The Seba library treats Hyperboreans in 7 passages, across 7 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Kerényi, Carl, Otto, Walter F).
The Hyperboreans were a race in Greek mythology who lived in a land of sunshine beyond the north wind, worshiping Apollo. Nietzsche referred on several occasions to the free spirits as Hyperboreans
This editorial note to the Red Book establishes the dual valence of the Hyperboreans in Jung’s working context: the classical Apollonian mythologem and Nietzsche’s reappropriation of the figure for the emancipated, beyond-conventional-morality ‘free spirit.’
, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009thesis
Apollo arrived from the land of the Hyperboreans in midsummer, lo… Only a calendary explanation, that is, a tradition based on a calendar older than that of Alkaios’ time, can account for the inconsistency of Apollo’s being sent by Zeus to Delphi but driving his swan chariot to the land of the Hyperboreans and spending a whole year there.
Kerényi argues that Apollo’s annual sojourn among the Hyperboreans is explicable only through a pre-classical Delphic calendar, making the Hyperborean journey a cosmological-ritual necessity rather than mere mythic ornament.
, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976thesis
Nysa was, without doubt, the name of a divine mountain country in a distant land of fantasy, similar to the land of the Hyperboreans.
Otto positions the Hyperboreans as the defining template for mythic ‘otherworldly lands of divine origin’ in Greek religion, against which the Dionysian birthplace Nysa should be understood.
, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965supporting
Hyperboreans, donkey sacrifice, 69; and Delphi, 130
Burkert indexes the Hyperboreans in direct relation to donkey sacrifice and the Delphic cult, grounding the mythic topos in concrete sacrificial ritual practice.
, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, 1972supporting
Hyperboreans, 40
Corbin’s index cross-references the Hyperboreans within his discussion of celestial pole symbolism and the Hurqalya, linking the Greek mythologem to Iranian Sufi cosmography centred on the ‘midnight sun’ and the axis mundi.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
I hope to take him with us to Egypt, to Cyprus, to the Hyperboreans or yet farther. In the end he will be sure to reveal to us his family and his wealth
In this passage from the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus as cited by Kerényi, the Hyperboreans appear as the uttermost geographical extreme — a liminal marker of the world’s farthest boundary, beyond which divine identity is finally disclosed.
, The Gods of the Greeks, 1951supporting
tertius love tertio natus et Latona, quem ex Hyperboreis Delphos ferunt advenisse
Cicero’s doxographic account records the tradition that the third Apollo — born of the third Jupiter and Latona — was said to have come to Delphi from the Hyperboreans, attesting the classical currency of the myth of Apollonian Hyperborean origin.
, De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), -45aside