Hyperborea

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North of Thrace, north of Scythia, north of the last cultivated field a Greek could imagine, the Riphean Mountains rose as a wall against the world. From a cave in those peaks the north wind, Boreas, came down to freeze the harvests and harry the seafarers. The name of the blessed land says only where it stood in relation to that wind: Hyperborea, from hyper, beyond, and Boreas — the country beyond the north wind. The Greeks placed it not in the cold but past the cold, on the far side of the gale, in a pocket of sunlit air the wind could not reach. There a people lived without illness, without the wasting of old age, without toil and without war. Their occupation was worship. Crowned in golden laurel, they sang and danced in unbroken festival for Apollo, the god whose own light their land seemed to share.

The picture is precise about one thing and vague about everything else, and that combination is the source of its long power. Hyperborea has an exact bearing — due north, past the mountains, behind the wind — and no fixed place. It is an elsewhere defined entirely by negation: beyond the wind, free of sickness, free of age, free of labor, free of strife. Every later age that wanted a perfect origin found the coordinates conveniently empty and the meaning conveniently full.

The classical picture

The Hyperboreans enter Greek literature already old. Herodotus reports that they were named in a poem ascribed to Hesiod and in the lost epic Epigoni; the Homeric tradition knew them; and the seventh-century traveler-poet Aristeas of Proconnesus, in his lost Arimaspea, claimed to have journeyed toward their country and brought back word of the peoples of the far north. By the fifth century the land is a settled feature of the Greek mental map of the edges of the earth, where the ordinary rules of mortality thin out.

Pindar gives the fullest early portrait. In Pythian 10 the Hyperboreans feast amid the music of lyres and pipes, their hair bound with laurel; the Muse is never absent from them, and “neither sickness nor wasting old age” touches that sacred race, which lives apart from toil and battle. In Olympian 3 — composed in 476 BCE for Theron of Acragas — Pindar tells how Heracles brought the wild olive itself out of Hyperborea. Pursuing the golden-horned doe of Artemis, the hero had come to the land of the Hyperboreans — the servants of Apollo, in Pindar’s phrase — beyond the cold breath of Boreas, by the shaded springs of the Ister, the Danube. He marveled at the olive trees growing there and, returning, persuaded the people with words to give him a shoot, which he carried back to plant at Olympia to shade the games he had founded. The detail matters: the crown of the greatest Greek athletic festival is, in Pindar’s telling, a transplant from the deathless north — Olympia’s holiness imported from a holier place.

Their devotion ran in one direction. The Hyperboreans were Apollo’s people before they were anything else, and the god was understood to keep their company. A persistent strand of the myth has Apollo wintering among them — withdrawing each year from Delphi to ride out the dark months in his northern paradise, drawn (in some versions) by a chariot of swans, and returning to Greece with the spring. Two great Apolline sanctuaries traced their founding gifts to that land. At Delos, the god’s birthplace, the islanders preserved a memory of offerings sent down from the Hyperboreans across the whole length of the known world.

Herodotus, who reports this in Book 4 of the Histories with characteristic care and characteristic doubt, tells it twice over. In the first sending, two Hyperborean maidens, Hyperoche and Laodice, traveled south bearing sacred offerings, escorted by five men whom the Delians honored under the name Perpherees. When the maidens did not return, the Hyperboreans changed their method: they bound their offerings in wheaten straw and passed them hand to hand across the nations — to the Scythians first, then westward across Europe to the head of the Adriatic, then south, the people of Dodona receiving them first among the Greeks, until at last they reached Delos. Herodotus, ever the inquirer, notes that he himself has seen Thracian and Paeonian women carry wheaten straw in their rites to Artemis, and offers the parallel as the kind of thing one can actually verify — while declining to vouch for the Hyperboreans as such. The historian keeps the offering and brackets the offerers.

A fourth-century treatise pushed the geography toward something almost concrete. Hecataeus of Abdera wrote a whole work on the Hyperboreans, now lost but preserved in summary by Diodorus Siculus. He placed their island in the ocean “in the regions beyond the land of the Celts,” no smaller than Sicily, fertile and twice-harvesting, its people serving Apollo in a great circular precinct — a temple “spherical in shape,” loud with the worship of the god, who was said to visit them every nineteen years (the span over which the lunar and solar calendars realign). Later readers, including some modern ones, would seize on the round temple and the Celtic bearing to identify Hyperborea with Britain, even with Stonehenge; the identification is a reception, not a datum, but it shows how readily the legend’s open coordinates invited a map-pin.

Two human figures cross the boundary the other way. Abaris the Hyperborean, a priest of Apollo, was remembered as wandering through Greece carrying — or, in the more wondrous versions, riding — a golden arrow of the god, healing and prophesying and taking no food; later tradition made him a contemporary and counterpart of Pythagoras. He is the legend’s emissary, the deathless land’s representative among the dying. With Aristeas traveling north and Abaris traveling south, the myth supplied its own traffic between the worlds.

What the classical Hyperborea is not is as important as what it is. It is not a lost continent and not a vanished civilization mourned for its fall. Nothing sinks; no judgment overtakes it. Unlike Plato’s drowned island — the Atlantis of the Timaeus and Critias, which exists precisely to be destroyed as a lesson — Hyperborea is a place of permanence, an Apollonian elsewhere that simply endures at the back of the wind. Plato himself does not treat it; the two great Greek imaginary geographies, the cautionary west and the blessed north, belong to different authors and different purposes. Where Atlantis is a fall, Hyperborea is an exemption.

The afterlife: from the blessed north to the cradle of the races

For most of two millennia Hyperborea remained a literary memory — a flourish in the geographers, a name for an idealized remoteness. Its second life, the consequential one, began when nineteenth-century esotericism gave the empty northern coordinates a population and a chronology.

The decisive move was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky’s. In the second volume of The Secret Doctrine (1888), subtitled Anthropogenesis, Helena Blavatsky set out the cosmology that Theosophy carried into the twentieth century: humanity unfolds through seven “Root Races,” each with its own continent and its own stage of embodiment. The First Race, the Polarian, formed on an “Imperishable Sacred Land” crowning the North Pole. The Second she named outright after the Greek myth — the Hyperborean Root Race, on a Second Continent she likewise called Hyperborean, “the land which stretched out its promontories southward and westward from the North Pole,” comprising what is now northern Asia. Neither of these first two races, in her account, had yet acquired solid physical bodies. The Third Race was the Lemurian and the Fourth the Atlantean; the continents proper to those races belong to the entries on Lemuria and Atlantis, where Theosophy’s full root-race genealogy and its long pseudo-archaeological tail are set out. What matters here is the borrowing: a Greek name for a sunlit Apolline paradise was relocated to the literal pole and made the address of a prehuman race. The wind was gone; the geography had become absolute.

Through the Theosophical Society and its writers the scheme spread, and the northern term traveled with it. It also met, in the same decades, a current of scholarship reaching independently toward a polar origin. In The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903) the Indian scholar and nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak argued from Vedic and Avestan astronomy that the ancestors of the Vedic peoples had once lived near the North Pole in a pre-glacial age, departing southward only when the ice advanced. Tilak’s method was philological and astronomical rather than occult, and his conclusion was framed as history; but it converged with the esoteric current on a single image — a far-northern cradle of an ancestral people — and the two streams were thereafter easily, and consequentially, confused.

From this confluence grew a body of “polar” symbolism in twentieth-century Traditionalism. René Guénon, the chief architect of that movement, located the source of his postulated primordial Tradition at a symbolic spiritual center he identified with the pole; in Le Roi du Monde (1927) and his essays on sacred symbolism he treated the Hyperborean cycle as the first phase of humanity’s spiritual history, succeeded by an Atlantean cycle, and used the names Tula and Thule for the supreme northern center — the land, in the old phrase he adopted, at the back of the north wind. Julius Evola, who took Guénon as his master while bending the doctrine toward action and a politics of hierarchy, made Hyperborea the symbolic origin of the Primordial Tradition itself: a first and highest cycle he characterized in solar and “Nordic” terms, whose collapse, in his telling, closed the first age of the world and opened the Atlantean. In these systems the blessed land of Apollo’s singers had become the postulated homeland of a primordial humanity, and the Greek myth’s open north was filled with a doctrine of origins and decline.

That filling had a darker register, which the record requires stated plainly and attributed exactly. The image of a northern, polar cradle of an “Aryan” race was taken up in the German-Austrian occult-nationalist current known as Ariosophy — in the writings of Guido von List and Lanz von Liebenfels — and circulated in the milieu of the Munich Thule Society, which drew its name (and a quantum of its mystique) from the ancient Ultima Thule. The fuller history of that society and of the Germanic occult northern homeland belongs to the entry on Thule, where the political reception is treated in detail; here it is enough to record that the Hyperborean and polar-Aryan motifs were folded into a racialized prehistory, that the Ahnenerbe research apparatus of the Nazi state pursued related pseudo-archaeology, and that none of this carries any scholarly standing. These are claims advanced by named ideologues, not findings; they are reported as reception history and endorsed by nothing in this account.

A clarification of kinds belongs here, because the legends are often run together. Hyperborea, Atlantis, and Lemuria are northern and sunken lands of the surface world and its imagined deep past. The hidden kingdoms of the esoteric tradition — Agartha, the subterranean realm of the nineteenth-century occult imagination, and Shambhala, the hidden land of the living Tibetan Buddhist Kalachakra tradition — are inner-earth or concealed kingdoms, not northern paradises, and they belong to a different family of legend even where later writers tried to thread them all onto one occult chronology. Hyperborea’s siblings, properly speaking, are the lost lands; its merely cross-referenced cousins are the hidden ones.

Sources and scholarship

The primary witnesses are few and entirely classical. The foundational accounts are Herodotus, Histories 4.32–36 (on the Delian offerings and the maidens), available in the public-domain Godley translation in the Loeb edition; Pindar, Olympian 3 (Heracles and the olive) and Pythian 10 (the deathless festival), the former in Ernest Myers’s public-domain verse translation; and the fragment of Hecataeus of Abdera’s lost treatise preserved in Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 2.47, on the circular temple and the nineteen-year visitation, hosted in the Thayer Lacus Curtius text. Pausanias, Pliny the Elder, and Strabo add later notices; Plato, by contrast, supplies the contrast case — the drowned western island of the Critias, hosted in the site’s Library, against which the undrowned northern land defines itself.

For the modern afterlife, the load-bearing document is Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888), vol. 2, Anthropogenesis, where the Second Root Race and Second Continent are named “Hyperborean”; the full text is in the Library, and the root-race nomenclature is summarized at the Theosophy Wiki entry on the Second Root-Race. The scholarly treatment of the polar-homeland idea and its political uptake runs through the literature on Ariosophy and Nazi occultism — Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke’s The Occult Roots of Nazism (1985) is the standard critical study — and through the literature on Traditionalism, where Mark Sedgwick’s Against the Modern World (Oxford, 2004) traces Guénon’s and Evola’s symbolism as a twentieth-century construction rather than an inherited wisdom. The reception material throughout is presented as the work of named figures, never as established prehistory.

A luminous elsewhere

The Greek Hyperborea asks for nothing. It does not sink, it does not fall, it issues no warning and demands no descent; it sends an offering wrapped in straw the length of Europe and asks only that the rite reach Delos. Its people do one thing forever — they crown themselves with laurel and sing for the god of light — and the whole of their meaning is in that single, uneventful permanence. The land was always a figure for what lies past the limit: past the wind, past sickness, past age, past the reach of war. Its exact bearing and its empty interior were the gift the Greeks left open.

The afterlife took the bearing and refused the emptiness. Where the classical land was an Apollonian beyond — a country defined by what it stood clear of — the esoteric and Traditionalist systems pinned it to the literal pole and packed it with a prehistory of races, cycles, and decline. But the distance between those two Hyperboreas is exactly the measure of what the later systems could not use. The Greek land had no history because it needed none: no founding, no fall, no chronology to decode, only the laurel and the song repeated without end. Its whole content was a permanence that asked nothing and explained nothing — a sunlit exemption held open at the back of the north wind. To fill that blank with cycles and origins was to mislay the one thing the place had been: a horizon kept deliberately empty, so that what lay past the limit could stay past it.

→ In the library: Plato — Critias (Jowett, 1892) · Blavatsky — The Secret Doctrine, Book 2: Anthropogenesis (1888)

→ Related: Apollo · Delphi · Herodotus · Plato · Theosophy · Helena Blavatsky · Theosophical Society · Rene Guenon · Julius Evola · Thule · Atlantis · Lemuria · Agartha · Shambhala · Esotericism