"The Deloans claim that offerings wrapped in wheat straw are brought from the land of the Hyperboreans to the land of the Scythians. In turn, neighbors receive them from the Scythians, and forward them on and on till the Adriatic Sea. Thence they are further sent towards the South, and the Dononans-as the first among the Hellenes-accept them. From them, they arrive to the Gulf of Malis, cross the strait to Euboea, whence... Thus they relate how these offerings arrive in Delos. But on the first occasion, the Hyperboreans sent two maidens to carry the offerings, whose names were Hyperoche and Laodice according to the Deloans." (Herodotus, The Histories, Fourth Book #33.) 

"The Sacred Route" followed at its farther end the well-known route of commerce from the coves of the Adriatic Sea towards Cernumtum, known as an important site of commerce which was located to the east of the present Vienna, at a bend of the Danube, a Celtic city named after the god Cernunnos, and from thence further on by Elba to the North Sea or following the Wisla, to the coasts of the Baltic Sea. In this connection it must be noted that this route is almost identical to "Hellvägen",  the Amber Road, which rose into high prominence during the Roman era. The word for amber in Baltic Finnish languages is archaic, "helm", and in modern Finnish  helmi  means  pearl.

The Scythians were notorious to the Greeks. They also knew that Scythians do not live anywhere near the Adriatic Sea. The most plausible explanation for the mention about the Scythians is the fact that the  Hyperboreans lived-according to the Greeks-in the neighborhood of the Scythians or their sphere of influence. The Scythians and the Greeks were in constant contact with each other on the shores of the Black Sea and the Crimean Peninsula which had Greek colonies and commercial cities at an early period. By the wide Russian rivers, the Greek goods went on towards the North, and the Greeks probably knew that behind the empire of the Scythians there are other peoples, and possibly they had some contacts with them as well.

About later periods we know that whoever ruled the downstreams of the rivers discharging into the Black or the Caspian Seas and thus controlled the commerce vital to the North Russian peoples, usually was able to ally with and/or tax the Northern peoples. The best-known example is the  Hermannaric Empire.  We suppose: Hyperborea was politically part of the Scythian empire or union. When the aforementioned gifts are routed via the West from the Adriatic to the Baltic Sea, the route crosses the lands dependent on the Scythians only on the territory of the Finnic peoples which extended at the time from the Gulf of Riga to the White Sea and Middle Russia. To the question why the nations north to the Scythians contacted the Greeks via the Western route there is a logical answer: the Hyperboreans knew that the steppes north to the Black Sea were politically unstable. At any moment, the "Caspian Gate" could let through a nomadic people which did not honor good manners or any rules and was able to foul up the political conditions and the traffic in the area. Before the Scythians, there had been others, and others will come after them, was the general way of thinking in the North. When one traveled to the Greek world from the Baltic Sea via the Western road, one was in a politically stabler area where traditional customs between tribes were honored even during wartime.

The denomination  Scythian  connects Hyperborea to the world situated to the East of the Baltic Sea. Traveling via the  age-old hell road  implies generally an area North to the Baltic and North Seas, but, as will be shown later, the Scandinavians did not assume the honor thereof in their myths. They placed the realm of wonders and riches, their Hades and the land of the deceased eastward and northward of themselves, the farthest coves of  Perämeri,  the Gulf of the White Sea or the shores of the Arctic Ocean; in spoken tradition excursions to those regions turned into dreamlike horror stories about "man-eaters" and other monsters. In addition to the Sagas there is a large number of living witnesses aiding in locating Hyperborea: flights of birds of passage.

In ancient Mediterranean civilizations, it was known whither birds of passage traveled in the North. There firmament and land met, and through a slit between the two, flocks of birds slipped into another world, to return at the next change of seasons. To prevent monsters from intruding the human world from behind the "border of the world", the Hellene gods had the wisdom of posting watchmen. Since the firmament, the dome of the sky, lies quite low at the extremes of the world, the watchman people was small in stature and bowlegged. A Greek ceramic painting has preserved a view of the outward appearance of these inhabitants of the ultimate region: short, bowlegged, dark-haired, and dressed in a kind of frock reaching down to the calves. The situation in which the painting presents the representative of this folk is extremely interesting: the boatman of Hades. Our Väinämöinen encountered at the river of Tuonela his daughter, and the ancient Finns called him among others "...Joukahainen laiha poika lappalainen," i. e. "Youkahainen, Lapland's young and fiery minstrel" /Crawford 1888/; "He, the puny son of Lapland" /Kirby 1907/; "He the lanky lad of Lapland" /Friberg 1988/; "The young Joukahainen, the lean Lappish lad" /Bosley 1989/. "Jouka" -- "Joukahainen" = joutsen [in dialects, "joukkainen", "joukhainen"; "josch" in Mansi,] Finnish for "swan". Thus the river separating the living and the dead, and also the borderline between sky and earth, was guarded by the folk of the waterfowl. The Greece of the antiquity knew them, and each Spring large flocks of birds flew to them by the "way of the cranes". If the Deloans had a name for the Samis or the Finns, it may have been Hyperborean.

In itself, Herodotus´ account is plausible, meaning that in the conditions of his time people may have acted precisely in the way just described. The most fascinating part of the story is however the fact that regardless of the contempt felt by the ancient Greeks towards "barbarians" in general, they revered highly the dwellers of the ultimate North. There must have been a reason for this; and we shall discuss it further on.

There have been attempts to explain the numerous common features in the archaeological findings of Fennoscandia and the Mediterranean area, besides the above mentioned labyrinths, with other reasons than cultural connections since the historians of the antiquity do not mention such connections. One such passage is the above quotation from "the father of historiography", and later we shall notice that it is not the only one.

The classical pattern of the labyrinth, a circle formed by a winding and unforked corridor which ended at the center of the figure which can be found in e. g. Cretan coins of the Minoan era and the coast of Finland represented--according to the ancients--the sacred dance of the cranes and the planet Mercury. The Cretan Minoan high culture also included the labrys, a double-edged axe.

The denomination of the classical Minoan labyrinth is "troy" both in the Greco-Roman and the Etruscan traditions, and in later (?) North European place-names: Troytown (English,) Troijeborgs-slotte (Swedish,) and Caerdroia (Cymric.) A Pompeian graffito artist wrote beside a picture showing a Minoan-style labyrinth, Labyrinthus, hic habitat Minotavrus. Thus the labyrinth phenomenon forms a whole which includes a certain pattern or figure, "troy", "minotaurus", or a bull, a waterfowl, a maiden, dance and a cord or a ribbon.

The recently deceased Californian-Lithuanian professor of archaeology, Marija Gimbutas, has found out the origins of the bull culture. The horned head of a bull resembles the female uterus and ovaries. The styling routines of the early artists in this subject corroborate Gimbutas´ view. So we are dealing with a life cult of an ancient community striving for balance, in which the bull was revered as the Queen´s animal and as a symbol of death and rebirth.

So the labyrinth was involved in the cult rites of the Goddess. Its entrance was a narrow gate, then a long corridor had to be passed through, and at the end awaited an ambiguous bull or--as in the Fennoscandian and Etrurian traditions, a maiden.

A denomination for a stone labyrinth known also in Finland, "Jungfrudansen", is connected with the above. The matter dealt thus with fertility. On a wall of the medieval Sipoo church, (probably) built at an old heathen cult site, there is a fresco painting in which a maiden is shown at the middle of a complete Minoan labyrinth.

There is a verse in the preface of Agricola´s translation of the Psalms with its list of old Finnish gods which describes a "holy wedding", or the copulation of the sky god Ukko who governed among others rain, and his divine mate, Rauni, which obviously secured the fertility of the fields according to the early Finns. And about the "Ukon Vakka" (basket of Ukko) rite, Agricola does complain pathetically, "Siellä paljo häpiä tehtin". (Many shameful things were committed there.)

Of the megalith monuments constructed by the Stone Age farmers and fishermen of "Old Europe", at least the mound graves containing a chamber and a corridor were also symbols of the Goddess. In the region stretching from the Western Mediterranean Sea to the isles of Scotland and the middle of Poland, the bones of the deceased people of the communities were collected into mounds, carefully constructed with stacked stones and loose earth, which represented Mother Earth in an abstract form; and their remains are imposing even today. The large stones of the best known megalithic construction in Ireland, the New Grange grave and observatory mound, include carvings of the same ornaments that appear in the Goddess statuettes´ torso paintings found by Gimbutas in the Balkans and Ukraine.

The Theseus/Ariadne myth gives a totally different picture of Minotaurus and the Labyrinth. The ancient life forces have been turned into archaic and subconscious "evil" which is symbolically destroyed. Something horrifying had taken place in Europe, and old myths were rewritten. This phase is best described by Herodotus´ precursor and colleague, Hesiod.

Hesiod tells about a "golden tribe" which lived in Greece before the intrusion of the Achaeans, Ionians, and Dorians, "All good was theirs. The fertile earth lavished its gifts without asking and without limit. In peace and convenience did they till their flourishing soil, rich in numbers and favored by the immortals." After this people which Hesiod calls "pure in spirit" and "enemy of evil", came a lesser "silver tribe", in turn supplanted by the "brass tribe, completely unlike the silver tribe, terrible and mighty, originated in an ash pit".

Hesiod goes on by telling how this people--according to present knowledge, the Bronze Age Achaeans--brought war with it. "Their greatest concern were the sinful, woe-inducing acts of Ares". Hesiod names the Mycenaean culture, created by the Achaeans and the previous peoples together, "the fourth tribe" which was "nobler and more just than the previous one".

But the conquest was incomplete since parts of the old culture survived within the new framework. Old gods were not forgotten--their role was simply changed and they were accompanied by the Indo-European war gods beside the Olympian pantheon. Too, the myths were adapted for the new environment, and the aforementioned story about Theseus is a good example of such rewriting.

The upheaval that took place in Europe is described in the Scandinavian mythology as the battle between the Aesir and the Vanir, and Pohjan Akka of our Kalevala is a typical product of rewriting. (Rendered by Crawford, "Louhi, hostess of Pohjola, Ancient, toothless dame of Northland," and by Kirby, "Louhi, Pohjola's old Mistress, Old and gap-toothed dame of Pohja", and by Friberg, "Louhi, mistress of Pohjola, She the sparse-toothed dame of Northland", and by Bosley, "Louhi, mistress of Northland, The gap-toothed hag of the North", and into German by Anton Schiefner and reviewed by Martin Buber, "Louhi, sie, Pohjola´s Wirtin, Nordlands zähnearme Alte.") The crooked and power-hungry Akka is the opponent of the people of Päivölä (land of the day) with whom the hearers identify. Her headquarters are situated in the extreme North, the land of death and darkness. An old Scandinavian tale places King Gorm the Old who once ruled a part of Denmark in a context of still greater an antiquity. Assumably, a voyage to RUIJA by a historical character turns in the story more and more mythical as we proceed farther to the North, and at the Kantalahti of the White Sea we already encounter monsters of the myths and fears of the subconscious.

The "Northland" known by the Kalevala and Saga poetry is a region of dangers, riches, and death. It is ruled by a woman, but she does not procreate life. The only wealth of Pohjola is cold gold and commercial goods. It is indeed interesting to compare the new role of Akka with certain Levantine innovations of the same age in which the role of the creator of life and even the giver of birth is transferred to a male godhead. When the culture was patriarchalized, it was done very thoroughly.

The "Northland" of Kalevala and the Sagas is a land of the deceased: House of the Dead, River of Tuonela, Man-Eating Mountain... All this was placed in the region of light summer nights and the youngest Troy labyrinths of Europe.

Another typical example of rewritten myths is the story of St. George. An armed horseman--thus a robber, a knight or some other bully--slays a dragon, the symbol of happiness of the old religion. Since an urban version of the cult of the vengeful and ultra-intolerant war-god of a desert people, Christianity, was foisted on the Europeans, this and several other stories were produced.

The war of the Aesir and the Vanir ended in a compromise, as the sagas tell us, nor did the European crusade of the "killer demon of a waterless desert" produce any better results. The Catholic church quickly assumed many holidays and rites of the pagans to be converted, and even some of their gods.

From ecclesiastical history we know that the apostle Paul fulminated in Ephesus against one of the most central cult of the antiquity. Although the populace gathered at the demonstration shouted, "Great [is] Diana of the Ephesians", the followers of Paul won--that time around. A couple of centuries later, the Council of the Christianity which still was rather uniform made a decision in Ephesus to order Virgin Mary to be worshiped as divine. So, great is Diana of the Ephesians! The medieval stone church of Maaria is incidentally one of the three Finnish churches which has a labyrinth drawing as an ornament on its wall. The other drawings are in the churches of Perniö and Sipoo. When a minister preached to his congregation at the Sipoo church about the heroics of St. Paul it is doubtful whether he knew whose picture is at the middle of the wall labyrinth.

Old religion has lived on for millennia: as a substratum within a dominating religion, as subcultures, witchcraft, and traditions whose origin and meaning we no longer recognize.

The cult sites of the Goddess remained in use longest in Europe at PERÄMERI, in the ultimate North. Thus we are again in Hyperborea, but not the evil Pohjola encountered by Väinämöinen and Gorm the Old. The building of the symbols of life, birth, fertility, and continuity, that is, labyrinths, went on here until the last century. Probably the builders of the last Jatuli gardens of the archipelago no longer understood everything that was involved in the subject, the old tradition having regressed into magic and trickery, but nevertheless they still built them--and recalled something.

Was the way of the cranes from the Aegean Sea to Perämeri or Dvina the route through which the gifts mentioned by Herodotus traveled to the most central sanctum of the ancient Greece, and did the Greeks revere the carriers of the gifts as rememberers of the "Golden Tribe" of Hesiod and as the People of the Goddess?

If this is the case, the medieval chroniclers were not wrong in placing in various places between the Gulf of Finland and the White Sea the Terra Feminarum and the Insula Amazonarum, and our own runo singers when relating about Pohjan Akka, that reversed character.

In the famous history by Adam of Bremen, the "land of women" has been located in Southern Finland, and another chronicler tells that it is equally far from Birka and Reval (Tallinn) when traveling by sea. And the word pair Queen/Kveeni (dweller of Kainuu, Finn of Norway, Finn of Norrbotten) remains still unresearched. The English scientist, Thomas W. Shore, presents in his large book "Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Race" several old place-names in England with Finnish influence, and he believes they have a connection with the fact that Finnish "Normans" took part together with Anglo-Saxons in the conquest of England. Shore pays special attention to the words "queen-" and "Kween-" which thus are connected with the inhabitants of Kainuu and the Finns. Shore´s object was to find out from which peoples the modern English population had inherited its genes, and such place-names give evidence of the presence of Finns. Also elsewhere in Europe, the word family of the queen and kveeni type is associated with the Finns.

Ancient chroniclers have seen here in Hyperborea something odd. Something which they have been able to describe with very few words, and these few words have been copied until they have been worn out practically into an unrecognizable state and fused into new environments.

Consequently, labyrinths must be viewed as part of the life form and social system which prevailed in Europe before the Christian era. Ancient communities reinforced their unity with annual festivals in which the entire village or tribe took part. During the darkest time of the year a feast was held which was called "hjul" in Scandinavia, and it may have found its way into Finnish before Christianity. I mean Yule, the heathen festival of midwinter. The fact that a word for "wheel" was established to stand for an annual festival can be understood only if one supposes that this event was connected both with the Sun and a labyrinth constructed in the earth.

When village communities lost the independence they had had during heathen times, and the "legal authorities" now present in the villages began to see to it that the people stay within the bounds of the official state religion, the powers that be attempted to destroy the age-old rites which had kept the communities together for millennia. Although this wasn´t completely successful--as late as in the 19th century a minister found his villagers performing heathen rites at the Lauri spring of Janakkala--the Hiisi's, Pitämys trees and Jatuli gardens remained either within private properties with reduced meaning, or in secluded places where remains of old rites could be performed without unnecessary eyewitnesses. But now they were no longer the common rites of the village but rather private persons dabbling with "occultism".

Pekka Kemppainen