Aurora or Northern Lights in myth and legends. In Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, and other places close to the North Pole the night brings a wavy curtain of green, blue, red and other colored lights stretching across the sky. As evening passes to midnight and on to dawn, the folds of the curtain make fantastic decorations over the heavens, forming arcs, rays, and wreaths. These are some of the many legends concerning Aurora, which still exist in various parts of the world: - Ancient peoples of Alaska, Canada, and Greenland believe that the Aurora is the fire of torches lighting the way to heaven for the spirits of the dead. The beautiful pink rays, which sometimes appear, are thought to be the color of blood shed in the struggles between the spirits. - In Japan, an entry in the ancient Nihon Shoki “Chronicles of Japan is an epical monument of Japanese literature, a cycle of myths and historical legends written in 720A.D.” is thought to refer to the aurora. - In China many sketches resembling the aurora remain. The dark red aurora was considered to be an omen of ill fortune. In Roman Mythology Eos, Goddess of the dawn, was known as Aurora and was the sister of Helios, the Sun. Every morning she would rise from her bed and drive Helios into the sky. Four of her sons are the four winds (north, south, east, and west). According to one myth, her tears cause the dew as she flies across the sky weeping for one of her sons, who was killed by Achilles during the Trojan war. Among the handsome young men whom she carried off as lovers were Orion and Tithonus. Eos asked Zeus to give Tithonus immortality but forgot to include everlasting youth with her request. In Greek Mythology She is Eos Goddess of the dawn, the daughter of the Hyperion and Theia and the sister of Helios (sun) and Selene (moon). She was the mother of the four winds: Boreas, Eurus, Zephyrus, and Notus; and also of Heosphorus and the Stars. She was depicted as a goddess whose rosy fingers opened the gates of heaven to the chariot of the Sun. Her legend consists almost entirely of her intrigues. She first slept with Ares; this earned her the wrath of Aphrodite who punished her by changing her into a nymph. In Finnish, the name for the aurora borealis is Revontulet, which literally translated means Fox Fires. The name comes from an ancient Finnish myth, a beast fable, in which the lights were caused by a magical fox sweeping his tail across the snow spraying it up into the sky. The Lapps, or the Saami, a people who are a close relative race of the Finns, who live in Lapland — that is, north of the Arctic Circle, in what officially are Northern Finland, Sweden, and Norway — traditionally believed that the lights were the energies of the souls of the departed. When the fires blazed in the skies, people were to behave solemnly, and children were admonished to quiet down and be respectful of the fires. It was believed that whoever disrespected the fires incurred bad fortune, which could result in sickness and even death. In Norwegian folklore, the lights were the spirits of old maids dancing in the sky and waving — in Scotland, which had an influx of Viking settlers, the lights are sometimes called the merry dancers. Several of the Eskimo tribes also connected the lights with dancing. Eskimos in Eastern Greenland attributed the northern lights to the spirits of children who died at birth; their dancing caused the dancing lights. The Salteaus Indians of eastern Canada and the Kwakiutl and Tlingit of Southeastern Alaska also believed the lights to be human spirits, whereas an Eskimo tribe living on the lower Yukon River believed the dancers to be the spirits of animals. Young Labrador Eskimos, who believed that the northern lights were torches lit by the dead who were in playing soccer in the heavens with a walrus skull, in turn, would dance to the aurora. The belief that the northern lights were caused by ancient heroes battling in the skies can be traced (in writing) as far as Pliny. Beliefs that the aurora were portents of war and sickness also can be read in the Greeks; one can only imagine how frightening these mysterious lights must have been in places where the lights were a rare phenomenon. Tacitus recorded in his description of Germany the belief that the fires were the Valkyries riding through the air. In the Americas, the Fox Indians of Wisconsin also believed the lights to be an ill omen—they believed the lights to be the ghosts of slain enemies waiting to take revenge. Perhaps the loveliest of the beliefs comes from the Algonquin Indians. They believed that Nanahbozho the Creator, after he finished creating the earth, travelled to the far north, where he still builds great fires which reflect southward, to remind those he created of his lasting love.
Posted on: Sat, 29 Mar 2014 11:51:40 +0000
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