Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 4. The Sky Connection 100
can be attempted starting with what is actually seen. Caution is necessary so that
unneeded complexity is not tossed into the picture out of habit; simplicity is far
more necessary than symmetry.
Looking at the night sky, these ancient people saw fixed stars in constellations
with a hazy, star-studded band of light running through and around them. At
midnight, once a year, the “open end” of the frozen, solid-appearing band of stars
led directly from the center of the common night spectacular known to us as the
aurora borealis to a point which passed immediately over the Land of the Living. All
the colors were certainly awe-inspiring, but the flashing curtains of reds brought to
mind bloody battles they had known in their lives with memories of ancestors and
relatives who had fallen by the sword. Memories, for these pre-scientific-age people,
were not by-products of neurons firing in a pattern, but were actual visits by the
souls (hugr, hug: ON) of those remembered. With the sighting of the red mottled
aurora borealis, memories were of those who had crossed the threshhold from life to
death, particularly as the result of violence. Umo Holmberg writes
“During the pagan period, separate worlds for the good and the bad dead
were unknown. But, already at that time, there seem to have been views
that the dead attained to different worlds, not on account of their deeds
during life, but according to that which had been the cause of their death.
Those who died in battle or as the result of some accident did not go to the
underworld but peopled another world up in the heavens. . . . According to
the Finnish Lapps the aurora borealis is ‘the dead in battle, who, as spirits
still continue battling with one another in the air.” 17
He further adds that
“to the same folk belief may ultimately be traced the Scandinavian belief
in Valhall, where the souls of the dead in battle dwell, and, according to
Gylfaginning, ’take on their accoutrements, go out into the yard and fight
and kill one another’.” 18
Looking more closely at the sky-gate formed by the forked end of the Milky Way, the
ancients noticed one side “seemed” to lead upward and the other down. According
to ancient folklore and even some of the more modern, there appears to have been a
tradition of two bridges to the otherworld, one leading to the fighting fields forming
the entire north end of the sky, and the other to the more peaceful landscape of the
Lands Below.
17 In Finno-Ugric Mythology by Umo Holmberg in Mythology of All Races ed. by J. McCol-
lough, p. 80-81, 1928.
18 op. cit., p. 81.