The Eternal Bonfires of the pagan Sun Worshippers, at the tallest hills of Aestii castles in Sambia

"When you, hero, land there, as I tell you,
dig a pit one cubit long and wide,
and around it pour out the libation for all the dead:
firstly with honeyed milk, then with sweet wine,
thirdly with water, and sprinkle white barley (...)"
Odyssey 10.516-520
Besides the mysterious, archaic charm of these lines, where Circe explains Ulysses how to act, we cannot help being piqued by that “pit” around which the rite was held: it is not difficult to recognize it as the equivalent of the ancient Roman mundus, a well or “mouth” (Mund in German) that acted as the entrance to the Underworld. This was also the pit that, according to the legend, Romulus dug when he founded Rome, the hole into which he threw the sacred first harvest. Georges Dumézil points out that:
"It corresponded remarkably to an archaic Vedic rite where the square sacrificial fire place was marked out (...) In the middle of the quadrilateral, exactly where the diagonals met, in a spot called “mouth,” the priests placed a tuft of grass called darbha onto this symbolic equivalent of a mundus; then they poured twelve jars of water and sprinkled all kinds of herb seeds over it. This rite is surely very ancient."
Dumézil, Georges, La religione romana arcaica (Archaic Roman Religion), Milan 1977, p. 562.
The connection to Vedic rites tallies with Tilak’s theory that his ancestors, known as the ‘Aryans’-who spoke a language that belonged to the same family as the Greek and Norse languages-originated from an Arctic land. Here it is appropriate to open a parenthesis to summarize his theory. In The Arctic Home in the Vedas, Tilak expounds the audacious theory that the ‘Aryans’, “cousins” of the Achaeans, originally came from an Arctic region: this hypothesis is based on the fact that the Vedas, i.e., the most ancient collection of hymns in Hindu literature, show evident traces of a calendar typical of the Arctic regions, which includes winter darkness, midnight sun and revolving dawns. In another book, The Orion he shows that the Vedic hymns date back to the so-called “Orionic period”, when the rising of the sun at the spring equinox corresponded to the position of Orion’s constellation-this phenomenon occurred every year from about 4000 to 2500 BC, then this configuration gradually changed due to the precession motion of Earth’s axis. In short, Tilak’s two books-the former from the geographic point of view, the latter from the chronological one-allow us to form an opinion about the location, both in space and time, of the original civilization that produced the Vedic hymns before it moved south to India-which roughly took place at the same time as the migration of the Achaeans to Greece.
Significantly, the Orionic period preceded the ‘Indo-European’ migration and, by a surprising coincidence, chronologically overlapped the Atlantic climatic optimum, which provided acceptable living conditions even at very high latitudes. However, Tilak could not draw the obvious conclusion from his studies-that the original Aryan civilization flourished in an Arctic land during the Orionic period thanks to the fact that the climate at that time was milder-because he was unaware of the climatic optimum. He was obliged, therefore, to backdate that civilization to an unlikely very distant past, even preceding the last ice age, which prejudiced the historical reliability of his theory. Instead, now, by comparing his theory to the current knowledge on the evolution of the climate in the last millennia, we are able to confirm his intuitions.
The Nordic Origins of the Odyssey and the Iliad: the Migration of Myth.
by Felice Vinci, 2022

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