Taken from Frederic Edwin Church — Rainy Season in the Tropics

Julius Evola

The Mystery of the Prehistorical Arctic – Thule

Julius Evola discusses the myth of Thule in the light of anthropological findings.

Translated by John Bruce Leonard

The following article originally appeared in Il Corriere Padano (Ferrara), 13 January 1934.

It is altogether characteristic that, contained within an entire group of extremely recent studies on
prehistory, ancient ideas should make new appearance, despite the fact that up until yesterday these were
considered to be pure myths.

One of these ideas refers to the legendary primordial land of the Hyperboreans. A number of researchers
have taken up precisely this idea, thereby calling into doubt the presumed certainty that a simian
humanity was the only kind of humanity to exist in prehistory, and going so far as to confront the problem
of origins from a new and unprejudiced view, to the point of expressing the suspicion that the Stone Age
might be testimony to an authentic civilization of a superior, symbolic-spiritual kind. The Arctic, the
North Pole, the fabulous Hyperborea was evidently the primordial fatherland of a highly civilized
prehistoric white race – so civilized indeed that it was considered ‘divine’ by the ancients.

This is the strange and evocative conception which is today once again coming to light: the Arctic, the
first fatherland of humanity, indeed of ‘solar’ civilization, in the highest sense.
The seeming paradox of this thesis disappears so soon as one recall what physics teaches regarding the
so-called ‘procession of the equinoxes’. On account of the inclination of the terrestrial axis, the climate of
the Earth shifts from epoch to epoch. Given that hard coal has been rediscovered beneath the polar ice,
this means that there were once forests and fires in the arctic zone. The freeze would not have come upon
the arctic zone save in a later period. One of the designations for Asgard, home of the ‘divinities’ and
original fatherland of the royal Nordic lines, according to the Scandinavian traditions, is the ‘green isle’ or
‘green land’, in modern German Grünes-Land, and hence Greenland. But this land, as its very name
shows, seems even in the time of the Goths to have had a vigorous vegetation, and to have not been
entirely covered in the freeze. But there is more: in the region of the arctic ice, the recent expedition of the
Canadian Jenness, the Danes Rasmussen and Therkel, and the American Birket-Smith made some truly
singular archaeological discoveries:1 deep beneath the ice, the remains of a civilization of much higher
level than that of the Eskimos, and relicts yet more ancient, prehistoric. The name of the civilization of
Thule was given to this civilization.

Thule is the name that the Greeks applied precisely to a region or island of the far north, one often
confounded with the lands of the Hyperboreans, whence came the solar Apollo – that is the god of the
Doric-Achaean races who descended from the north into Greece. And Plutarch says of Thule that the
nights there, for about a month, lasted only two hours: this is precisely the ‘white night’ of the northern
countries. And the fact that other Hellenic traditions call the northern sea the Chronid Sea, that is the Sea
of Chronos (Saturn), is another significant indication, since Chronos was conceived as one of the gods of
the Golden Age, that is the primordial age, the age before humanity.

Now, if we travel to America, we find correspondences in the Aztec civilizations of Mexico so

But let us compare these Mexican traditions with the Celtic. If the most distant progenitors of the
Mexicans came to America from some Nordic-Atlantic Land, here too the Irish legends speak to us of the
‘divine race’ of the Tuatha dè Danann, which came to Ireland from the West, from a mystical Atlantic or
Nordic-Atlantic land, Avalon. These would appear to be, therefore, two forms of one and the same
memory. The two civilizations would correspond to two irradiations, the one American, the other
European, taking their point of departure from one and the same centre, from one and the same vanished
source (the myth of Atlantis), or else from a source that froze over. But there is more, insofar as, if we
depart the field of positive modern investigations, we will find elements that might easily accord with
these legendary echoes. Indeed, on the Atlantic European littoral (above all in the so-called culture of the
Magdalenes) there are very clear traces of an authentic civilization and of a kind of humanity – the so-
called Cro-Magnon man – that appears to have developed in a superior way as compared to the almost
animal races of the so-called ‘glacial’ or ‘Mousterian man’ who lived at that time in Europe. The
fragments that have come down to us of this civilization are of such a nature as to bring certain
researchers to declare that the Cro-Magnons could certainly be considered the Hellenes of the Stone Age.
Now, might not this race of Cro-Magnons, which appeared enigmatically in the Stone Age along the
Atlantic littoral among inferior and almost simian races, be identical to the Tuatha dè Danann, the ‘divine
race’ come from the mysterious Nordic-Atlantic land, of which the Irish legends make mention? And as
for the myths regarding the fight between the suddenly arising ‘divine races’ and the races of ‘demons’ or
monsters, might these not be best interpreted as the fantastic echoes of the battle waged between those
two races, between the Cro-Magnon men, ‘the Hellenes of the Stone Age’, and the bestial ‘Mousterian’
men?
The results of the research of Wirth,3 in short, are apparently these: that in the highest prehistory – around
20,000 B.C. – a great unified white race, of the solar cult, was pressed out of the polar region, which had
become uninhabitable on account of the freeze, toward the South, into Europe and America, but above all
into a land which has disappeared, positioned to the North of the Atlantic. From this land, this race
evidently subsequently moved, in the Palaeolithic Period, toward Europe and Africa, with a movement, in
any case, from the West to the East; it evidently penetrated into the Mediterranean basin, creating a cycle
of prehistoric civilizations which were intimately related to one another, in which family are included the
Egyptian, the Etruscan-Sardinian, the Pelasgian, etc., not to speak of others yet that new waves would
founded in their advance across the continent, going so far as to reach the Caucasus and then beyond, up
to India, and even to China. Thus, that which has been held to be the ‘cradle of humanity’, the tablelands
of Pamir, would be only one of the fairly recent centres of the radiation of an elder race. The Arian and
Indo-Germanic races, Homo eurapaeus in general, would be races already derived and in a certain sense
already mixed compared to the older and purer lines, the ‘Hyperboreans’, to whom are related prehistoric
memories, symbols and even the stone representations of the ‘conquerors come on great foreign vessels’,
of the ‘axe’, of the ‘sun’ and of the ‘solar man with raised arms’. A mysterious unity would in this way
draw together a group of great civilizations and ancient religions, which were already flourishing in areas
wherein even yesterday one posited the presence of animal-like cavemen.

This is, in brief, the strange and evocative conception which, drawing from the world of myth, is today
once again coming to light: the Arctic, the first fatherland of humanity, indeed of ‘solar’ civilization, in
the highest sense.

And since symbol summons symbol, let us recall this in closing: Even in the Roman epoch, the idea of the
region of the north as a mystical country, inhabited by the ‘father of the gods’, by the numen of the first
age or the golden age, the idea that the almost nightless Arctic day was not unrelated to the perennial light
that envelops the immortals – such ideas were so alive in the Roman epoch that, according to the word of
Eumenius,4 Constantius Chlorus, confusing Great Britain with Thule, even directed an expedition toward
the north of Great Britain, not so much out of desire for military glory, as to reach the land ‘that more
than any other is near the sky’ and almost sensing the divine transfiguration that, it was believed, the
Heroes and the Emperors underwent at their death.

Now, these same regions, which saw the dawning of humanity, and which enclose the mystery of a race
of primordial white conquerors whose symbol, the axe, is to be rediscovered moreover in the very Roman
symbol of the fasces5 – these same Nordic-Arctic regions, from the island of Greenland to North America,
are the very same that have been victoriously surveyed very recently from the air by the Italians, in a feat
which has something fateful about it, and which bound itself enigmatically precisely to places of a
primordial greatness.6

References:

1Reference in fact to an entire series of expeditions, seven in total, performed between 1912 and 1933, by
a number of explorers, including those named here: Diamond Jenness (1886–1969), Knud Rasmussen
(1879–1933), Therkel Mathiassen (1892–1967), and Kaj Birket-Smith (1893–1977). Knud Rasmussen
was the organizer of these expeditions, and the only one to venture out on all of them. The self-
proclaimed task of the later expeditions in particular was to uncover the civilizational origins of the
Eskimo people. The name of Thule was given reflexively to the discoveries that resulted, since in fact it
had actually been merely the name of the original trading station established by Rasmussen and his friend
Peter Freuchen, which was named ‘Ultima Thule’ on account of its being the most northerly trading
post in the world. Evola probably has in mind here specifically the ‘Fifth Thule Expedition’ of 1921 to
1924, which was by far the most successful, productive and well-documented of these expeditions.
Several minor errata: Evola evidently confounds the name and surname of Therkel Mathiassen, and
Birket-Smith was in reality a Dane and not an American.

2The name is today commonly transliterated as ‘Tollan’; this obviously in no way discredits Evola’s
etymological suggestion.

3Herman Wirth (1885–1981) was a Dutch-German historian who dedicated many of his studies to ancient
religions and their symbols, as well as to racial studies particularly surrounding the Nordic races. Evola
makes frequent mention of him in his works, and discusses his ideas at some length in Chapter VII of The
Myth of the Blood, in which he reviews a number of ideas related to those presented in the present article.
Although Wirth received a degree of early acclaim from the Nazis and even from Hitler himself, his
attempt to interpret Christianity in the light of a Nordic faith led to his falling out of favour when the neo-
pagan strands of Nazi thought began to rise to prominence. His 1928 work Der Aufgang der Menschheit
(The Accession of Mankind) has yet to be translated into English.

4The original has ‘Eumanzio’, but this is surely the figure meant: Eumenius, the Roman panegyrist born
between 230 and 260 AD. The present reference is probably taken from Eumenius’ Pro restaurandis
scholis, in which he lauds the Emperor Constantius I, otherwise known as Constantius Chlorus (250–
306), father of Emperor Constantine.

5A Latin term indicating a bundle of rods bound together with an axe, symbol of the authority invested in
the civil magistrate. Evola uses the Italian fascio here, the term from which the name ‘Fascism’ arose in
self-conscious reference to the Roman tradition.

6Probable reference to two flights (1926 and 1928) over the North Pole in dirigibles conducted by
General Umberto Nobile, with the Norge and the Italia respectively. The first was probably the first
aircraft to reach the North Pole. The second ended in a Polar crash and an expensive rescue operation,
from which misadventure General Nobile emerged with reputation unscathed, and body sporting only
several broken bones.

Julius Evola