How The Future of Nations Can Be No
Less Interesting Than That of Individuals
Jorge Luis Borges
A Norwegian
fiord or fjord (photo). A fiord is a long, narrow
inlet with steep
sides or cliffs, in a valley carved by glacial activity.
A 2012 Editorial Note:
What is the theosophical
importance of lands situated relatively near the North Pole?
Such regions have the geological memory of distant points
in the timeline of our planet’s life. The North Pole represents Atma, the seventh
and highest principle of human consciousness in theosophy. Nations living near the
North polar region deserve special attention. They may have a natural,
involuntary relation to some higher levels of planetary consciousness which are
also present in every part of the Earth. In some mysterious, indirect ways, these
countries seem to help open a path to the common future of all nations.
In her work “The Secret Doctrine”, Helena P. Blavatsky
explains:
“….It is the north pole, the country of ‘Meru’, which
is the seventh division, as it answers to the Seventh principle (or fourth
metaphysically), of the occult calculation, for it represents the region of
Atma, of pure soul, and Spirituality. Hence Pushkara is shown as the seventh
zone, or dwipa, which encompasses the Kshira Ocean, or Ocean of
milk….” [1]
Just as the other main regions of the planet,
Scandinavia has accompanied present humanity for ages. In his text below, Jorge Luis Borges suggests -
giving us a few practical examples - that Scandinavian countries live things
before they are lived by humanity at large.
In a conversation in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s, Borges said Swedish
and Norwegians live in a way a few centuries in advance as regards other
regions of the Earth.
It is not difficult to see that present day
Scandinavian culture is marked by social justice and humanitarian activities
often having a planetary dimension. Life
in the Nordic countries seems to anticipate in more than one aspect the future
humanity whose guiding principle will be universal brotherhood.
The long past of Scandinavian region is equally
inspiring, and H.P. Blavatsky explained in the late 1880s:
“Rudbeck, a Swedish scientist, tried to prove about
two centuries ago that Sweden was the Atlantis of Plato. He thought, even, that
he had found in the configuration of ancient Upsala, the situation and
measurements given by the Greek sage of the capital of ‘Atlantis’. As Bailly
proved, Rudbeck was mistaken; but so was Bailly likewise, and still more. For Sweden
and Norway had formed part and parcel of ancient Lemuria, and also of Atlantis
on the European side, just as Eastern and Western Siberia and Kamschatka had
belonged to it, on the Asiatic.” [2]
Writing about the “Land of the Eternal Sun”, H. P. B. said:
“…The main point for us lies not in the agreement or
disagreement of the Naturalists as to the duration of geological periods, but
rather in their perfect accord on one point, for a wonder, and this a very
important one. They all agree that during ‘The Miocene Age’ - whether one or
ten million years ago - Greenland and even Spitzbergen, the remnants of our
Second or Hyperborean Continent, ‘had almost a tropical climate.’ Now
the pre-Homeric Greeks had preserved a vivid tradition of this ‘Land of the Eternal
Sun’, whither their Apollo journeyed yearly. ‘During the Miocene Age, Greenland (in N. Lat. 70 degrees) developed an
abundance of trees, such as the Yew, the Redwood, the Sequoia, allied to the
Californian species, Beeches, Planes, Willows, Oaks, Poplars and Walnuts, as
well as a Magnolia and a Zamia’, says Science; in short Greenland had
Southern plants unknown to Northern regions.” [3]
Such a North-South climate connection will be
significant for those interested in the changes of location that take place
from time to time regarding the polar regions of our Earth, and which are
unavoidably related to stronger climate changes.
As to the literary connection between ancient Scandinavia
and the ancient Greeks, it is commented upon by H.P.B. in her work “Isis Unveiled”, and she says:
“Homer’s Odyssey
surpasses in fantastic nonsense all the tales of the Arabian Nights combined; and notwithstanding that, many of his
myths are now proved to be something else besides the creation of the old poet’s
fancy. The Laestrygonians, who devoured the companions of Ulysses, are traced
to the huge cannibal [4] race, said
in primitive days to inhabit the caves of Norway. Geology verified through her
discoveries some of the assertions of Homer, supposed for so many ages to have
been but poetical hallucinations. The perpetual daylight enjoyed by this race
of Laestrygonians indicates that they were inhabitants of the North Cape,
where, during the whole summer, there is perpetual daylight. The Norwegian
fiords are perfectly described by Homer in his Odyssey, x. 110; and the gigantic stature of the Laestrygonians is
demonstrated by human bones of unusual size found in caves situated near this
region, and which the geologists suppose to have belonged to a race extinct
long before the Aryan immigration. Charybdis, as we have seen, has been
recognized in the maëlstrom; and the Wandering Rocks [5] in the enormous icebergs of the Arctic seas.” [6]
On the blessed “Hyperborean” land, H.P.B. comments:
“(….) And now this natural question rises. If the
Greeks knew, in the days of Homer, of a Hyperborean land, i.e., a
blessed land beyond the reach of Boreas, the god of winter and of the
hurricane, an ideal region which the later Greeks and their classics have
vainly tried to locate by searching for it beyond Scythia, a country where
nights were short and days long, and beyond that land a country where the sun
never set and the palm grew freely - if they knew of all this, who then told
them of it? In their day, and for ages previously, Greenland must certainly
have been already covered with perpetual snows, with never-thawing ice, just as
it is now. Everything tends to show that the land of the short nights and the
long days was Norway or Scandinavia, beyond which was the blessed land of
eternal light and summer; and to know of this, their tradition must have
descended to the Greeks from some people more ancient than themselves, who were
acquainted with those climatic details of which the Greeks themselves could
know nothing. Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the
very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and
a continent which is ever green. The archaic teachings, and likewise the
Puranas - for one who understands the allegories of the latter - contain the
same statements. Suffice, then, to us the strong probability that a people, now
unknown to history, lived during the Miocene period of modern science, at a
time when Greenland was an almost tropical land.” [7]
“The
Scandinavian Destiny”, the thought-provoking text by Borges, is reproduced from “Selected Non-Fictions”, J.L.B., edited by Eliot Weinberger, Penguin
Books, UK, 560 pp., 1999, pp. 377-381.
In order to better understand both H.P.B. and Borges
and the numerous implications of many a sentence written by them, readers often
say that they must be read more slowly and with a deeper attention than
conventional authors.
(Carlos Cardoso Aveline)
NOTES:
[1] “The Secret Doctrine”, Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy
Co., Los Angeles, Volume II, p. 403.
[2] “The Secret Doctrine”, Volume II, p. 402. As to Siberia,
Russia and Scandinavia, in the following text Jorge Luis Borges refers to
the fact that Russia was founded by a Scandinavian man named Rurik.
[3] “The Secret Doctrine”, Vol. II, pp. 11.
[4] Note by H. P. Blavatsky: “Why not to the sacrifices of men in ancient
worship?”
[5] Note by H. P. Blavatsky: “Odyssey,
XII, 71.”
[6] “Isis Unveiled”, H. P. Blavatsky, Theosophy Co., Los
Angeles, Vol. I, p. 549.
[7] “The Secret Doctrine”, Vol. II, pp. 11-12.
Information on the distant future of present humanity can also be obtained in
Scandinavian traditions. See “The Secret
Doctrine”, by H.P.B., Vol. II, p. 100.
On Scandinavia, see also “The Secret Doctrine”, Vol. II, p. 7; p. 97; pp. 345-347; and pp. 423-424. These,
however, are but a few references made by HPB on Scandinavia. There are others.
The Scandinavian Destiny
Jorge Luis Borges
That the destiny of nations can be no less interesting
and poignant than that of individuals is a thing Homer did not know, but Virgil
did, and the Hebrews felt it intensely. Another problem (the Platonic problem)
is that of investigating whether nations exist in a verbal or a real way,
whether they are collective words or eternal entities; the fact is that we can
imagine them, and Troy’s misfortune can touch us more than Priam’s. Lines such
as this one from the Purgatorio:
Vieni
a veder la tua Roma chepiagne
[Come see your Rome that weeps]
are proof of the poignancy of the generic, and Manuel Machado has
successfully lamented, in an unquestionably beautiful poem, the melancholy
destiny of the Arab lineages “que todo lo
tuvieron y todo lo perdieron” [who had everything and lost everything].
Here, we might briefly recall the differential traits of this destiny: the
revelation of Divine Unity that almost fourteen centuries ago brought together
the shepherds in a desert and plunged them into a battle that has not ceased
and whose limits were Aquitaine and the Ganges; the cult of Aristotle, which
the Arabs taught Europe, perhaps without entirely understanding it, as if they
were repeating or transcribing a coded message…. All that aside, it is the common
vicissitude of peoples to have and to lose. To be on the verge of having
everything and to lose everything is the tragic destiny of Germany. Rarer and
more dreamlike is the Scandinavian destiny, which I shall attempt to define.
Jordanes, towards the middle of the sixth century, said of Scandinavia
that this island (the Latin cartographers and historians took it for an island)
was like the workshop or seedpod of nations; Scandinavia’s sudden eruptions at
the most heterogenous points of the globe would seem to confirm this viewpoint,
from which De Quincey inherited the phrase officinia
gentium. In the ninth century, the Vikings invaded London, demanded from
Paris a tribute of seven thousand pounds of silver, and pillaged the ports of
Lisbon, Bordeaux, and Seville. Hasting, by a wily strategem, took control of
Luna, in Etruria, put its defenders to the knife, and burned down the city, in
the belief that he had seized Rome. Thorgils, chief of the White Foreigners
(Finn Gaill), ruled the north of Ireland; after the libraries were destroyed,
the clerics fled; one of the exiles was John Scotus Erigena. Rurik, a Swede,
founded the kingdom of Russia, whose capital city, before it was called Novgorod,
was called Holmgard.[1] Toward the year 1000, the Scandinavians,
under Leif Eriksson, reached the coast of America. No one bothered them, but
one morning (as Erik the Red’s Saga tells
it) many men disembarked from canoes made of leather and stared at them in a
kind of stupor. “They were dark and very ill-looking, and the hair on their
heads was ugly; they had large eyes and broad cheeks.” The Scandinavians gave
them the name of skraelingar,
inferior people. Neither the Scandinavians nor the Eskimos knew that the moment
was historic; America and Europe looked upon each other in all innocence. A
century later, disease and the inferior people had done away with the
colonists. The annals of Iceland say: “In 1121, Erik, Bishop of Greenland,
departed in search of Vinland.” We know nothing of his fate; both the bishop
and Vinland (America) were lost.
Viking epitaphs are scattered across the face of the earth on runic stones.
One of them reads:
“Tola erected this stone in memory of his son Harald, brother of Ingvar.
They departed in search of gold, and went far and sated the eagle in the East.
They died in the South, in Arabia”.
Another says:
“May God have pity on the souls of Orm and Gunnlaug, but their bodies
lie in London.”
This one was found on an island in the Black Sea:
“Grani built this barrow in memory of Karl, his friend.”
And this one was engraved on a marble lion found in Piraeus, which was
moved to Venice:
“Warriors carved the runic letters…. Men of Sweden put it on the lion.”
Conversely, Greek and Arab coins and gold chains and old jewels brought
from the Orient are often discovered in Norway.
Snorri Sturluson, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, wrote a
series of biographies of the Kings of the North; the geographic nomenclature of
this work, which covers four centuries of history, is another testimony to the
breadth of the Scandinavian sphere; its pages speak of Jorvik (York); of
Biarmaland, which is Archangel or the Urals; of Nörvesuud (Gibraltar); of
Serkland (Land of the Saracens), which borders the Islamic kingdoms; of
Blaaland (Blue Land, Land of Blacks), which is Africa; of Saxland or Saxony,
which is Germany, of Helluland (Land of Smooth Stones), which is Labrador; of
Markland (Land of Forests), which is Newfoundland; and of Miklagard (Large
Population), which is Constantinople, where, until the fall of the East, the
Byzantine Emperor’s guardsmen were Swedes and Anglo-Saxons. Despite the
vastness of this list, the work is not the epic of a Scandinavian empire.
Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro conquered lands for their king: the
Vikings’ prolonged expeditions were individual. “They lacked political
ambitions,” as Douglas Jerrold explains. After a century, the Normans (men of
the North) who, under Rolf, settled in the province of Normandy and gave it
their name, had forgotten their language, and were speaking French….
Medieval art is inherently allegorical; thus, in the Vita nuova, an autobiographical
narrative, the chronology of events is subordinated to the number 9, and Dante
speculated that Beatrice herself was a nine, “that is, a miracle, whose root is
the Trinity.” That happened around 1292; a hundred years earlier, the Icelanders
had written the first sagas [2], which
are realism in its most perfect form, as this sober passage from Grettir’s Saga proves:
“Days before St. John’s eve, Thorbjörn rode his horse to Bjarg. He had a
helmet on his head, a sword in his belt, and a lance in his hand, with a very
wide blade. At daybreak it rained. Among Atli’s serfs, some were reaping hay;
others had gone fishing to the North, to Hornstrandir. Atli was in his house,
with few other people. Thorbjörn arrived around midday. Alone, he rode to the
door. It was closed and there was no one outside. Thorbjörn knocked and hid
behind the house so as not to be seen from the door. The servants heard the
knock and a woman went to open the door. Thorbjörn saw her but did not let
himself be seen, because he had another purpose. The woman returned to the
chamber. Atli asked who was outside. She said she had seen no one and as they
were speaking of it, Thorbjörn pounded forcefully.”
“Then Atli said: ‘Someone is looking for me and bringing a message that
must be very urgent’. He opened the door
and looked out: there was no one. By now it was raining very hard, so Atli did
not go out; with a hand on the doorframe, he looked all around. At that moment,
Thorbjörn jumped out and with both hands thrust the lance into the middle of
his body.”
“As he took the blow, Atli said: ‘The blades they use now are so wide’.
Then he fell face down on the threshold. The women came out and found him dead.
From his horse, Thorbjörn shouted that he was the killer and returned home.”
The classical rigor of this prose coexist (the fact is remarkable) with
a baroque poetry; the poets did not say “raven” but “red swan” or “bloody
swan”; they did not say “corpse” but “meat” or “corn” of “the bloody swan”.
“Sword’s water” or “death’s dew” were their words for blood; “pirate’s moon”
for a shield….
The realism of the Spanish picaresque suffers from a sermonizing tone
and a certain prudishness regarding sexual matters, though not with respect to
excrement; French realism oscillates between erotic stimulation and what Paul
Groussac termed “garbage dump photography”; the realism of the United States
goes from mawkishness to cruelty; that of the sagas [3] represents an impartial observation. With fitting exaltation,
William Paton Ker wrote: “The great achievement of the older world in its final
days was in the prose histories of Iceland, which had virtue enough in them to
change the whole world, if they had only been known and understood” (English Literature, Medieval, 1912), and
on another page of another book he recalled “the great Icelandic school, the
school that died without an heir until all its methods were reinvented,
independently, by the great novelists, after centuries of floundering and
uncertainty” (Epic and Romance,
1896).
These facts suffice, in my understanding, to define the strange and
futile destiny of the Scandinavian people. In universal history, the wars and
books of Scandinavia are as if they had never existed; everything remains
isolated and without a trace, as if it had come to pass in a dream or in the
crystal balls where clairvoyants gaze. In the twelfth century, the Icelanders
discovered the novel - the art of Flaubert, the Norman - and this discovery is
as secret and sterile, [4] for the
economy of the world, as their discovery of America.
[1953] [Translation, Esther Allen]
NOTES:
[1] On Scandinavia,
Siberia and Russia, see note [2] at
“A 2012 Editorial Note”, above. (CCA)
[2] ( Note by Borges: ) The Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spain
(1947) reads: “Saga (from the German sage,
legend) f. Each one of the poetic legends contained mainly in the two
collections of early heroic and mythological traditions of ancient Scandinavia,
called the Eddas.” This entry is an almost inextricable amalgamation of errors.
Saga is derived from the Icelandic
verb segja (to say), not from sage, a word which did not mean “legend”
in medieval German; the sagas are prose narratives, not poetical legends; they
are not contained in “los dos Eddas”
[the two Eddas] (and whose gender is feminine). The most ancient songs of the
Edda date from the ninth century; the most ancient sagas, from the twelfth.
[3] The Eddas and
the sagas are often discussed in theosophy.
H. P. B. made references to them in various places in the works “Isis
Unveiled” and “The Secret Doctrine”. See also “Collected Writings”, H. P. Blavatsky,
TPH, volume XV, p. 161, “Edda”. (CCA)
[4] “Sterile”. With
the appearance of a criticism, Borges closes his article without obviously
expressing his admiration for Scandinavian nations. This is a writing technique
used to bring to a text a sense of “perceived balance”. From a theosophical
viewpoint, however, such a “sterile” action and influence over human history is
occultly more fruitful, precisely because in an outward dimension it does avoid
“denser levels of karma”. The Vikings linked many points of the globe together,
but they did not make formal colonies or provoke long bloody colonial wars. There
is no need to say that Borges admired them for this. (CCA)
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