Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 4. The Sky Connection 102
filled with objects that moved in a circular fashion, and a single sky object which
did not move that they called the “Nail of the Heavens,” to us it is known as the
Pole-Star or the North-Star. Descriptions in Scandinavian literature do not tell us
that the Pole-Star represents the upper end of the World Tree, 20 but they show
it to be the apex of the bowl-shaped sky. It also known from northern European
folk culture that it was the primary reference point in the sky from which all other
movements were reckoned and compared to stationary geographical locations such
as mountains, local trees, house orientations, etc. In other words, as the stars moved
around the Pole-Star, the amount of movement could be easily visualized by how far
they moved in relation to the “stationary” earth-bound objects. But, it is the Samí
to the north end of Scandinavia, and their eastern neighbors, the Finns, who have
remembered that the Nail (as they also call it) is the apex of Yggdrasil and it would
be well to note that the apex is slightly to the North (hence the term North Star).
This concept is relatively common to rural folk throughout the entire circumpolar
region from the Baltic sea to the Aleutians; it may even have been common enough
that it was not worth mentioning in heroic poetry or family sagas, since the main
thrust of such literature was to leave a record of either Gods or men not to create
a forerunner to the Duden “Picture Dictionary” of Life in the Viking Age.
Doing away with all the modern low-charts and mathematical diagrams, the
picture of the universe becomes much simpler and clearer: a disk of the Earth, one
side being the World of the Living, the other, the Land of the Dead; a stationary
sky much like a glass cover over a cheese plate; the land-sky connection, Lærað, in
the middle of it all holding all life within it. There are also two other connections
between the plate and the glass cover which are not stationary, but move according
to the time of day or the season: the Rainbow-Bridge or the “Brig o’ Dread,” and
the Bridge of the Night, the Shimmering Way, Bifröst. In both cases of the land-sky
bridges (they could have been the same bridge seen as the Milky Way at night
and the rainbow by day), the ends connect to points where sky meets earth, the
horizon, and the center rises up into the sky passing through the upper branches of
the World Tree. This is a very simple arrangement compared to the many others
floating around out there. Such an arrangement also matches up to most other
tribal systems of the subarctic, both European and Asian, as well as many in the
more temperate areas, for defining the cosmos. Is it too simple? After all didn’t the
Völva in Völuspá mention that she remembered nine worlds not just three as the
system here would imply? Perhaps.
Although there are a variety of theories around, dealing with the idea that the
20 Some of the Siberian tribes describe the Pole-Star, Polaris, as being the upper point of
the world’s ”tent-pole” or as the apex of a world tree. The reader is refered to Mircea Eliade’s
Shamanism:Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy for a more complete discussion of these concepts.