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Apollo and the Hyperboreans
Did the Greeks keep a memory of contact with the far north?
They did, and two Greek historians describe it. So far in this volume Hyperborea has come to us from esoteric sources; here it comes from historians.
The first is Herodotus, the Greek historian, writing about 2.4 KY (thousands of years) ago, in the fifth century BC. His account is the earliest detailed description of the Hyperboreans that survives, and he gives it from what others told him. He writes that the Scythians say nothing about the Hyperboreans, and that the people who say most about them are the Delians, the priests and people of the island of Delos in the Aegean Sea, the birthplace of Apollo. He notes that older poets mentioned them too: Hesiod, about 2.7 KY ago, and the author of a lost poem, the Epigoni. And he adds a doubt of his own: if there are people beyond the north wind, there should also be people beyond the south wind.
What the Delians told him was this. The Hyperboreans sent sacred gifts, wrapped in wheat straw, to Delos. The gifts passed from people to people through Scythia, the steppe north of the Black Sea, and so reached Greece. Two Hyperborean maidens who came to Delos with the first gifts died there, and Herodotus describes their tomb beside the temple of Artemis, as the section Leaving the pole mentioned.
The second is Diodorus of Sicily, writing about 2.1 KY ago and citing the older writer Hecataeus. He describes an island in the ocean beyond the land of the Celts, as large as Sicily, where Apollo is honoured above all gods in a round temple, and where the god comes every nineteen years. Many writers identify that island with Britain, and the round temple with Stonehenge.
So the Greeks placed the land of Apollo's people in the far north, and they kept a route of contact to it.
Odin, the Atlantean initiate
What did the esoteric sources make of Odin?
Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, gave a clear answer in a lecture in Berlin on 21 October 1904: Odin carried the culture of Atlantis into the north.
In Steiner's account, the later cultures that grew up further south left the northern regions untouched, and there something of Atlantis remained, brought by Atlantean initiates, people trained in the Atlantean mysteries. Wotan, he says, was an initiate of the northern peoples, "the bearer of the elements of Atlantean culture into these parts." The northern mysteries had a founder, an initiate named Sieg. Sieg gave up his body and placed it at the disposal of a higher being, and the transformed Sieg was then called Odin, the highest initiate of the northern mysteries.
So in Steiner's account the Norse Odin reaches back to Atlantis, into the far older age the section The war of the gods pointed to.
Odin's eye
What did Odin give up for his knowledge?
The Norse poems answer: an eye. In the Poetic Edda and in Snorri's Edda, Odin gives one of his eyes to Mimir, the guardian of a well of wisdom, for a single drink from it. In another poem, the Havamal, he hangs for nine nights on the world tree, wounded by a spear, and wins the runes, the signs that carry speech and magic.
A commentator on Steiner's lectures of 1910 on the folk souls, in an appendix to their English edition, reads the lost eye as the clairvoyant eye, which he identifies with the pineal gland, and Odin's reward as the runes and human speech.
The earlier volumes of this book described the same exchange: telepathy lost, and speech given in its place. The story of Odin's eye reads as an early esoteric confirmation of it.
Arcadia and the Moon
Do the channeled sources and the Greek legends meet anywhere on the gods?
They meet on one name, Arcadia.
Athena, channeled by James E. Charles in 2019, says the Greek gods came from a planet called Arcadia. They played gods, she says, to feel their power over a more primitive people, and she calls that wrong.
The Greeks themselves gave Arcadia, the mountain land in the middle of the Peloponnese, the southern peninsula of Greece, a strange distinction. They called the Arcadians the proselenoi, the people from before the Moon, who lived in their land before there was a Moon in the sky. The belief is recorded from the fifth century BC, by Hippys (an ancient Greek name) of Rhegium, a Greek historian of southern Italy, and later by Aristotle, the astronomer Eudoxus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Ovid and Plutarch.
So a channeled goddess names Arcadia as the home of the gods, and the Greek legend makes the Arcadians older than the Moon.
We looked for the date of the Moon's arrival and found it far out of reach. Tides laid down in rock about 620 million years ago already record the lunar month, and the slow circling of the Earth's axis, which the Moon's pull drives, shows in ocean sediments for millions of years at the rate the present Moon gives. So the Moon has stood over the Earth for at least 600 million years, when the Earth held only simple life in the sea, long before the first reptiles. A people from before the Moon can only be a memory of another kind, perhaps a vision from astral travel into that age, and it bears on our history only indirectly.