Hyperborea
[6] Later writers disagreed on the existence and location of the Hyperboreans, with some regarding them as purely mythological, and others connecting them to real-world peoples and places in northern Eurasia (e.g. Britain, Scandinavia, or Siberia).
Modern scholars consider the Hyperborean myth to be an amalgam of ideas from ancient utopianism, "edge of the earth" stories, the cult of Apollo, and exaggerated reports of phenomena in northern Europe (e.g. the Arctic "midnight sun").
[10] Herodotus recorded three earlier sources that supposedly mentioned the Hyperboreans, including Hesiod and Homer, the latter purportedly having written of Hyperborea in his lost work Epigoni.
[29][30] Hyperborea was identified with Britain first by Hecataeus of Abdera in the 4th century BC, as in a preserved fragment by Diodorus Siculus: In the regions beyond the land of the Celts there lies in the ocean an island no smaller than Sicily.
[31]Hecateaus of Abdera also wrote that the Hyperboreans had on their island "a magnificent sacred precinct of Apollo and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape".
Hecataeus of Abdera collated all the stories about the Hyperboreans current in the 4th century BC and published a lengthy, now-lost treatise on them that was noted by Diodorus Siculus (ii.47.1–2).
[40] Herodotus also details that two other virgin maidens, Arge and Opis, had come from Hyperborea to Delos before, as a tribute to the goddess Ilithyia for ease of child-bearing, accompanied by the gods themselves.
This legend is found preserved in the writings of Aelian: This god [Apollon] has as priests the sons of Boreas [North Wind] and Chione [Snow], three in number, brothers by birth, and six cubits in height [about 2.7 metres].
[41][42]Diodorus Siculus added to this account: And the kings of this (Hyperborean) city and the supervisors of the sacred precinct are called Boreadae, since they are descendants of Boreas, and the succession to these positions is always kept in their family.
[43] However, Aelius Herodianus, a grammarian in the 3rd century, wrote that the mythical Arimaspi were identical to the Hyperboreans in physical appearance (De Prosodia Catholica, 1.
[citation needed] Six classical Greek authors also came to identify the Hyperboreans with their Celtic neighbours in the north: Antimachus of Colophon, Protarchus, Heraclides Ponticus, Hecataeus of Abdera, Apollonius of Rhodes and Posidonius of Apamea.
[citation needed] This aligns with the traditional aspect of a perpetually sunny land beyond the north, since the Northern half of Scandinavia faces long days during high summer with no hour of darkness ('midnight sun').
This idea was especially strong during the 17th century in Sweden, where the later representatives of the ideology of Gothicism declared the Scandinavian peninsula both the lost Atlantis and the Hyperborean land.
In this vein, the self-described "Hyperborean-Roman Company" (Hyperboreisch-römische Gesellschaft) were a group of northern European scholars who studied classical ruins in Rome, founded in 1824 by Theodor Panofka, Otto Magnus von Stackelberg, August Kestner and Eduard Gerhard.
In this sense, Washington Irving, in elaborating on the Astor Expedition in the Pacific Northwest, described how: While the fiery and magnificent Spaniard, inflamed with the mania for gold, has extended his discoveries and conquests over those brilliant countries scorched by the ardent sun of the tropics, the adroit and buoyant Frenchman, and the cool and calculating Briton, have pursued the less splendid, but no less lucrative, traffic in furs amidst the hyperborean regions of the Canadas, until they have advanced even within the Arctic Circle.
[48] This idea was earlier proposed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak (whom Bennett credits) in his The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903) as well as the Austro-Hungarian ethnologist Karl Penka (Origins of the Aryans, 1883).
[53] According to Jason Jeffrey, H. P. Blavatsky, René Guénon and Julius Evola all shared the belief in the Hyperborean, polar origins of mankind and a subsequent solidification and devolution.
[55][56][57] However, Jeffrey's account may contradict some theosophical tenets, as according to other authors like Santucci, theosophy sees the passage from one root race to another as always evolution, never devolution, thus the Hyperborean could not be superior to modern man.
[58] According to these esotericists,[citation needed] the Hyperborean people represented the Golden Age polar center of civilization and spirituality, with mankind, instead of evolving from a common ape ancestor, progressively devolving into an apelike state as a result of straying, both physically and spiritually, from its mystical otherworldly homeland in the Far North, succumbing to the 'demonic' energies of the South Pole, the greatest point of materialization.
Following J. D. P. Bolton's location of the Issedones on the south-western slopes of the Altay Mountains, Carl P. Ruck places Hyperborea beyond the Dzungarian Gate into northern Xinjiang, noting that the Hyperboreans were probably Chinese.
[62] Aleksandr Dugin has "touted ancient legends about the sunken city of Atlantis and the mythical civilisation Hyperborea" in defense of his vision of a vast Russian Empire.
[63] The archaeologists Kristian Kristiansen and Thomas B. Larsson have argued that accounts of Hyperborea and its associated myths represent "a mythological relict" from the Bronze Age: The Delphic Apollo had strong northern links with the solar deity of the Baltic, from where amber came.
On numerous metal items swans carried the sun, materialising the common myth of the sun-god, which according to Herodotus (IV, 32-6) was brought to Delos by Hyperborean maidens in at least two missions.
[69] In 1924 the tombs associated with the Hyperborean maidens in Delos (Hyperoche, Laodice, Opis and Arge) were found "in the very places described by Herodotus" and exacavated by French archaeologists Charles Picard and Joseph Replat.
