Our Icelandic ancestors associated the lights with childbirth and held that they would relieve the pain of delivery as long as the expectant mum didn’t look at the Aurora whilst giving birth (we imagine she had other things on her mind at the time!) because the child would be born cross-eyed! Northern Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland The lights were deemed to be the spirits of those who had died violently, spirits rejoicing because the sun was absent, spirits of dead animals such as deer and salmon and spirits of revenging enemies killed in combat.
Just to illustrate how different the legends and myths became, disparate North Americans accepted the lights as anything from ravens to spirit guides holding torches aloft to direct the departed to the next world. Their explanation was that the lights were again fires over which great warriors boiled their enemies in huge cooking pots. Fire and cookery were also at the forefront of the Mandan people’s thinking in North Dakota. In Washington State, the particularly imaginative Makah Indians thought the lights were fires in the north created by a tribe of dwarves who used it to boil whale blubber. For reasons we will doubtless never fathom, the good people of remote Nunavik Island told the same story but the other way round so for them, the Northern Lights were walrus spirits playing ball with the skull of some unfortunate human. They understood the fire to be Nanahbozho’s way of telling his people that he remembered them and was watching over them.įurther north, many Inuit tribes considered the Aurora to be the spirits of dead humans playing a ball game using a walrus skull as the ball. The Algonquin’s take on the Aurora was that it was created by light from a fire built by Nanahbozho, their creator. The Cree believed that the lights were spirits of these departed friends and relatives trying to communicate with those they had left behind on earth. The Cree Indians held that the Aurora was part of life’s circle and were the spirits of the dead who remained in the sky but apart from their loved ones. Here are just a few of the many and varied beliefs held by our ancestors in North America. As a result, many, many North American tribes or people evolved their own myths surrounding the Aurora Borealis. We’ve picked out a few of our favourites but it’s only once you have been held in the Aurora’s thrall that you can truly appreciate how these stories originated and how our forefathers might have believed them to be spirits or gods or celestial warriors.Ĭenturies ago, human settlements were far less concentrated and we lived in far smaller and remoter communities with barely any communication with other tribes. Not surprisingly, the Aurora Borealis figures prominently in the mythology and legends of most indigenous people living in countries situated within the Auroral Oval and often further afield. Of course, you know that you are watching the Northern Lights, a spectacular light show created by the interaction of electronically charged particles in our atmosphere but what must our ancient ancestors have thought as they stood and beheld the skies ablaze with light? Suddenly, somewhere in the northern sky, a green smudge of light begins to materialise and slowly manifests itself into dancing stair rods of shimmering green light which skip across the darkness of space. Above that forest is darkness, an ink black sky, dotted with more stars than you had ever believed possible.
In front lies a vast and flat expanse of snow-covered ice stretching away into the distance until it encounters the dark, haphazard barrier that is more forest on the opposite shoreline. The only noise comes from a gentle wind playing with the pine trees in the forest behind you. Imagine standing on a frozen lake just north of the Arctic Circle.