The Arctic Home in the Vedas: Part 1

Just to give some background--part fact, part theory--the proto-Norse during the last Ice Age, lived approximately in what is today Iran. That land looked very different 25,000 years ago. There was an ice cap a mile high above the 45 or 50 degree latitude in the northern hemisphere. Now if you look on a map, that would make "ancient Iran" and the surrounding territory into something of an Alaska! A totally different environment: dim, cold, mountainous, wooded. A harsh land of wood and snow, with whoolly rhronoceros, mammoth, and lion. These proto-Norse were not specifically "European" then; although this is part of "the Indo-European story."

"Apparently the belief (earth-based/month-birth classification system) is mainly a Norse conception, since it was the Nordic peoples, of all the ancients, who most clearly expressed their ideas in Nature. Some authorities assert that it comes from the East, whence comes all mystical lore. But since modern scholars now prove the Norse tribes to have migrated from Asia, originally, there may easily be a common origin of ideas. Certain it is that, far away in the dim ages of our nation's (UK) dawning, when wandering Aryan tribes, said to have come originally from the plain of Iran, in Central Asia, swarmed over and settled in Northern Europe, they found their ideas of God in Nature."
--Margaret Baillie-Sanders (UK), 'Your Birthday Month and You', 1932

Numerous authors and researchers--including Guido von List--who studied and wrote about subject matter basically dealing with Odinic-type spiritual traditions, eventually drifted off to other cultures to the south and east, and to India. It's as if there's a loose concept that the roads to all pre-Christian spiritual traditions, of the "earth island" and beyond, lead to ancient India. Some people believe that there once existed "mystery schools" which once tied together ancient wisdom from England to India. I don't believe that; but I think there could have been geographically smaller spiritual tie-ins between east and west, and which vibrated outward over thousands of years.

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