These reflections are built on examples drawn not from the traditions of the Russian North, yet they seemed interesting to us, and so we publish them here.

In Andersen, the Snow Queen makes the boy Kay lay out, from shards of ice, the mysterious angelic word Ewigkeit; but the warm forces of the earth (“Gerda,” in Old German, means “earth”) return the failed hero to a meager and hopeless everyday life. Instead of becoming an angel, he later turns into a rosy-cheeked Scandinavian burgher—with beer and sausages.

Cold is a sign of both the corpse and the initiate. The bodies of yogis freeze as the sacred serpentine energy awakens: the higher Kundalini rises, the more lifeless the corresponding parts of the body become, until the initiate is transformed into an icy statue, an axis of spiritual constancy.

Every hero must make a journey to the pole, to the heart of midnight. There he learns to love that dark and incomprehensible substance which alchemists call “our earth” or “the magnesia of the philosophers.”

Author: A. Dugin, Orion, or the Conspiracy of Heroes.
The photographs were taken at a northern lake in early winter.