Birth And Death Of The World In Aryan Myth

h/t Vidar

SS NOTEBOOK NO. 3. 1944

Where do worlds. gods, men and all things between heaven and earth come from? And what is their destiny, above all that of the gods and worlds, even if they survive the earthly life of man and are subject to a great cosmic law?

These are the eternal questions that man has always asked himself in all eras and among all peoples. The comparative study of myths and legends reveals an astonishing concordance, both in the questions and in the answers. But it is not simply a matter of noting a racial diference in the study of myths. The Aryan myth of the birth of the world is in principle different from the Chinese, Babylonian or Aztec myths. Although the representations of a cosmic order seem, at first sight, to be equally divergent in the Aryan racial area, there is, despite spatial and temporal differences, a common basic structure that is recognised. The same knowledge of an eternal universal law is discernible in the emerging experience of the Germanic North, in that of the thinkers of Vedic India and in the prayers of the great Aryan mystic Zarathustra.

The Rig-Veda and the Edda provide the most magnificent evidence of world-birth myths from the Aryan racial sphere. Almost two thousand years before the philosophical perception of the world began in Greece, the Indian Aryan wisdom reached the limits of human knowledge beyond which ignorance reigns. Today we cannot but have great respect for the compelling purity of Aryan wisdom which manifests its full depth in the tenth book of the Rig-Veda, chapter 129:

1. “In the past there was no non-being, nor was there being. There was no space and no sky above. What was moving? Where did it move? In what expanse? Was the water unfathomably deep?
2. In the past there was no death, no immortality, no difference between night and day. The One breathed without wind from its own power; there was nothing else but that.
3. Who knows with certainty, who can announce here where it was born, where it comes from, this creation? The gods are on this side of the creation of the universe. But who knows where it comes from?
4. Where did this creation come from; whether it is created or uncreated. He who watches over it from heaven. He knows it well! or does he not know it more?

In the eyes of Christian thought, this last question might seem to be a severe outrage and a denial of divine omnipotence. The Aryan mind of India knows no such fetters, nor any absolute divine revelation which curses a priori any human idea relating to it. Like the Greeks of Homer, like the Germans of the heroic songs of the Edda, the Indian presents himself to his gods with a proud self-consciousness and an almost serene calm. He also knows that the gods are ‘on this side of the creation of the universe and that, like man, they are subject to a higher world order. And, to understand this ultimate cause of the world verbatim, he invests himself entirely in himself, isolated in the attractive and promising fields of the mind. Nor was he able to define that which did not exist in the beginning. But like a wanderer who can no longer explain anything, he seeks and struggles for knowledge, explores the word in its deepest foundations and finds long before a Plato and an Aristotle the absolute fundamental notion: Atman and Brahman–the one and the all—sat and âsat—being and non-being. Thus, our text illustrates in an exemplary way the fact that Aryan India transformed the multiple and pictorial creation of poetic experience into a thinking reason, into an abstract notion.

In the Edda, the destiny of the worlds has remained a genuine, structured myth of the profound prediction of the Norns and the wise seers with their faces imbued with mystery. Where India already manifests the sacredness of abstract thought, the prediction of the Germanic Volva envelops the Nordic country with its whispering song, where every word reflects the earthly environment.

There are certainly multiple questions and answers, yet the ‘seer’s face acts as a powerful music, roaring in fatal chords, then whispering again and speaking softly of eternal things–whereas in Aryan India, naked and raw language alone is explicit.

The Edda begins with the prediction of the seer. The importance that was once attributed to it can already be seen. Attempts to find in this poem of the fate of the worlds a religious purpose of an alien nature have always failed. The prediction of the Volva is not a religion and does not want to be. It is a vision of great style, mythical, of an era that still knew how to learn from the study of the outside world, that was intent on spying on the many secrets of the forests and the seas.

The seer expresses her mysterious science in a voice that makes all noise cease and imposes a solemn silence:

Silence I ask all
Sacred beings,
Young and old Son of Heimdall;
Do you want me, Valfüdr, to I reveal
The ancient stories of men,
The most remote I can remember,

I remember the giants
Originally born,
They who, a long time ago,
Gave birth to me;
Nine worlds I remember.
Nine huge expanses
And the glorious tree of the world
Buried under the earth.

It was in the first age
Where there was nothing,
Neither sand nor sea
Nor cold waves;
There was no land
Nor high skies,
The emptiness was gaping
And grass nowhere

What a gulf between the ‘being and non-being of the Rig-Veda and the ‘Neither sand nor sea/ Nor cold waves of our poem! Here are the limits of the mind’s solitary reflections, here the lived features of the Nordic country! On the one hand, the first great attempt of Aryanity, which has always remained alien to this environment, to understand things in a purely rational way, is expressed; on the other hand, the seen and the experienced are transposed into mythical and also poetic words, which reveal an extremely lively relationship with this environment. One can see the particularly glaring gaps that have caused the Aryan mind to follow different paths during evolution.

The Germanic myth of the birth of the world is an immortal testimony to the living interaction between experience and creation. And when the seer first evokes the ancient times of mythical memory, she immediately unfolds before our eyes a grandiose image of the world that synthesises past, present and future with unyielding necessity. Gods and men are born, a creation, a construction, and ‘war came into the world’, a fact that must be faced heroically.

One has the impression of witnessing a process of world evolution presented as a great symphony in major keys, but the seer soon curses the first minor chords. She senses the doom that no one can avoid. The twilight of the gods and the worlds is taking shape. The gods are preparing themselves and men too. Inevitably, Volva interprets the infallible signs of the impending end:

The brothers will fight each other
And put themselves to death,
Parents will defile
Their own layer;
Rough weather in the world,
Universal adultery.
Time of the axes, time of the swords,
The shields are cracked,
Time of storms, time of wolves
Before the world collapses;
Person
Spare no one.

The sun is getting darker,
The land sinks into the sea,
The shining stars
Flicker in the sky;
Rage the fumes,
The flames are roaring.
An intense ardour
Play to the sky.

The twilight of the gods and worlds—this is the boldest Aryan thought. It concludes the myth of the birth of worlds and the grand beginning ends in an equally powerful ending. The Aryan mind knows no perfect world, born and then collapsing, nor a final judgment. Rather, the world is “a wheel turning on itself’ symbolised by the swastika. Vedic texts often refer to the cosmic order as “the great wheel of becoming” which rolls irresistibly along with destiny. Nor is the decay of the gods and the world the ultimate end that continues with a life in an eternal afterlife.

Since Nietzsche, the notion of the “eternal return of all things” has been a great thought in the making. The teaching of the return finds its most sublime form in the Völuspa. Yes, the twilight of the gods is quite absurd without a new morning of the worlds in the Germanic perspective. The victorious transformation of the bad into the good will be accomplished when “the bad become better and Baldr returns”. The most sacred Aryan certainty is that light will finally triumph over darkness, good over evil. It found its timeless manifestation in the teaching of the great Aryan Persian Zarathustra in an illustrious age.

Fritz Reich

-excerpted from “The SS Order – Ethics & Ideology” by Edwige Thibaut