In Greek legend, which was probably influenced by the Druid presence in Greece for at least six centuries before the Christian era, there existed a polar region "populated by a race of giants with strange occult powers". Hecate of Abdera (lived 400 BC) referred to the British Isles as being a remnant of Hyperborea "lost beyond the ice of the Far North". In this legend, Britain was identified as the "Land of the Dead of Sacred Thule" and Stonehenge was a temple to Apollo. The bards of Eire and the poets of Gaul alluded to these ever-young giants: in Thule/Hyperborea there was no ageing, and even the surface god Apollo found it necessary to revisit Thule occasionally "to shed years".

This may explain the idea of Stonehenge being a "centre for healing".

However, what is certain historically is that in 325 BC the Greek navigator and geographer Pytheas sailed in search of Thule/Hyperborea. He based his navigation theory on the premise that the Earth was spherical and that the Pole Star was constant. In his writings "On the Ocean", only excerpts of which survive, Pytheas became the first explorer to report the polar ice, the midnight sun and the aurora borealis.


He claimed to have discovered Thule/Hyperborea which lay "six days sail north of the British Isles" and "one day's sail from where the sea freezes". This might put legendary Thule/Hyperborea between Spitsbergen and Greenland on the meridian of Greenwich. It was, he said, "an agricultural island producing honey, whose inhabitants ate fruit and drank milk, and made a drink of grain and honey. They threshed the grain indoors in barns."


If Thule/Hyperborea sustained a large bee population, had pastures and its inhabitants grew cereals and fruit, it cannot have been anywhere near the Arctic Circle, for both climate and daylength make agriculture impossible there. For this reason, this part of his chronicle is rejected by historians, since it can only be explained by Thule/Hyperborea existing in a parallel world.

It is interesting to note that in 1909 the American polar explorer Admiral Peary claimed to have sighted land NNW of Ellesmere Island which he believed to be an uncharted large island and named it "Crockerland". Lt Green his assistant wrote an article for the magazine "Popular Science Monthly" in 1923 concluding that the lost Viking colonies of Greenland had migrated there. It is known in Eskimo lore as a "paradise" in Arctic waters which the Eskimo shun for fear of the evil spirits which protect it.

In the National Socialist period, German investigators belonging to the "Thule Society", a founding organ of the NSDAP, made attempts to contact the occult giants of Thule/Hyperborea in the hope of concluding a pact with them.