Before the SS appropriated solar wheel symbolism for an ideology that would have been utterly alien to the Northern European cultures it claimed to represent, those cultures had their own rich tradition of solar mythology — including their own understanding of the dark sun, the hidden sun and the sun at the end of the world.
In Norse mythology, the sun is feminine — Sol (Old Norse) or Sunna (Old High German), a goddess who drives the solar chariot across the sky each day. This is significant: the Germanic solar tradition did not conceive of the sun as a male warrior-king but as a female figure engaged in an endless, urgent race across the sky. She drives her horses Árvakr ("Early Waker") and Alsviðr ("All Swift") at full gallop — because she is being pursued.
The wolf Sköll ("Treachery" or "Mockery") pursues the sun across the sky each day. Sol has never stopped running since the world began — and at Ragnarök, the world's end, Sköll will finally catch her and swallow her whole. The sun's daily journey is not a serene passage but a desperate flight, and the darkness of night is not rest but pursuit. The Norse Black Sun is the sun that has been caught — the sun swallowed by Sköll at the end of the world.
Sources: the primary Norse mythological sources are the Prose Edda (Snorri Sturluson, c. 1220 CE) and the Poetic Edda (collected c. 1270 CE, containing older material). Snorri's Gylfaginning ("The Tricking of Gylfi") provides the most detailed account of Sol, Sköll and Ragnarök. All surviving sources were written down by Christian Icelanders centuries after the conversion — the pre-Christian Norse tradition reaches us filtered through that lens.
Ragnarök — the twilight of the gods, the doom of the Norse world — contains the most explicit Black Sun event in the Germanic tradition. The Völuspá (Prophecy of the Völva), the most important poem in the Poetic Edda, describes Ragnarök in vivid detail, including the moment when the sun goes dark. The prophetic völva describes what she sees in the sequence of catastrophes that ends the present world.
The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars down from heaven are whirled; fierce grows the steam and the life-feeding flame, till fire leaps high about heaven itself.
— Völuspá, stanza 57 (Henry Adams Bellows translation, 1923)The Norse Black Sun is therefore explicitly eschatological — it is the sun of the world's end, the sun that has ceased to function as the sustaining principle of the cosmos. Unlike the Egyptian nocturnal sun (which returns each dawn) or the alchemical Black Sun (which precedes transformation), the Norse Black Sun of Ragnarök represents genuine dissolution: the solar principle overwhelmed by the forces of chaos and consumed.
But Ragnarök is not permanent annihilation. The Völuspá continues past the destruction: after the world sinks into the sea, it rises again. A new earth emerges, green and fertile. And a new sun — the daughter of Sol — rises to light the renewed world.
The Norse Black Sun mythology is therefore — like its Egyptian and alchemical counterparts — ultimately regenerative. The sun is swallowed, the world ends, and from that total darkness a new and younger sun is born. The Black Sun is not the end but the necessary nadir before a new beginning. Even in its most catastrophic Norse form, the dark sun carries within it the seed of the sun that follows.
The archaeological record of Bronze Age Germanic and Scandinavian culture (approximately 1800–500 BCE) contains extensive evidence of solar worship centred on the solar wheel symbol — the same multi-armed wheel that the SS later appropriated. These artefacts demonstrate that the solar wheel was genuinely central to pre-Christian Northern European religious life, and that its meaning was entirely unrelated to anything resembling Nazi ideology.
The Nazis' claim to represent authentic Germanic heritage was a fabrication built on selective misreading, deliberate falsification and the creative invention of pseudo-traditions. The actual Germanic and Norse solar tradition — as documented by archaeology, linguistics and the Eddic sources — contains nothing that supports the ideological uses to which its symbols were put.
The Norse tradition was not racially supremacist. The Eddas describe a cosmos in which giants, gods, elves, dwarves and humans coexist in complex relationships of cooperation, conflict and interdependence. The cosmological enemies of the gods (the Jötnar) are not racial inferiors — they are the primordial forces of chaos that both oppose and, in many cases, intermarry with the gods. Odin himself is partly of giant descent.
The solar wheel meant solar worship, not Aryan identity. The Bronze Age solar wheel appears across the entire Indo-European cultural zone from India to Scandinavia — it is a pan-human symbol of the sun's importance to agricultural civilisation, not a marker of any ethnic group's superiority. Claiming it as exclusively Germanic was an archaeological and historical fabrication.
Karl Maria Wiligut was not a scholar. The primary occult advisor to Himmler who helped develop the SS pseudo-mythology (including the Wewelsburg significance) was a man who claimed to possess inherited racial memories of ancient Germanic history going back 228,000 years. He had been institutionalised for mental illness before Himmler discovered him. The SS "traditions" he helped create were inventions, not recoveries.
The Germanic ancestors whose symbols the SS appropriated would not have recognised themselves in what was done in their name. The völva who saw the Black Sun at Ragnarök was prophesying a cosmic tragedy — not providing a badge for an ideology of racial murder.
— On the Nazi distortion of Norse mythology