A while ago my eye fell on the back of this book when I visited a second-hand bookshop and passed a section that I normally don’t check out. I don’t believe I knew this book, but paging through it I already found it interesting enough to pay a relatively high price for it. “Northern-European Mysteries and their sources to the present” is a massive book of 650 pages in a very small fonttype, but with quite a lot of images. As the title suggests, it speaks about mystery-cults of Northern Europe. Of course we know about mystery religions from ancient Greece, the Middle East and northern Africa, but northern Europe? Naturally the writer speaks about Scandinavian, German and some Celtic mythology and religion and gives the little information that we have that point towards mystery-practises in these traditions. Doing this you will read a lot about folklore in the countries of the European north, Northern mythology and the like. When focussing on the religious and mystery-practises, Farwerck shows how reminiscenes of these can be found in more recent times upto the present day. This is interesting enough, but more interesting it becomes when Farwerck treats Freemasonry as the natural descendant of mysteries of Northern Europe and follows the known Masonic practises back into the past. Very interesting and this book is truely a standard-work with tons of notes for even more (detailed) information.
When I was already reading the book, I read that Farwerck had ‘spoiled past’ and some further investigation proved that he was one of the big cheeses of the NSB, the Dutch nazi-party in WWII. Farwerck was the person who wanted to replace Christianity by the ancient religion of the North. Not that you will notice much of this past in this book, but just so you know.
This review must have been written in 2002 or 2003. The date below is from when I changed from an html website to WordPress.