual path and should be viewed both as an ascending and a descending sequence.
The aim of the initiate is to travel from the lowest rune, Byrghal/
Berkano (b), to the highest, Thors (th), which represents the pagan god Thor. At the center of the cross where the horizontal axis (called the nine-rune width) and the vertical axis (the seven-rune height) intersect is the rune Haghal, which represents the god Odin. Odin is seen as the connector—linking upper and lower, left and right.
The Rune Cross is also to be viewed as a symbol of the body of Odin. The nine-rune width represents his outstretched arms, while the seven-rune height represents his upright body. The lowest rune Byrghal symbolizes his feet and the highest, Thors, his head. The five runes in between are named the five-rune ladder and represent the spiritual rungs by which man (Byrghal) is linked to God (Thors). The five steps are linked together to make another symbol—the arrow that Bureus connects to Abaris, the Hyperborean sage of Greek myth. This arrow is also described as a gandr (a wand or magical staff) inscribed with runes.
By modifying the rosy cross symbol of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood into the Rune Cross it is clear that Bureus was attempting to synthesize the pagan and Christian traditions. As Thomas Karlsson put it, “Bureus equates Odin on Yggdrasill [the world tree of Norse myth] with Jesus on the cross.”7
Bureus also found much inspiration in the work of the French mystic Guillaume Postel (ca. l510–81). Postel’s mythological ideas on the spread of the Hyperborean peoples were entwined with his belief that alongside the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament there was another line of prophecy. This second line was that of the Sibylline Oracles. The Sibylline Oracles is the name given to various collec-tions of prophecies widely read in antiquity. The sibyls were seeresses whose visions were said to be divinely inspired. Among them was one named Alruna, the northern sibyl, said to have been born in 432 BCE.
For Review Only
To rediscover the tradition of Alruna, Bureus investigated the ancient monuments of his country, finding connections such as evidence of solar worship and the mystical meanings of the runes, which he sought to reconcile with biblical prophecy and the Kabbalistic traditions that derived from it.
He believed that the Swedish people had, in ancient times, descended from their northern homeland and colonized Europe, bring-ing their runic mysticism and writbring-ing with them. He also believed that his rediscovery of the spiritual tradition of the runes was a partial ful-filment of Rosicrucian prophecies for the transformation of European civilization. What Bureus did was to combine the myth of Hyperborea with the inner meaning of the runes and revive the Northern pagan tradition in a prophetic vision of the spiritual and cultural renewal of Europe. He never claimed to be a pagan but his revival of the Northern tradition, symbolized by the Rune Cross, was the beginning of the pagan resurrection.