Arktos (book)

The term "Arktos" derives from the Greek word for "bear," arktos (ἄρκτος), referring to the constellation Ursa Major, which prominently features in the northern sky and gave its name to the Arctic. The book's title invokes this celestial and geographical association with the North.

Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival is a 1993 book by historian of occultism Joscelyn Godwin. The book is a history of mythic and occultist interest in the polar regions of Earth, the Arctic and Antarctic, particularly in the context of and their influence on the mythology of occultism in Nazism. The book was first published in 1993 by Phanes Press in the United States and by Thames & Hudson in the United Kingdom. It covers the presence of polar myths in many traditions...

Joscelyn Godwin's Arktos is a compelling excavation of a peculiar, yet persistent, thread in the tapestry of human belief: the myth of the polar regions. It is not merely a geographical curiosity, but a potent symbol, a locus of the sacred that has drawn the attention of mystics, occultists, and even ideologues across millennia. The bear constellation, arktos, charting its eternal circuit in the northern sky, became inextricably linked with the celestial pole, a fixed point in a turning cosmos. This celestial anchor found its terrestrial echo in the idea of a polar center, a primordial axis mundi, a paradise lost or yet to be found.

From the Hyperborean myths of the ancient Greeks, a land of perpetual sunshine beyond the North Wind, to the subterranean realms and lost continents imagined by later esotericists, the poles have served as a blank canvas onto which humanity has projected its deepest desires for origin, purity, and ultimate knowledge. Mircea Eliade, in his seminal works on myth and religion, often pointed to the significance of the "center of the world" as a place of cosmic renewal and spiritual access. The polar myth is a powerful manifestation of this archetypal concept, a geographical displacement of the sacred heart of the cosmos.

Godwin meticulously traces this thread, showing how it wove its way through theosophy, Arianism, and most disturbingly, into the pseudo-scientific and racialist doctrines that fueled Nazism. The idea of a pure, Aryan homeland in the Arctic, a refuge from a degenerate world, became a potent, albeit monstrous, distortion of an ancient symbolic geography. The book reminds us that symbols are not inert; they are living forces, capable of being reinterpreted, appropriated, and weaponized. It is a testament to the power of myth to shape not only our understanding of the cosmos but also our very perception of reality and our place within it, urging us to consider the potent, often unseen, currents that shape human thought and action.