The Quest of Gangleri: Theosophy and Old Norse Mythology in Iceland

Chapter 10 The Quest of Gangleri: Theosophy and Old Norse Mythology in Iceland

Simon Halink

In her magnum opus The Secret Doctrine (1888), Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831–1891), one of the founders of the Theosophical Society, claims to unveil the ultimate synthesis of science, religion and philosophy based on ancient Hindu wisdom and occult Tibetan manuscripts. She maintains that metaphysical truth is not restricted to one specific religious tradition, but can be found in ancient traditions and mythologies around the world. The “secret doctrine” had been revealed by wisdom masters throughout the ages, and some of these prophets achieved such supernatural qualities that they were eventually deified and en- capsulated in elaborate mythologies. Odin (Old Norse: Óðinn1), who brought his people the wisdom of the runes, is interpreted as one of these initiated masters:

These personages [the “Thirty-Five Buddhas of Confession”], however, though called in the Northern Buddhist religion “Buddhas”, may just as well be called Rishis, or Avatars, etc., as they are “Buddhas who have preceded Sakyamuni [the historical founder of Buddhism]” only for the northern followers of the ethics preached by Gautama. These great Ma- hatmas, or Buddhas, are a universal and common property: they are historical sages – at any rate, for all the Occultists who believe in such a hierarchy of Sages, the existence of which has been proved to them by the learned ones of the Fraternity… The day when much, if not all, of that which is given here from the archaic records, will be found correct, is not far distant. Then the modern symbologists will acquire the certitude that

1 Note on the text: for the sake of authenticity, I have decided not to anglicise the spelling of Icelandic words and names mentioned in this article (e.g., Althing instead of Alþingi) but to keep to the original Icelandic orthography, except when the standardised English versions are in very common use (e.g., Odin, Asgard and Midgard). The letter Þ þ is pronounced th as in thought, Đ ð is pronounced th as in weather and Æ æ is pronounced i as in kind. All translations in this essay are my own, unless otherwise indicated. Because most Icelandic last names are patronyms, rather than family names, I refer to Icelanders by their first names, as is the custom in Icelandic.

The Quest of Gangleri 193

even Odin, or the god Woden, the highest god in the German and Scandi- navian mythology, is one of these thirty-five Buddhas; one of the earliest indeed, for the continent to which he and his race belonged, is also one of the earliest. So early, in truth, that in the days when tropical nature was to be found, where now lie eternal unthawing snows, one could cross almost by dry land from Norway via Iceland and Greenland, to the lands that at present surround Hudson’s Bay. blavatsky, 1888, p. 380

Blavatsky’s historical Odin was not merely a “remarkable human being”, but an enlightened Buddha, who appeared in northern Europe in a time before time, when it was warm and when the Northern Hemisphere was not yet di- vided by the Atlantic Ocean. Because of this, the spiritual founding father of Europe could easily be associated with mythical lost continents, such as Atlan- tis, Hyperborea and Thule, which play an important part in the Theosophical worldview. Blavatsky was not the first Westerner to identify the supreme deity of the Old Norse pantheon as an actual historical bringer of wisdom.2 She borrows many of her ideas on Germanic mythology from the German writer and theo- logian Wilhelm Wägner (1800–1886), whom she regularly refers to. The Scot- tish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) already maintained in his seminal work On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) that the historical figure of Odin had been “a First Teacher and Captain” of the north, and that “every true Thinker to this hour is a kind of Odin” (Carlyle, 1841, pp. 39, 54–55). By the time these metaphysical interpretations of Eddic mythology were taking root in the nineteenth century, the myths had already been emanci- pated to a large extent and elevated to the status of national heritage in Ice- land and other Scandinavian countries. They were no longer considered the remnants of a pre-Christian spiritual darkness, dissolved by Christianity, or thought of as distorted pieces of naive and primitive historiography, as the so- called “anti-Eddists” of the Enlightenment tended to do (Böldl, 2000, p. 113). In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Icelandic philologist Finnur Mag- nússon (1781–1847) contributed to the Eddas’ emancipation by placing them in the great organic structure of a Eurasian myth-tree, in which they were no longer inferior to, but on equal grounds with the more prestigious mythologi- cal systems of the ancient Greeks and the Indian subcontinent (Halink, 2015). This scholarly emancipation rendered the Eddic myths a beloved subject for

2 This euhemeristic interpretation of Odin can already be found in medieval sources, notably in the prologue to the Prose Edda and in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla.