Palingenesis and the Myth of the North
“Greenland is a barren place,
’Tis a place that’s seldom green,
There’s ice and snow and the whale fish he blows,
And daylight seldom seen.“
When I was very young, I downloaded Google Earth on the family computer. I spent endless hours exploring the world and looking at the photographs people would upload there. More than any other place, I looked at Greenland. Contemplating those northern wastes, something stirred within me, which I did not understand then. Now, decades later, I have begun to appreciate what Greenland represents for me, and what it could represent for others.
The photographs showed an empty land, with only scattered villages of colorful buildings. Vast plains of ice, with hills and valleys, which in summer near the coast turned to green with grass and wildflowers. How I loved those desolate landscapes, and even now I prefer to turn to the memory of those pictures than to try and find them again. Memory preserves with art what sight occludes, and a flawed memory reveals a deeper truth than the information it warps and conceals. I remember seeing, high upon a glacial hill, a giant yak, yet unless I am mistaken there are no yaks in Greenland. The memory became a dream, a symbol. The age of Taurus, the Atlantean Age when Greenland may have formed a lush peninsula of that lost continent which Solon said had warred with primeval Athens… or a link to the Dreamland Tibet that lurks in the Western Mind, a Shangri-La of hidden rites and secret powers kept among the siddha man-gods hidden in their remote ashrams?
Greenland is a mysterious country, and this is what is needed for us now, when everything is weary with being understood, we must have somewhere that confounds our abilities to comprehend completely, a mountain that enshrines itself in mist so that the naked peak exposed above provokes us all the more with awe.
A little while ago, time was ended, and eternity yawned before us like a condemnation, there would be no more great events, no more great men, no greatness possible of any kind. Now time moves forward once again, and nimbly, each passing year revealing possibilities we once thought closed. Now War, the Red God, is once more seen among us after years of rumor, we have seen Pestilence return again, risk and danger have returned, and in every nation upheaval threatens. The United States, once seemingly condemned to grey decline, now suddenly throws off miasma and elects a hurricane in human form of titanic energy and charisma, and bullets glance off his skin, a feat the Boxers thought only the highest Taoist rites could accomplish. The dam is undone, we, who were once dreaming youth, stream forth, to wash away the festering cities and inundate the settled plain.
Projects call us now. Recently, some have spoken of plans to purchase Greenland, either for the United States or for the creation of a new state entirely. In either case, this would mean the opening up of a new territory for Western men to enter, a frontier that would forge, in time, a new people, conditioned by the cold climate and the harsh terrain. A hard people then, and rich perhaps, from the resources they could exploit there, or through the domination of advanced technology in a land free from pinching regulation and a parasitic governing class. It is no longer so hard to believe that this will happen, after what we’ve seen. I hope it does, and I would like to offer one thing to the men who, now or in the future, make that island noisy with ambition and industry: Palingenesis.
The beginnings of states and nations must be located in Myth. If a state does not have myth at its back, the wondrous, the pre-rational, the superhuman, it will fail, and sooner than later. Even the United States, with its origin in the 18th Century, has not escaped this rule. Rather than mere folk tales about its founders, the real strength of the nation was noted by Spengler: its Constitution is one of the last institutions in the world that predates the French Revolution, with all that signifies.
But what myth could lie at the foundation of a state of Greenland?
We have so much material. The Greenland Sagas tell us of the men who went to found a Norse settlement there, which existed well into the Middle Ages before disappearing. That alone would be plenty of material for a national mythology, but there is something even stranger. In the Age of Elizabeth, the mathematician and court astrologer John Dee coined the phrase “British Empire” which seems so natural now to us, considering the Union Jack that once flew from the Cape to Cairo and from Calcutta to Canberra, composed of flags for England, Scotland and Ireland, that is, Great Britain. But at the time of Elizabeth, she ruled only the Kingdom of England, it would have been more natural to refer to an English Empire. John Dee was making a purposeful allusion to the Mythic Past, to the Empire of King Arthur, who controlled all of the British Isles. And, Dee strove to prove, many other parts of the earth besides. He urged the Queen to take Greenland, considering it to have been an important part of Arthur’s Empire. This may seem fantastical, but he drew from very ancient sources.
Dee received information from Gerard Mercator, the geographer, which the latter had taken from one Jacob Cnoyen, who in turn took it from the Gestae Arthur (now lost) and the Inventio Fortuna. Mercator asserted that his sources led him to believe that at the North Pole there is an enormous black stone, around which sit four islands, the southern parts of which are mountainous and form a circular wall around the furthest Pole. This will call to mind the other black stones that often appear in myth, often with a polar import, like the Gral of Eschenbach, or the stone of the King of the World mentioned by Ossendowski, or even the Kaba in Mecca. Mercator asserted that Arthur had taken his army north from Scotland to people the Northern regions up to the mountain wall, and that he had found in Greenland men who were 23 feet tall.
This is a very odd claim, but the idea of a race of giants inhabiting polar regions crops up in many totally unrelated contexts, from the imaginative Arthur Gordon Pym of Poe to the records of Sarmiento de Gamboa concerning Patagonian giants, to an Eskimo song whose true existence I have been unable to confirm, found in the 1969 counterculture classic by Raymond Bernard, The Hollow Earth.
The rule of Arthur over the North is not only recounted in a literal form in these medieval sources used by Dee and Mercator, it is also at the esoteric core of the entire Arthurian cycle, many elements of which, like the round table with twelve seats, imply that it is what Jocelyn Godwin, in his magisterial study Arktos refers to as a Polar Myth. The name Arthur is cognate with the Greek arktos (bear), from which Arctic — Ursa Major, the Great Bear, being the most important polar constellation. Arthur is the King of Pole, a form of Apollo, who periodically journeyed north to be among the Hyperboreans, by whom he was particularly adored. Hecataeus of Abdera located Hyperborea in Britain, appearing to describe Stonehenge, which researchers like John Michell have connected, once more, to the Arthurian cycle.
Of course, the true Hyperborea could not have been Britain. It must have been further North, seated directly over the Pole, where now we know there is only frozen sea — though perhaps there is, behind a veil that limits our perception, that Black Stone, or even a great opening, appearing and disappearing with the breaths of the living Earth. Frederick Cook, in his expedition to the Pole, described a mountainous island where now no island is thought to be! Was it one of Mercator’s? Or did he somehow pass below the outer rim and glance upon the lands of Inner Earth for the first time? Why refuse ourselves the joy and wonder of such speculation? The chill, pure air of Greenland, the cold nights, will naturally promote the spread of such tales, which will come to populate the mental world of her future inhabitants.
The Norse sagas, Arthurian Legend, the stories of explorers who dared the Northwest Passage, the heroism of the Arctic explorers who raced to the Pole, the new Greenland and her people, will be able to look upon themselves as part of a tradition of singular glory and surpassing excellence, and draw spiritual sustenance and pride from all of these. As they build a new society, they will be able to refer to such stories to form artistic motifs, providing a ready national iconography that will be replicated in statues and murals, depicted in marble and bronze.
And the new Greenlanders should learn from the old. The Inuit have their own legends and myths, and these should be studied and understood by any who would want to share custodianship of the land. It is important to note however, that I am not referring to the groveling and superficial attitude of most modern people toward “indigenous ways of knowing,” whereby these natives are patronizingly made to recite their legends as a colorful novelty for materialists who have no respect for what they essentially represent. Rather, cultural interchange must be on the model of the Interpretatio Graeca, whereby the ancients treated their religions like different languages, and strove to translate one into another, to learn from each other as though each might have information useful to the better worship of the Gods. If they integrate the mythos I have sketched into their psyches, this will be possible for the colonists, and new syntheses will emerge.
The building of a new state requires industry and brilliance, and the sacrifice of many men. Men struggle and sacrifice when ideals beyond themselves make it possible. That Greenland is not foreign to them, that it is a land of myths their fathers told, will form an important psychological prop to the process of colonization. These myths will unite them, and they will begin to see themselves in fact and not merely in spirit as the descendants of Arthur, thereby achieving true Palingenesis, to walk tall among older peoples, with a mental world as populous and as inspiring.
Plethonist is a writer and poet. He can be followed @plethonist.
