"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore.
This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as "Hyberborea"--the "Land Beyond the North Wind"--which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization.
In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among "the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism" and which is currently almost unknown in the West.
"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore.
This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as "Hyberborea"--the "Land Beyond the North Wind"--which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization.
In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among "the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism" and which is currently almost unknown in the West.
Beyond the North Wind: The Fall and Rise of the Mystic North
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Beyond the North Wind: The Fall and Rise of the Mystic North
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Overview
"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore.
This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as "Hyberborea"--the "Land Beyond the North Wind"--which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization.
In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among "the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism" and which is currently almost unknown in the West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633410909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Red Wheel/Weiser |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2019 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The North is not just a compass point but a state of mind. It has a geographical location and at the same time it exists wherever its call is felt. Certain words and names evoke it: Hyperborea, "the land beyond the north wind," as the ancient Greeks called it; Thule, the northern promised land; Asgard, home of the Nordic gods. The writer C. S. Lewis was one of those who felt the call. In his autobiography, he describes how, as a boy, he was reading a translation of a Swedish elegiac poem called Tegner's Drapa and came across the lines:
I heard a voice that cried Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead —
"I knew nothing about Balder," he writes, "but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then ... found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it."
Lewis's fascination with the North was shared by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow member of the Inklings circle in Oxford in the 1930s and '40s — the name is partly a play on the title of the Old Norse Ynglinga Saga. Tolkien brilliantly created his own version of the Nordic epic in his trilogy The Lord of the Rings, with its numerous borrowings from Old Norse literature and mythology. And, significantly, Tolkien locates his evil empire in the south.
The subsequent phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings is one symptom of a remarkable upsurge of enthusiasm for things northern, which has become a feature of the present age, although its roots go back several centuries. It is difficult to say precisely when this modern revival began, but certainly it was not in evidence when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. Throughout my education, if we learned anything about mythology it was the classical gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome who were dominant. I, along with most of my school contemporaries, could easily have said who Zeus and Apollo and Aphrodite were, but we would have been hard pressed to say anything about, say, Tyr, Odin, Thor, or Freya (despite the fact that we invoked their names every time we said the words Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday), let alone Balder.
If we thought about the Nordic deities at all, we considered them as belonging to a primitive and barbaric world. Similarly, we knew quite a lot about the Romans, and we could quote, say, Julius Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered), but about the Druids or the Vikings we had only the vaguest notions, and they were largely distorted. Essentially, we were taught that European civilization spread from south to north and that northern Europe was first civilized by the Romans and further civilized by the Christianization process in the early Middle Ages. So the whole early culture of northern Europe tended to be marginalized. Culturally and spiritually, the northern part of the compass was semi-invisible.
Now all that has changed dramatically. The North is back with a vengeance. It is everywhere you look — in culture, high and low, in academia, in religion, and in politics. Take its influence in the cinema, where in recent years the Beowulf story has been the subject of two films and a British television series. Two other movies have appeared about the god Thor, based on how he is depicted in Marvel Comics, and there are many further examples in film. The North is also writ large in the domain of global popular music, as for example in the case of the Icelandic group Sigur Rós, which has attracted a worldwide following with its subtle, hypnotic tones and falsetto singing. Innumerable other bands have picked up the Nordic theme in recent years, from the German group Faun, with its rather gentle, folk-music style, to heavy metal groups like Forefather (UK), Helrunar (Germany), Pagan Blood (France), and Tyr (Faroe Islands).
The digital realm offers an enormous sphere for Nordic themes. There are numerous video games with names like God of Thunder, Heimdall, Rune, and Valhalla, in which you can take on the role of Thor or some other Nordic god or hero in a great cosmic struggle involving perilous journeys and fights with all manner of malevolent beings. And then there is the Internet, which reveals a whole other dimension to the Nordic revival, namely the growing number of people who follow the Nordic way as a belief system — a phenomenon that is part of a wider and steadily growing Pagan movement. One can see this in the number of websites belonging to the various Pagan groups that identify themselves as Heathen, Odinist, or Asatru (a term meaning "faithfulness to the Aesir," one of the two main groups of Nordic deities). In a number of countries, Nordic Paganism is now officially recognized as a religion — most notably in Iceland which led the way in the 1970s with the official establishment of Ásatrú as a religious community. Neo-Paganism also encompasses a revival of the Celtic gods and goddesses as well as a neo-Druid movement, a neo-witchcraft movement, and similar phenomena. I shall touch on these insofar as they relate to the general theme of the North.
We have also seen an increase in the number of books published about the North. An interesting case in point is the work of the Italian researcher Felice Vinci, author of a book called The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales, in which he argues that the setting of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was not the eastern Mediterranean but the Baltic, the North Sea, and the North Atlantic. The increasing fascination exerted by northern mythology and the mystique of the North is further attested by works such as Joscelyn Godwin's Arktos, Heather O'Donoghue's From Asgard to Valhalla, Kevin Crossly-Holland's The Norse Myths, and Andrew Wawn's learned and witty study The Vikings and the Victorians, as well as by numerous novels on Nordic themes. Books on the runes and runic divination are also abundant.
The northern mystique is particularly strong in Russia, and this opens up a vast and intriguing territory, which is explored in detail in chapters 12 and 13. It is a territory that has its alarming aspects, as it can overlap with xenophobia and political extremism. "Here be dragons" — or in Russia's case "here be bears." The Russian bear can be a fierce animal, and we would do well to understand what stirs him.
The interesting questions that now arise are: Why is all this happening? How can we account for this phenomenon of the Nordic revival? Let us return to C. S. Lewis's boyhood vision after reading the lines:
Balder the beautiful Is dead, is dead —
What is striking here is how Lewis notes that he "knew nothing about Balder" and yet, merely by hearing the word, he was instantly lifted into "huge regions of northern sky" and had a sense of something "cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote." If this account is accurate, it means that a word can convey something powerful to a person, even if he or she is completely unaware of its meaning or connotations. That is to say the word acts as a link to some source of energy outside the hearer.
Here we enter a subject area where many historians fear to tread, but which has long fascinated me, namely the way in which historical events can be driven by intangible things like words, myths, symbols, thought forms, and what the psychologist Carl Gustav Jung called archetypes. Jung wrote a famous essay on Wotan/Odin, which has often been held against him as an apology for National Socialism, but the central argument of the essay is worth considering: He posits that a deity is like a riverbed, dug over many centuries in the collective mind of a people. When the river dries up, the bed remains, and when the water begins to flow again, the river returns to its old course. Similarly, Jung argues, a god can remain dormant and inactive for a period, like the dried-up riverbed, until some spring is reopened and the god comes to life again.
Jung's argument, however, does not explain what precisely links the individual mind to the collective archetype. Here, I believe, it may be useful to introduce the concept of the egregore. Professor Joscelyn Godwin, in his book The Golden Thread, writes as follows about this notion:
There is an occult concept of the "egregore," a term derived from the Greek word for "watcher." It is used for an immaterial entity that "watches" or presides over some earthly affair or collectivity. The important point is that an egregore is augmented by human belief, ritual and especially by sacrifice. If it is sufficiently nourished by such energies, the egregore can take on a life of its own and appear to be an independent, personal divinity, with a limited power on behalf of its devotees and an unlimited appetite for further devotion.
Thus any collectivity — from a football crowd to a religious or political movement — possesses an egregore which is larger and more powerful than the sum of the individuals in the collectivity. This would be no surprise to anyone who has studied mass psychology or the morphic resonance theory of Rupert Sheldrake, which says that each member of a species "inherits a collective memory from past members of the species, and also contributes to the collective memory, affecting other members of the species in the future" — e.g., monkeys on one side of the world figure out how to crack open a coconut, and others on the other side of the world follow suit.
I suggest that there is a northern egregore which has been built up over the centuries. At certain times it has been eclipsed or has gone out of favor, as in the aftermath of National Socialism, but it has now returned in full force and is manifesting itself in the ways that I have outlined. The question then arises whether the egregore is based on actual historical experience. Was there a real Hyperborean civilization, the memory of which has been transmitted down over the centuries? I have not yet found conclusive evidence for it, but what I have found are many mysterious things indicating that something like Hyperborea might have existed, that is to say a prehistoric civilization that left its traces on the world and then vanished — a missing link in the early history of humankind.
Something similar is the theme of Graham Hancock's thought-provoking book Fingerprints of the Gods. Hancock produces a range of evidence for such a civilization, which foresaw a coming cataclysm and created great monuments in order to enshrine its knowledge for the survivors. Hancock places this civilization on a landmass which, he says, now lies under the Antarctic ice — like a kind of southern Atlantis — whereas I focus on the opposite pole of the earth. Nevertheless, I found much in Hancock's book that might support the Hyperborean thesis. I also appreciate the way he questions the widespread dogma that the whole history of humankind is one of continuous progress from the world of the cavemen to that of space travel and the Internet, a dogma which can blind us to the possible existence of earlier civilizations that were actually superior to those that followed.
Whether such a civilization existed in the far North is still an open question, but there is no denying that the idea of it has long exerted a powerful mystique. In this book I shall explore that mystique, and inevitably I shall be drawn into some speculation about what might or might not lie behind it.
CHAPTER 2THE SEARCH FOR THE LAND BEYOND THE NORTH WIND
The mystique of the North is encapsulated in a name: Thule, a word that conjures up an icy, fog-wreathed northern land, mysterious, penumbral, lying far away across perilous seas. Our conception of Thule has been handed down from a remarkable Greek mariner called Pytheas, who sailed in the early fourth century BCE from the Greek colony of Massalia, present-day Marseilles. Using highly advanced measuring techniques to calculate factors such as latitude and distance, he and his crew sailed out of the Mediterranean, then went via Britain into the North Atlantic, and eventually reached a land of ice and fog he called Thule, which may have been Iceland. The Romans later called it Ultima Thule. Sadly, Pytheas's original account of the voyage was lost, but it was transmitted at second or third hand by later chroniclers such as Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, and Pliny the Elder.
Over time the notion of Thule merged with an older Greek motif, namely that of Hyperborea, meaning the land beyond Boreas, the north wind. One of those who wrote about it was the Greek poet Pindar (c. 518-442 BCE), who described the Hyperboreans as having an ideal way of life:
Neither by ship nor on foot could you find the marvelous road to the meeting-place of the Hyperboreans ... In the festivities of those people and in their praises Apollo rejoices most ... The Muse is not absent from their customs; all around swirl the dances of girls, the lyre's loud chords and the cries of flutes. They wreathe their hair with golden laurel branches and revel joyfully. No sickness or ruinous old age is mixed into that sacred race; without toil or battles they live without fear of strict Nemesis.
The Hyperborean theme also captured the imagination of the Romans. Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (of about 77 CE) writes as follows:
Then come the Ripaean mountains and the region called Ptephorus ... it is a part of the world that lies under the condemnation of nature and is plunged in dense darkness, and occupied only by the work of frost and the chilly lurking-places of the north wind. Behind these mountains and beyond the north wind there dwells (if we can believe it) a happy race of people called the Hyperboreans, who live to extreme old age and are famous for legendary marvels. Here are believed to be the hinges on which the firmament turns and the extreme limits of the revolutions of the stars, with six months daylight and a single day of the sun in retirement, not as the ignorant have said, from the spring equinox till autumn: for these people the sun rises once in the year, at midsummer, and sets once, at midwinter. It is a genial region, with a delightful climate and exempt from every harmful blast. The homes of the natives are the woods and the groves; they worship the gods severally and in congregations; all discord and all sorrow is unknown. Death comes to them only when, owing to satiety of life, after holding a banquet and anointing their old age with luxury, they leap from a certain rock into the sea: this mode of burial is the most blissful.
Over subsequent centuries the theme of Hyperborea could be intermittently heard, like a faint leitmotif within the culture of the west. Among the numerous writers who referred to it were the Greek theologian Clement of Alexandria (second century), the philosopher Porphyry (fourth century), the monk and scientist Roger Bacon (thirteenth century), and the alchemist and physician Paracelsus (sixteenth century). During the great age of exploration in the sixteenth century the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator (1512–1594) produced a map of the north polar region (Fig. 1), based on a description which he said he had copied from an earlier author he does not name. In Mercator's depiction, the polar region is a vast land divided by four rivers which flow inward from the surrounding ocean and disappear into an enormous whirlpool. In the midst of the whirlpool, exactly at the Pole, is an island of magnetic rock. This is an interesting reversal of the biblical description of Eden, where four rivers flow outward from the center. Today Mercator's map of the North Pole remains iconic for aficionados of the Hyperborean theory.
Parallel to the story of Hyperborea/Thule and sometimes overlapping with it is the legend of Atlantis, the lost continent described by Plato in two of his works, Timaeus and Critias. In the former, he writes of Atlantis:
There was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together ... Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent ... But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune ... the island of Atlantis ... disappeared in the depths of the sea.
In Critias there is a much more detailed account of Atlantis. We are told that it was "greater in extent than Libya and Asia," a fertile land with abundant wildlife including elephants, named after Atlas, son of Poseidon (hence the names Atlantis and Atlantic), and had a large empire. The speaker, Critias, gives a description of its inhabitants, their way of life, and their system of government.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Foreword Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson ix
Preface and Acknowledgments xvii
1 Introduction 1
2 The Search for the Land beyond the North Wind 9
3 Midnight Land, Northern Light 21
4 Children of the Polestar: Evidence for Migration from the North 39
5 The Nordic World and Its Legacy 51
6 The Runes 69
7 The Vikings: Samurai of the West 85
8 Northern Mysteries Resurrected 95
9 Iceland: The Northern Sanctum 109
10 Old Gods, New Age 123
11 The East Turns Northward: Russia and the Northern Spirit 145
12 A Russian Hyperborea? 163
13 The North in the Age of Mass Communication 177
14 Conclusion 193
Appendix: Who's Who in Northern Mythology 201
Bibliography 225
Illustration Credits 229
Index 230