The Secret Yoga of the Vikings

As a young boy, I was entranced by reading books about the mythologies of past cultures such as the Greeks, the Norse and eastern literatures. As a child growing up in Germany, I was especially fond of Thor; he represented all the simple virtues and strengths that a young fellow could want. Back then, I treated the Thor myth in a fanciful-fantasy fashion, not unlike those today who go to movie theaters to see new versions of the handsome, rugged modernized Thor. Like those souls watching the latest cinematic version of Thor and his godly friends and enemies, I had no idea that there actually was a deep spiritual and neuropsychological underpinning to a certain secretive portion of the old, original Norse lore called the Poetic Edda. This spiritual underpinning is far more entrancing than any mere cinema display.

In various parts of the world today, there are many passionate lovers of the mysterious Vikings and their secretive poetic lore, which involves an even more mysterious pantheon of gods led by Odin the All-Father, Thor, the great Hammer-Striker, Loki, the Evil One, and Heimdal, the Cosmic Horn Blower. There are even more passionate lovers of the multi-faceted Yoga systems devised by the ancient Hindustani in India over 5,000 years ago. It is this authors opinion that transcendental Yoga has not only endured over the millennia, but that it has also anonymously traveled in different forms of spiritual or religious expression. Yoga has overtly and covertly spread to all corners of the globe and is an essential feed to other spiritual systems, such as Buddhism, even Christianity, and in our specific case, the 10th century Vikings. This Yogic cultural diffusion is a primary theme in this book. In the Poetic Edda, amidst the babble of outer, mythical stories, there are just a few cryptic references to a legendary tradition of Norse spiritual warriors called the Einherjar. This spiritual cult of the anonymous ‘Odin’ warriors died out long ago. It no longer exists but was likely responsible for the writing of the Poetic Edda itself. We infer here that the mysterious Einherjar...are actually the Norse Bards themselves, perhaps depicting themselves in the Edda, as spiritual alter-egos, in a clandestine sense.