The Mythology Of The Northern Lights Explained

While it's true that the world is a scary, sometimes awful place filled with all kinds of terrifying things, it's also a place where there's unimaginable beauty to be found. It's all around us: from rainbows, clouds, and pure white snow to coral reefs, blue whales, and raging volcanos. All we need to do is stop, take a deep breath, and look around.

Our ancestors definitely did, and when they took notice of the natural miracles they were surrounded by, they did something we've lost the art of. They made up stories to explain what they were seeing. Sure, we have science on our side now, but there's something to be said for a good story.

Take the Northern Lights. They're a spectacular display of color that dances across the night sky at certain times, kind of like Mother Nature's own Pink Floyd laser light show. 

Now, we know the colors of the Northern Lights originate on the surface of the sun. Sun storms send particles flying off across space, and EarthSky says that when our planet gets in the way of those particles, they react with our atmosphere and magnetic field and cause the atoms above us to light up. Different gases turn different colors, and that's pretty cool. We didn't know that hundreds of years ago, though, so our ancestors made up their own stories about what they were seeing. And some of those were even cooler.

While the Tromso Geophysical Observatory says that the best place to see the Northern Lights is within about 1550 miles of the North Pole, it is possible — although less likely — that those living even farther south will catch a glimpse during a particularly fierce storm. Visit the USA says those in Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, and other states along the border between America and Canada can sometimes catch a glimpse of them, and that explains why the Menominee — a tribe of Native peoples living in Wisconsin and along Green Bay — have developed their own folklore about the lights. 

According to Bivrost, Menominee legend says the lights are actually the glow from the torches carried by members of a race of giants called the Manabai'wok. These giants live in the north, and they've long been revered as a friendly sort who, legends suggest, used to interact with their southern friends. Even though they no longer do, they're still revered as great fishermen and hunters. Their torches are said to come out when they're fishing at night, and they are believed to guide other fishermen to the places where the schools have gathered and where fishing will be the most fruitful.

The Inuit, The Canadian Encyclopedia says, are defined as the indigenous people who live in the northernmost regions of Canada. Their homeland is called Nunangat, and refers to all parts — water, ice, and land — in the Arctic. Today, there are eight separate ethnic groups, and while different groups tell slightly different stories, the theme is very similar.

According to some tales, like the one told by the Hudson Bay Inuit, Bivrost points out— the lights are spirits entering the afterlife. There were different parts of the afterlife for those who died in different ways, and the highest was the Aurora. It was reserved for those who died violent deaths, so they could finally know peace. The spirits already there — along with the Raven — light torches to guide new spirits home.

In the 1920s, the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen recorded another story, told by the people he met on the island of Iglooik. They believed that the Northern Lights were caused by spirits who were playing a game, sort of like a heavenly version of soccer, but with a walrus skull as a ball.

There are a few different variations on this idea: people from the island of Nunivak said those playing the game were walruses, and the ball was a human skull. Other groups told their children that the skull was plucked from the shoulders of a naughty, disobedient child, while others believed the spirits were the souls of children who had been still-born.

The Cree are a Native American tribe who originally had a sprawling domain that reached from the Hudson River into Alberta, Canada. They suffered greatly during outbreaks of smallpox, Britannica says, and both groups — the Great Plains Cree and the Woodland Cree, called Swampy or Maskegon Cree — told incredible stories about the world around them.

According to the University of Central Lancashire (via The Telegraph), the Northern Lights were connected to the Cree's belief in the "circle of life." They taught that those who have passed on aren't gone completely, and continue to watch over their loved ones who remain in the land of the living. Spirits are always looking for ways to communicate with those left behind, and the lights are one of these communications — one that went both ways. 

Hurtigruten notes that the Cree even told of a way to tell when it was a familiar spirit who was trying to communicate. When their dogs barked at the lights, it meant that they recognized the soul of a long-lost companion.

Call them the Northern Lights or the Aurora Borealis, and you're talking about the same thing. In Sweden, ancient storytellers had a different name for the lights: sillblixt. Culturally Ours says that translates to the wonderfully descriptive "herring flash," and what does that mean?

Old Swedish folklore said that the brilliant lights in the sky were reflections and that they happened when there were particularly large groups of fish swimming in the waters beneath the vast night sky. It was more than just a reflection, too: when fishermen who were getting ready to go out onto the open water saw the Northern Lights before they departed, it meant that they were going to have extraordinarily good luck. They were going to find those huge schools of fish and bring home a large catch. 

And that was a big deal: the fishing industry in Sweden has been historically massive — it's why Swedish fish became a thing in the first place (via Mashed)!

The Northern lights are undeniably beautiful, but not everyone saw something kind or benevolent in that beauty. Take the tales of the Tlingit, a group of Native Americans who Britannica says have lived in the area of what's now southern Alaska for a long, long time.

According to Bivrost, they have long told of the connection between the Northern Lights and the afterlife. It was said that when their warriors died in battle, their spirits left their bodies and crossed to the afterlife — Kee-wa-kow-anne, or "the above people's country" — by making their way across a rainbow. Once they were there, they could occasionally decide to reach out to contact those they had left behind by leaving their otherworldly dwellings and taking on the form of the Northern Lights. That wasn't always a good thing: those spirits were thought to appear when war or conflict was on the horizon, and so the lights became a sign of hardship looming in the future. 

Some added more to the tale: CBC News says some Tlingit believed that looking at the lights was bad luck because they weren't just the souls of warriors, but of anyone who had died a hard, tragic, untimely, or violent death. Because of the way they died, they were thought to get lonely, and anyone who looked up at them for too long risked getting their attention. They would then be taken away to join them in their eternal dance across the night sky.

The Algonquin, Britannica explains, are a group of closely-related bands that originally lived in the deep forests of Canada. The Algonquin language family, however, refers to a group of 24 tribes across the northeastern US and into the Great Plains, who were united by a common language. It was the Canadian Algonquin who told of the Northern Lights as a reminder that they weren't alone.

In 1907, the Bureau of American Ethnology wrote a piece on some of the cosmological traditions of the tribes, including Nanabozho, who symbolizes life. They described him as embodying life, renewal, and as a creator figure, birthed by a great primal being, who became the friend and caretaker of the human race and showed them the art of making things like fire and weapons. 

Bivrost says that after Nanabozho taught mankind all that they needed to know to care for themselves, he moved on. He went to his permanent home in the North, but before he left, he promised that he would always watch over his children. As a reminder that he was still there, and still looking over them, he would occasionally light flares in the skies over his home. Those fires, as mythology tells is, are the Northern Lights.