Oera Linda
Encyclopedia
Old Frisian
Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian but no medieval texts of this area are known...
. It purports to cover historical, mythological, and religious themes of remote antiquity, compiled between 2194 BC and AD 803.
The manuscript's author is not known with certainty, and it is hence unknown whether the intention was to produce a hoax
Hoax
A hoax is a deliberately fabricated falsehood made to masquerade as truth. It is distinguishable from errors in observation or judgment, or rumors, urban legends, pseudosciences or April Fools' Day events that are passed along in good faith by believers or as jokes.-Definition:The British...
, a parody
Parody
A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...
or simply an exercise in poetic fantasy.
The manuscript first came to public awareness in the 1860s. In 1872, Jan Gerhardus Ottema published a Dutch translation and defended it as "genuine". Over the next few years there was a heated public controversy, but by 1879 it was universally recognized that the text was a recent composition. Nevertheless, a public controversy was revived in the context of 1930s Nazi occultism, and the book is still occasionally brought up in esotericism and "Atlantis
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
" literature.
Goffe Jensma published a monograph on the manuscript in 2004, De gemaskerde god, including a new translation and a discussion of the history of its reception. Jensma concludes that it was likely intended as a "hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians", as well as an "experiential exemplary exercise" by Dutch theologian and poet François Haverschmidt
Piet Paaltjens
thumb|right|François Haverschmidt.François Haverschmidt was a Dutch minister and writer, who wrote prose under his own name but remains best known for the poetry published under the pen name of Piet Paaltjens.- Life and career :Haverschmidt read Calvinist theology at Leiden University, graduating...
.
19th century
The Oera Linda Book, known in FrisianWest Frisian language
West Frisian is a language spoken mostly in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. West Frisian is the name by which this language is usually known outside the Netherlands, to distinguish it from the closely related Frisian languages of Saterland Frisian and North Frisian,...
as Thet Oera Linda Bok, came to light in 1867 when Cornelis Over de Linden (1811–1874) handed the manuscript, which he claimed to have inherited from his grandfather, via his aunt, over to Eelco Verwijs (1830–1880), the provincial librarian of Friesland, for translation and publication. Verwijs rejected the manuscript, but in 1872 Jan Gerhardus Ottema (1804–1879), a prominent member of the Frisian Society for History and Culture, published a Dutch translation. Ottema, believed it to be written in authentic Old Frisian
Old Frisian
Old Frisian is a West Germanic language spoken between the 8th and 16th centuries in the area between the Rhine and Weser on the European North Sea coast. The Frisian settlers on the coast of South Jutland also spoke Old Frisian but no medieval texts of this area are known...
.
The book was subsequently translated into English by William Sandbach in 1876, and published by Trübner & Co. of London.
There was some debate on the book's authenticity during the 1870s, but by 1879 it was widely recognized as a forgery.
Nazi Germany
More than forty years later, beginning in 1922, Dutch völkisch philologist Herman Wirth revived the issue.Wirth published a German translation of what he dubbed the "Nordic Bible" in 1933, as Die Ura Linda Chronik.
A panel discussion on Wirth's book at the University of Berlin on 4 May 1934 was the immediate impulse for the foundation of the Ahnenerbe
Ahnenerbe
The Ahnenerbe was a Nazi German think tank that promoted itself as a "study society for Intellectual Ancient History." Founded on July 1, 1935, by Heinrich Himmler, Herman Wirth, and Richard Walther Darré, the Ahnenerbe's goal was to research the anthropological and cultural history of the Aryan...
Nazi "think tank" by Himmler
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...
and Wirth, together with Richard Walther Darré. Because of the infatuation of Himmler's with the Oera Linda Book and its consequent association with Nazi occultism, it became known as "Himmler's Bible".
Wirth's book was by no means universially acclaimed among the Nazi era Nordicist academics, and the 1934 panel discussion was steeped in heated controversy. Alfred Rosenberg
Alfred Rosenberg
' was an early and intellectually influential member of the Nazi Party. Rosenberg was first introduced to Adolf Hitler by Dietrich Eckart; he later held several important posts in the Nazi government...
and his circle rejected it. Gustav Neckel
Gustav Neckel
Gustav Neckel was a German scholar of medieval German studies and Old Norse....
had praised Wirth's work before publication, but upon seeing its content published a dismayed recension.
Speaking in defense of the book's authenticity were Walther Wüst
Walther Wüst
Walther Wüst was a prominent German Orientalist in the first half of the 20th century who became Rector of the University of Munich from 1941 to 1945. He was also a leading Nazi intellectual, and from 1937 the President of the Research Institute of the Ahnenerbe SS...
and Otto Huth
Otto Huth
Otto Huth was a German theologian, ethnologist, archeologist and an expert on folklore, who taught at the University of Tübingen....
, besides Wirth himself.
Speaking against its authenticity were Neckel, Karl Hermann Jacob Friesen (who identified it as a satirical hoax by Cornelius Over de Linden) and Arthur Hübner. Hübner was one of the most respected Germanists of his generation, and his verdict of the Oera Linda being a falsification settled the defeat of Wirth's party.
The public defeat of Himmler's pseudo-scholarly brand of "esoteric Nordicism" resulted in the foundation of Ahnenerbe, which attracted occultist charlatans such as Karl Maria Wiligut
Karl Maria Wiligut
Karl Maria Wiligut was an Austrian Ariosophist- Biography :...
and was viewed with suspicion by the mainstream Nazi ideologues of Amt Rosenberg
Amt Rosenberg
Amt Rosenberg was an official body for cultural policy and surveillance within the Nazi party, headed by Alfred Rosenberg.It was established in 1934 under the name of Dienststelle Rosenberg , with offices at Margarethenstraße 17 in Berlin, to the west of Potsdamer Platz.Due to the long official...
.
Modern esotericism
The book later experienced a revival of popularity in the English-speaking world with the publication of Robert Scrutton's The Other Atlantis (1977) and Secrets of Lost Atland (1979).Within the first few years after the appearance of the Oera Linda Book, its recent origin was established not only based on the exceptional claims being made, but also because of a number of anachronisms it contained. Research was performed on the quality of the paper, and it was claimed to have come from a papermill in Maastricht
Maastricht
Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...
circa 1850. The text was nevertheless a source of inspiration for a number of occultists and speculative historians.
The authenticity of the book is supported by at least some Neo-Nazi groups, possibly because it indicates a Northern
Northern Europe
Northern Europe is the northern part or region of Europe. Northern Europe typically refers to the seven countries in the northern part of the European subcontinent which includes Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Finland and Sweden...
European origin for several Middle Eastern civilisations.
Another figure to formulate a contemporary Neopagan
Neopaganism
Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...
tradition influenced by the Oera Linda was Tony Steele, a self-professed English "Traditional Witch", who considered the book to reveal the genuine truth about the megalithic culture.
Authorship
The most likely candidates for the author of the manuscript are Cornelis Over de Linden or Eelco Verwijs. A popular third choice is the Protestant preacher François Haverschmidt (1835–1894), well known for writing poetry under the pseudonym Piet Paaltjens. Haverschmidt lived in Friesland and was an acquaintance of Verwijs.Jensma (2004) argued that Haverschmidt was the main writer of the book, with the help of Over de Linden and Verwijs. According to Jensma, Haverschmidt intended the Oera Linda Book as a parody of the Christian
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
Bible
Bible
The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...
. An article in late 2007 by Goffe Jensma says that the three authors of the translation intended it "to be a temporary hoax to fool some nationalist Frisians and orthodox Christians and as an experiential exemplary exercise in reading the Holy Bible in a non-fundamentalist, symbolical way."
However, ignoring clues that it was a forgery, it was taken seriously by J.G. Ottema and achieved popularity for the reasons given above. Its creators felt unable to admit that they had written it, and it became the foundation for new occult beliefs. Jensma concludes his article by saying "It is a perfect irony that a book written to unmask the Holy Bible as a book of human making was to become a bible itself."
Contents
Themes running through the Oera Linda Book include catastrophismCatastrophism
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
, nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
, matriarchy
Matriarchy
A matriarchy is a society in which females, especially mothers, have the central roles of political leadership and moral authority. It is also sometimes called a gynocratic or gynocentric society....
, and mythology
Mythology
The term mythology can refer either to the study of myths, or to a body or collection of myths. As examples, comparative mythology is the study of connections between myths from different cultures, whereas Greek mythology is the body of myths from ancient Greece...
. The text alleges that Europe and other lands were, for most of their history, ruled by a succession of folk-mothers presiding over a hierarchical order of celibate priestesses dedicated to the goddess Frya
Frijjō
*Frijjō is the reconstructed name or epithet of a hypothesized Common Germanic love goddess giving rise to both Frigg and Freyja....
, daughter of the supreme god Wr-alda and Irtha, the earth mother. The claim is also made that this Frisian civilization possessed an alphabet which was the ancestor of the Greek and Phoenician alphabets. Modern historiography is essentially ignored, particularly in the area of basic chronology of known events in the recent and distant past of Europe. Geological as well as geographical evidence that was readily available even as far back as Over de Linden's time is also mostly absent from the manuscript.
The earliest portion of the Oera Linda Book, namely Frya’s Tex, was supposedly composed in 2194 BC, whereas the most recent part, the letter of Hidde Oera Linda, dates to AD 1256. Almost half of the entire book comprises The Book of Adela’s Followers, the original text around which the rest grew. It is purported to have been compiled in the 6th century BC from a mixture of contemporary writings and ancient inscriptions.
The last two sections of the Oera Linda Book, the writings of Konered and Beden, contain a number of lacunae
Lacuna (manuscripts)
A lacunaPlural lacunae. From Latin lacūna , diminutive form of lacus . is a gap in a manuscript, inscription, text, painting, or a musical work...
and the book itself breaks off in mid-sentence.
The book articulates the first known example of the concept of root races
Root race
Root Races are stages in human evolution in the esoteric cosmology of theosophist Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, as described in her book The Secret Doctrine . These races were said to have existed on now-lost continents. Blavatsky's model was developed by later theosophists, most notably William...
(though it does not call them that), and probably influenced H.P. Blavatsky to develop her own, much more elaborate ideas on the subject, as outlined in The Secret Doctrine
The Secret Doctrine
The Secret Doctrine, the Synthesis of Science, Religion and Philosophy, a book originally published as two volumes in 1888, is Helena P. Blavatsky's magnum opus. The first volume is named Cosmogenesis, the second Anthropogenesis...
(1888).
It also mentions Atland
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
(the name given to Atlantis by the 17th century scholar Olof Rudbeck), which was supposedly submerged in 2193 BC, the same year as 19th century Dutch and Frisian almanacs, following traditional Biblical chronology given for Noah's flood.
See also
- Old High German lullabyOld High German lullabyThe discovery of an Old High German lullaby was announced in 1859 by Georg Zappert of Vienna, a private scholar and collector of medieval literature....
, an Old High German lullaby mentioning Germanic deities that is generally also held to be a hoax - Voynich ManuscriptVoynich manuscriptThe Voynich manuscript, described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased it in 1912....
External links
- Oera Linda Boek original manuscript (interactive facsimile)
- Oera Linda Book William Sandbach's 1876 English translation