by Bob Curran
But here again, we find conflict and confusion for some later Greek explorers, for example, Phytheas, describe them differently. In some accounts they are described as being practically giants, pale-skinned and fair or red haired, perhaps reflecting something of a more Nordic influence. They were rather civilized, living in both towns and cities and trading with other peoples, but they were also very proud and fierce, willing to attack those who threatened them or who transgressed their laws at the slightest opportunity. Although they traded locally, they took little to do with the Mediterranean sphere of influence.
The Guanches People
Diverse theories regarding Hyperborea were later used to explain the origins of a number of races scattered around the Atlantic area. The most celebrated of all these “explanations” concerned the mysterious Guanches peoples who were the original inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and who were later ousted (or exterminated) by Spanish and Portuguese settlers. The name “Guanch” or “Guanchinet” comes from a mixture of ancient terminologies and actually means “man of Tenerife” (guan for “man” and Chinet for “Tenerife”). Although these people were considered to be reasonably primitive (they had not advanced far beyond the Stone Age) when the first European explorers arrived during the medieval period, there seems to have been some evidence to suggest that they may have been the descendants of other, more advanced inhabitants. Either that or the islands were previously inhabited by another race who subsequently abandoned them to the Guanches. Some have claimed that this race was the Hyperboreans. Hanno the Carthaginian explorer visited the islands in the 500s B.C. and claimed that he found them to be largely uninhabited; but he also found evidence of great ruins, as in those of mighty cities there. It is suggested that the Guanche might have migrated from some part of northwest Africa, taking over these ruins about which they knew little, and making them their homes. Some accounts of early explorations of the Canaries state that they were living among the remnants of dwellings that they could not possibly have built themselves. Were these the ruins of Hyperborean cities?
Pliny the Elder, relying on the testimony of King Juba II of Mauritania, a North African coastal Berber kingdom, claims that there was indeed a fairly advanced civilization on the Canaries that preceded Guanches settlements, and that these may indeed have been Hyperboreans or the inhabitants of Thule. He points to a curious tongue that many of the Guanches spoke, and which they were said to have picked up from survivals on the Canaries. In the later 1300s and early 1400s, the incoming Spanish and Portuguese eradicated this language and more or less eliminated the Guanches by massacring them, enslaving them, or allowing them to marry into Spanish society; all traces of these people have therefore been eliminated, including their language. There is now no way in which we can check Pliny’s theories. But the origins of the Gaunches people remain an intriguing mystery—some have even connected them to survivors from the destruction of ancient Atlantis or even Lemuria.
The Aryans
The Guanches were not the only ancient people supposedly to have originated in Hyperborea—another such race was the Aryans. Aryan was initially an Indo-European language form that probably started out among some of the early tongues of the Far East. However, by the late 1800s and early 1900s, scientists and anthropologists were already developing ways to explain differences in various races and dispersal of prehistoric races. One of the determinant factors, it was argued, might be language. Language identified and unified a people, and shaped the course of their culture. It also set them apart from their neighbors and defined them as a people. Thus, the Aryan language became identified with an early people, and the phrase “Aryan race” was born. The word Aryan may come from a mingling of ancient Persian and Vedic Sanskrit (the form of Sanskrit used in the holy Vedas of northern India), and is taken to mean spiritual or noble. It was first used to describe, in a generalized way, a culture that had sprung up in ancient Iran, which contained elements of both early Persian and Indian thinking. Later, as more language groups were discovered, further elements of the Avestan tongue (the most ancient language in Iran/Iraq and used in the Gathas—the most sacred texts in Zoroastrianism) were added making the term mean “superior and skillful.” The anthropologists of the early 20th century, eager to make distinctions between ancient peoples and to show the origins of some more modern races, referred to this culture as “Aryan,” although it is not exactly clear if indeed these were a homogenous people or they saw themselves as such. Soon, however, an entire ideal had built up around this grouping including a point of origin that some argued might be Hyperborea or Thule. Based on alleged cranial measurements, this race was considered to be different from, and superior to, other emerging races such as the Semites and the forerunners of the African peoples. This led to the idea of a pale-skinned race that might well have spread out from Hyperborea into Europe and some of the more northerly lands of Scandinavia. Others, however, argued that the Aryan race had originated in the Caucasus Mountains in southern Russia, and this was where Hyperborea had lain. From this idea would emerge the term “Caucasian,” which came to be applied to any white European or those of white European descent. This, in some ideologies, was tied in with the notion of beauty. The ancient Greeks had held that the goddess Aphrodite was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and this was symbolic of her purity and beauty. This would later transfer itself into the perceived characteristics of the Aryan race.
Such notions would, of course, inevitably lead to the development of a racist philosophy. This ideal was fuelled by the writings of H.P. Blavatsky under the alleged direction of her “Secret Masters” in Tibet. In her book The Secret Doctrine (published in 1888), Madame Blavatsky identified Hyperborea as being the home of the second “root race” dwelling on Earth, and stated that it was located somewhere in the vicinity of Greenland. This gave the land a sense of the occultism that was associated with Blavatsky’s movement, and suggested that Hyperborea might be connected to ancient mysteries long forgotten.
This concept of an ancient, mysterious, and culturally superior people springing from a lost land, now disappeared, found its expression in Nordic-Aryanism, a philosophy that developed the idea of a “Master Race,” which had been the forerunners of blue-eyed, blond-haired humans—mainly in parts of Germany. These had been people with a slightly different cranial development to other species of man, and were therefore much more “skillful, spiritual, and noble” than other races around them—as the term Aryan had now come to suggest. The theory of Aryanism was based partly on the work of the French anthropologist Joseph Deneker (1852–1918), who coined the term “Nordique.” It was generally agreed that a white-skinned, fair-haired race had come into Europe from an unknown origin somewhere in the north, and had a profound affect on the people there. These people, it was suggested, were Aryan. Occultists claimed that they had come from Hyperborea or Thule (which were now rapidly becoming one and the same). Such theories were widely accepted throughout Europe in the era following the first World War, but in the mid-20th century, they took on a much more sinister tone.
In 1918, a German occultist, Rudolf von Sebottendorf (or Sebottendorff) founded the Thule Society also known as the Thule-gesellshaft, the Teutonic group or Studengruppe fur germanisches altertum (Study Group for German Antiquity) that was supposedly an occult and folklore society. The “folklore” element of the group concerned itself with a highly romanticized view of German history. Much of it concerned itself with the rise of the Aryan people who had originated in Hyperborea or Thule. Von Sebottendorf was not all he appeared—his name was actually an alias; he had been born Alfred Rudolf Glauer (1875–1945), and he was something of a noted con man. Some of his interests lay in German freemasonry, and he often portrayed himself as an “occultist,” privy to hidden mystical knowledge. His ideas regarding Hyperborea, some of which he had culled from Madame Blavatsky, were especially suspect, but that did not stop them from being accepted by some very powerful advocates.
One of the groups that Glauer’s
theories attracted was the NSDAP (the National Socialist German Worker’s Party) or Nazi Party. Nazi mystics viewed Hyperborea as the birthplace of Aryan “ubermenschen” (supermen), and the blonde-haired, blue-eyed German people as their descendants, constituting a “Master Race,” which would one day dominate the world. They took the name “Ultima Thule” (that was the name with the Roman poet Virgil had used to describe a city at the furthest point of human geographical knowledge) to be the capital of Hyperborea and the epitome of early civilization. The Nazi leader Adolf Hitler was also greatly in favor of such theories as they matched his own ideas of racial superiority, which would eventually lead to the horrors of World War II. Many senior Nazis—for example Heinrich Himmler—also held such views regarding Hyperborea/Thule, theories that were swept away by the defeat of Nazi Germany and the end of the War. As for Glauer himself, he is supposed to have committed suicide by leaping into the River Bosporus in May 1945, although it has been suggested that his death was faked by Turkish Intelligence for whom he was working at the time, and that he actually died in Egypt in the 1950s, still maintaining some of his beliefs concerning the Aryans.
Perhaps as a result of its close connection with Nazi ideology, theories regarding Hyperborea began to diminish following the end of World War II. It was revived slightly in the 1960s and 1970s by science-fiction and fantasy writers who used it as a setting for some of their stories and novels. It has also been mentioned by certain heavy metal bands as part of their song lyrics, and there are even computer games that make reference to it. Today, however, the actual land remains little more than a vague memory, a theory that has more or less vanished into time.
Did Hyperborea truly exist, somewhere among the snows close to the North Pole, or was it just an idea to denote the furthest point to those living in the Mediterranean cultures could possibly imagine? Or was it simply a description of some parts of Scandinavia by those who lived in more southerly countries? Whatever the answer, the name Hyperborea has entered our language as meaning something incredibly far away, perhaps unattainable or unreachable, and maybe, for many of us, this is the most enduring image of this mysterious and unimaginable land.
15
Irem: City of Pillars
Anyone who is reasonably familiar with the works of the American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (and those who emulated him) will be familiar with the dark city of Irem. This was a hideous, shadowy place, located somewhere in the deserts of Arabia, built in some distant prehistoric time, and now inhabited by the ghouls and afreets of Arabic folklore. It was the place deep in the sandy wastes of the Sahara, visited by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazarad, author of the text Al Azif, which, translated into Latin, became the blasphemous Necronomicon, a staple of Lovecraft’s dark fiction. Here, among the dark and towering pillars of that terrible city, Alhazarad learned awful secrets that actually drove him mad and formed the source for a dark lineage that seems to have extended all over the world. Irem then became a dark and sinister place in horror writing, initially appearing as The Nameless City deep in the desert, in Lovecraft’s eerie story of the same name. But had Lovecraft (and those who came after him) based this monstrous city on an actual location that Mankind had forgotten or else blotted from its collective mind? Strangely, both historical fact and myth are closer to the Lovecraftian tradition than one might imagine.
Afreets and Fiends
In Lovecraft’s Mythos, Irem is the haunt of djinni and afreets, creatures that have inhabited the world in some former time. Before the consolidation of Judaism and the coming of Islam (and even long after), there was a widespread belief in spirits and disembodied forces all across the Arab and Semitic worlds. Animistic entities dwelt in rocks, pools, streams, and caverns far out in the desert and beyond the dwellings of humans, making their presence known only in the vaguest of ways. They were recognized in the minor whirlwinds that swept across the desert plains from time to time, or by eerie sounds emanating from remote hollows and valleys. Mostly, they were inimical and hostile toward Mankind, and sought to do humans harm when they could. These were the djinn or spirits who had no real corporeal form, but were nevertheless extremely powerful. It was widely believed that they were beings who had existed since before the foundation of the world and they were heirs to the ancient magics that had formed the Universe. They could create fierce sandstorms that could lay to waste an entire city, or floods that could devastate a fertile valley; they could create solid objects out of air and smoke, and inflict disease and pestilence upon those who had angered them. The genie in the story of Aladdin is such a being (although often set in China, the story had Middle Eastern origins). However, only certain men could communicate with them or in some cases control them.
Muqarribun
These were the muqarribun, or Ghost Priests, of Bedouin folklore, who dwelt in Arabia in pre-Islamic days, and who were regarded as magicians and sorcerers, usually leaning toward the Black Arts. Indeed, all who had dealings with the djinn were regarded with intense suspicion. The muqarribun, however, often allowed themselves to be possessed by such spirits, and this was often regarded as the source of their magical powers. They were also interpreters, listening to the “voices of the desert” (voices of the djinn) and deriving meanings from them. As well as this, they were the guardians and recorders of old lore, which had allegedly existed from a time before the world was formed.
The muqarribun knew of Irem or Iram, and mentioned it in those fragments of their writings that survive. Their lore states that it was built several generations after the Flood (some accounts say five) and that it was built by the tribe of Ad, who were direct descendants of Noah through his son Shem. According to tradition, the Ahd-al-Jann were a race of giants—“more than men”—similar to the Nephilim of Semitic folklore, who had close links with the djinn or “formless ones.” At the time of the building of Irem, their king was Shaddad of the bloodline of Shem, and it was he who conspired with the djinn, to build a large city for his people. Since the Flood had scourged the world, the survivors had grown lax in their ways and in their worship of Allah (God). They now consorted with the djinn, who had also survived the Deluge and, encouraged by the latter, had given themselves to witchcraft and magical practices. With the aid of the djinn, Shaddad built the city of Irem as his capital, and it became a haven of necromancers and practitioners of the devilish arts. The location of this city lay on the Arabian Peninsula in an area known as the Rub-el-Khali, or “Empty Quarter.” According to the tradition of the muqarribun, the location had a “hidden meaning”; “the empty quarter” referred to death and decay, and a kind of dark void within the soul of Mankind. It was a gateway to the lands of death, which lay beyond the senses of most mortals. This, of course, made it a fitting home for a city such as Irem. Some traditions say that Irem was built by the djinn themselves before the time of Adam, and was later inhabited by men. This tradition stems from the name “Irem of the Pillars”—the ancient Arabic word for “pillar” corresponding to another meaning, namely “Old One.” The name, therefore, was a city of the Old Ones (that is, djinns).
The City
As activities in Irem became more and more blasphemous, Allah sent the prophet Hud to warn the people there to behave. However, the populace ignored the warning and so Allah punished the city, first by a drought, and secondly by a monstrous sandstorm that buried the dark metropolis. Irem vanished beneath the sands of the Empty Quarter, apparently lost forever. However, even though it was covered in sand, its baleful influence still crept out like a shadow across the desert to affect large parts of the Middle East. These were the legends of which the muqarribun spoke, and they were quite clearly pre-Islamic.
So strong a tradition was this story of Irem that it even found its way into Islamic holy text as a warning in the style of Sodom and Gomorrah in Semitic teaching: “Seest thou not how thy Lord dealt with the Ad of the city of Irem with the lofty pillars The like of which were not produced in all the land” (Holy Qu’ran: Surah Al-Fajir 89 1–89:14). This
seems to have been an absorption of ancient muqarribun lore into mainstream Islamic teaching. It also appears in a collection of folktales from the Middle East known as The Thousand and One Nights, which has given us many other tales such as Ali Baba and Aladdin (Al-Haddin).
Folklore in the Middle East
More traditional Bedouin folklore spoke of a city that had been erected by an ancient civilization that had ruled part of the Middle East about 3,000 years before the coming of the Prophet. It had been extremely wealthy and had traded in spices and unguents with the rest of the world. However, the inhabitants had always been interested in the occult and the dark sciences. They encouraged the muqarribun and kahins (oracle mongers—men who also allowed themselves to be possessed by spirits in order to see the future) to live within their walls and to practice their questionable arts. Irem or Iram (the spellings only differ slightly) became a by-word for occultism throughout the lands of the Middle East. In the end, Allah would tolerate it no longer, sending a mighty sandstorm to swallow up the entire city. Allah’s anger stemmed from the fact that the principal god of Irem was the entity Moloch or Molech. In the center of Irem lay the great Tophet, or enclosure, which was dedicated to this fearful god, and in which, it was whispered, child sacrifice was carried out.