Joakim Häggström | Sound, Frequency, Lost History and the Legendary Bock Saga
Hailing from Sweden, Joakim Häggström is a musician and a researcher of lost mythology & history. He's also been involved with music, sound and frequency for many years and in this episode we weave between discussions of sonic phenomenon and correspondences, legends from Northern European lands, the Emerald Tablets of Hermes, and much more.
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In this episode
Core themes
From Death Metal Stages to Runestones
Joakim describes starting out as a painter drawn to flower of life geometry, then taking up music at 16 or 17 and playing death metal gigs in his early twenties in the small Swedish town he has called home for about ten years. Frustration with society turned him to history, and music led him further: he says the 22-string sitar is based on the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which led him to the Kylver Stone and its 24 marks. Finding academic readings of the runestones largely speculative, he was writing his own book on Norse mythology, then set it aside once he encountered the Bock Saga.
The Case for Oral Tradition
Chance argues that academic readings of runestones and hieroglyphs rest mostly on assumptions, questioning even whether the Rosetta Stone can be verified, and contrasts written scripture, where one Bible verse draws fifty interpretations, with oral tradition, which he calls a living vibration passed from mouth to ear by tellers who revered it. Joakim adds that oral transmission made people themselves important and connected them, and that a rune or glyph makes readers form their own associations, while long books let logic drift. He notes that older Bibles swapped letters over time, and Chance observes that most of what we read about mythology is secondhand rather than source material.
Vowels, Nine Sounds and the World Tree
Joakim explains that Swedish has a letter, ö, for a sound English has no single letter for, and that the Nordic alphabet as he understands it rests on nine clear sounds from which all others are combined. He links those nine to the nine realms of Yggdrasil, and describes 22 sounds set in a ring with seven standing outside it, such as å, ä and ö, for 29 in all. The conversation treats vowels as sacred sounds that some people intone in meditation, and Chance plays with the English W, a double U that opens the word one, reading it as the inner and outer worlds reflecting each other.
Atlantis, Thoth and the Northern Axis
Joakim studied the Emerald Tablets of Thoth in his early twenties, listening to an audiobook perhaps 200 times, and he reads them as an account of Atlantis in which Hermes leaves a great civilization for the Men of Kem, which the two take to be Egypt. He ties the goat heads on Egyptian statues to the goat figure at the heart of the Väinämöinen mythology. In that story, he says, the Earth's axis once stood upright over Finland and the planet was tropical until Ragnarok tipped it over. Chance reads the tablets' Children of Light and Children of Men as natural law set against the law of man.
Tuning Forks, Guitars and 432 Hertz
Chance brings up Eileen Day McKusick's book on tuning the human biofield, which he says uses tuning forks to shift stuck emotion in a person's field. Joakim replies that he has no need for a tuning fork because he has his guitar, and says that tuning by ear he tends to land near 432 hertz on the A string. He recalls studies he has seen in which a jarring tone changed the structure of water, and describes cutting out radio and outside music to compose his own long piece of Earth music.
Quotes
“The text becomes the history, whereas the oral tradition is a living thing. It's literally a vibration that originated at the source of when the events happened.”
“When we start to write stuff down too much, you don't need the human being almost then telling someone.”
“A lot of what we read about mythology or history is not the original source material. It's what somebody is telling you about what somebody else wrote or what somebody else said.”
“I think previous man, they really wanted to embody the laws of nature. Embody that on every plane as good as possible.”
“Under the legal system created by man, you can get a license to do things that are illegal or unlawful in nature, like killing somebody.”
“Heaven could be on top. So, if you have this perspective and look at mythology, as soon as they speak about heaven, just think about another place on Earth or a specific place.”
“I wouldn't say I have a problem with the Bock Saga in that it's not necessarily verifiable, but I wouldn't ask anyone to believe it.”
“I just quit listening to radio or anything, just as an experiment. And after that, I didn't need to go around listening to music anymore.”
Joakim Häggström ("Jocke") is a Swedish musician and researcher of lost mythology and history, known for his investigations into the Bock Saga, Northern European legends, and sound/frequency work.
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