1 The Thule Book by Bernard King 2 "Those of us who grew up in homes where our national festivals were celebrated know how much warmth and colour they brought into our childhood. In some of us, at least, they seemed to stir a racial memory and link us more closely to the generations that had gone before us." - Florence McNeill - The Silver Bough - Edinburgh 1956 In memoriam Bernard Arthur King 1906 - 1995 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Fragments of this study have appeared in slightly different form as articles for the magazines "Talking Stick" and "Pagan Voice" and the co-operation of the editors is gratefully acknowledged. Parts of the early chapters were originally issued in booklet form by the Asatru Folk Runic Workshop/Rune Gild UK. Here that material has been thoroughly revised and augmented. Thanks is also due to Element Books as some of the runic material is taken from my book "The Elements of the Runes". It appears here both expanded and updated. Some of the illustrations were tidied by Ian Read for inclusion in the first booklet edition. I am particularly grateful to Simon Sneath for scanning in many further ones. This book is dedicated to the many who have assisted its progress: Freya Aswynn, the Odinic Rite, true Northerners everywhere, working as they are in their own separate ways to revitalise and retrieve the spirit of Ultima Thule. It is also, as a lifetime's labour, dedicated to the memory of my father, Bernard Arthur King, who in my personal prejudice I regard as having been the best Thulian who ever lived. 3 Frontispiece: Abaris, the Mage of Hyperborea, from John Wood's "Essay towards a Description of Bath", first published in 1742. 4 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 6 1. THULE AND THE NAZIS 11 The Late Nineteenth Century - The Thule Gesellschaft - Hitler and the Swastika - Thule, The Nazis and Racism - Thule and the SS - Thulian Aspects of the Third Reich - The Last Crusade? - German Neo-Paganism - Replacing Christianity - Philosophy - Neo-Paganism and the Calendar - Survivals - Optimism Misfounded - A First Lesson of Ultima Thule 2. A SHORT HISTORY OF THULE 29 Pytheas of Marseilles - Early Exploration - Sextus Sylla - Ogygia - Cronus/Saturnus - Carthage - Demetrius - Tacitus - Was Thule Iceland? - Was Thule Greenland? - The Migration from Thule 3. BRITAIN AND HYPERBOREA 43 Hyperborea, Apollo and Thule - Silenus - Geoffrey of Monmouth and Brutus - Nennius - Geoffrey and Nennius Interpreted - The Daughters of Danaus - Perceptions of Thule and Hyperborea - Was Hyperborea Britain? 4. BLADUD AND THE DRUIDS 55 Abaris/Bladud - Ancient British Universities - The Anax Connection - The First Philosophers - Druids - Arthur, Bladud and Merlin - King Arthur and the Wild Hunt - The Original Merlin 5. THE SURVIVAL OF THULIAN CULTURE IN THE NORTH 69 Pythagoras - Serpents and Seidr - Thule, Prophecy and the Northern Peoples - The Runes - Seidr and Northern Magic - Platform Prophecy and Magic - The Thul - The Völva 6. LATER THULIAN SURVIVALS 89 The Medieval Period - Witchcraft - Johannes Faust - The Heathen - Seeking Thule's Wisdom - Woman - Prophecy - Racial Identity and Heritage - Healing and Blighting - Magical Flight - Shape-Shifting - Longevity and Reincarnation 7. CLASSICAL AND NORTHERN DEITIES 107 Sunday - Monday - Tuesday - Wednesday - Thursday - Friday - Saturday - Other Similarities in the Mythologies - Boreas, Cronus and Poseidon - Bor and Boreas 8. THE HYPERBOREANS 121 Thulian Visitors to Greece - The Founders of Delphi - Boreas and the Boreades - Hesperus - Notus - Zephyrus - Orithyia -Cleopatra - Chione - Zetes and Calais - Boötes - Hecaerge -Leto - Loxo - Opis 9. THULE AND RELIGION TODAY 128 The Nature of Religion - Polytheism - Religion and Ethics - The Thulian Faith - The Thulian Deities - The Original Apollo and Artemis - The Ideals of Thule - Human Relationships - The Thulian Priesthood - Grades CONCLUSION The Past - The Present - The Future - A Personal Note 140 5 APPENDIX. THE SYMBOLS OF ULTIMA THULE 144 BIBLIOGRAPHY 168 ILLUSTRATIONS Frontispiece: Abaris, the Mage of Hyperborea. Fig.1: The eagle, the laurel wreath and the swastika, all Thulian symbols, combine in Nazi iconography. 16 Fig.2: The traditional and degraded image of Saturnus from astrology. 34 Fig.3: Part of Ptolemy's map of the world, published in 1540, showing Iceland called Thyle, or Thule. 37 Fig.4: Apollo as sun god from Jost Amman's "Kunstbüchlin". 45 Fig.5: Platform sorcery, from a history of the North printed in 1555. Note the Thor's hammer. 94 Fig.6: Shape-shifted witches in flight from Molitor's "Von den Unholden und Hexen", printed in 1489. 103 Fig.7: A coin from Beneventum showing the head of Apollo (obverse) and a horse and pentagram (reverse). 109 Fig.8: Symbols from the Hällristningar. 145 Fig.9:Horse inscribed with swastika from Besançon - the two great solar symbols travelling together. 156 Fig.10: A shipwreck caused by magic. 157 6 INTRODUCTION It would be comfortable if I could say that this was not a political book. It is not political, in that whatever any British political party does today has little enough in real terms, I believe, to do with our past. We are still debating old issues, such as how close should be Britain's ties to Europe, the continent from which the ancestors of the vast majority of the population of these island emigratedin the new millennium. The curse of politics is that in my dictionary it occurs between polite and polka. One is what we should all be, if only as a courtesy to our fellows. The other is something that some of us have chosen to dance to. When I submitted an early draft of this manuscript to an American publisher it was heavily criticised for not being "politically correct". "Cultural heritage" is one of those emotive phrases, like F. Marian MacNeill's "racial memory" (writing over 30 years ago in 1966) which requires to be used but is frequently misunderstood by the sensitive. This was something I learned the hard way, discovering the highly emotive phrase "Jew-Communist" appearing in the reader's report. It was not an expression that I had used anywhere in the text, and it was used because at one point I speak of the Jewish members of a mid-1920s German regional Communist government. Karl Marx was Jewish, so a Jewish Communist should not be a shocking concept. The employment of the phrase, however, demonstrates how easy it is for bias to creep into any consideration. The passage which prompted its unwarranted creation by the American reader was closely based on a passage taken from a work published by the University of Chicago Press in 1955. Yet the reader and/or his or her publisher was so sensitive that a revision of historically-accurate descriptions and a judgementally biased approach to many historical phenomena would have been required in order to have the manuscript considered. In fact anything which even begins to erode political correctness is totally beyond the pale (a wooden stake, usually of chestnut, secured to others of its kind by wire and used for fencing areas off). All this is "by the way" but may offer a small insight into the sometimes uncompromising text which follows. There are, for all thinking people, two realities. One is the reality of the present, be it care- less self-sufficiency or, increasingly as society, both capitalist and communist, strives to alter without actually admitting it is undergoing significant change, constraining state allowances. The other reality is the more caring and uplifting one which so many wish to aspire to. That is why this book is both a historical and mythological detective story and an attempt to recreate the way of thought and wonder of a vanished age. Within the heart of even the most stolid individual there lies a deep-seated desire to believe in the incredible. This manifests in a variety of ways - the observance of peculiar superstitions, a tendency to religious extravagance, even a desire for ecstatic visions induced by either socially acceptable or prohibited drugs. One of the most widespread and popular manifestations of the outwardly incredible is the idea of the vanished homeland, the lost island or continent from which the race ancestors emerged by migration prior to its cataclysmic destruction. Yet the incredible is actually here, all around us. Many a mind has been captivated by Plato's Atlantis, a large island in the Atlantic Ocean beyond the Pillars of Hercules, and the theosophical Lemuria of the Pacific. The books these mostly hypothetical realms have inspired now defy counting. Films, TV series, plays and records extol the vanished Golden Age of man's forgotten or mythical past. Elaborate theses are written to prove, beyond all possible doubt or at least to the satisfaction of the author and his acolytes, that such and such 7 an island was Atlantis, that this part of the South American land-mass was a province of the Theosophical Lemuria, or that a lost island in the Mediterranean and not the Indus Valley was the cradle of civilisation. In most cases, and especially so with the all but vanished Thule and Hyperborea of the Northlands, it is not the physical existence of the homeland which is important to the individual. What really matters is the belief that the lost homeland was once a reality. The facts must not be allowed to spoil the story. Only the myth can triumph where objective reality is permitted to have no immediate relevance. The one lost homeland, the one vanished Isle of the Primogenitor, which has been studiously ignored by the mythographers, is one which, like its better-known companions in the uncharted seas of speculation, is mentioned by classical authors. It is also suitably remote in time and place to warrant its own legends and literary and dramatic representations. That homeland is the vanished realm called Ultima Thule.