Jeff Russell

Thanks as always for the references, Jeff. Taliesin's Map, in particular, seems like exactly what I'm looking for, like a parallel project to my own.

Regarding Hyperborea: yeah, Hyperborea is traditionally held to be the island of Great Britain, and I've seen books arguing, on the basis of place names, that Troy could be possibly placed in Cambridgeshire. As I have said many times, I am not a linguist, so I can't assess those arguments, but there's a lot of internal evidence in the Iliad that makes the traditional location in Anatolia seem rather silly even to someone as untraveled as myself. (The sea beside Troy is tidal, whereas the Mediterranean is not. It is always raining at Troy, but Anatolia is arid. Akhilles is blond; Menelaus is auburn-haired; various women, but especially Helen, are said to be white as snow; etc.; which doesn't fit the people we believe to have lived in the Aegean at the time. The times and distances described are not merely wrong but ludicrous if the Aegean is the sea between the Danaans and Troy. That sort of thing.)

Regarding symbolic equivalences: I was also thinking Baldr was the obvious Apollon/Horus equivalent, all being gods of sunlight and victory; in particular, Plutarch recounts a tradition that Horus defeating Set is the return of the Sun after an eclipse, which sure sounds a lot like Baldr slaying Fenrir after he gobbles up the Sun! Othin, is, if anything, more Osiris-y than Zeus ever was, since Othin is a (the?) divine mind striving to know all, and Osiris is the discoverer of all things (and, following the Pythagoreans, I have related him to Plotinus's Intellect, also the divine Mind striving to know all, many times in my Horus series). The Aesir-Vanir war erupts over Gullveig/Heithr coming to Asgard, which is reminiscent of the Trojan war erupting when Helen came to Troy. If the Aesir are, indeed, Trojans, it's also noteworthy that Zeus and Apollo were the two main gods fighting on the side of Troy...

Regarding history as propaganda: I think what I'm trying to say is that things exist at a level of being "below" whatever created them. Historical events exist at the material level of being. If historical events give rise to a narrative, then the narrative is "below" the material level of being; if, on the other hand, the narrative gives rise to the historical events, then the narrative is "above" the material level of being. Therefore, if we want to go "up," it is important to separate the spiritual wheat from the historical chaff. (Or, to put it another way, I'm interested in the question of whether Troy could be Hyperborean because it may provide more versions of the myth for me to compare against, which could help me abstract the myth's essential meaning from any one version of the myth's particulars!)