Original Dutch version
here.
Oera Linda’s freeing worldview
When Jan Ott (1968) is looking for information about the goddess of love Freya, he finds the Oera Linda. The Oera Linda is a handwritten collection of texts in a unique script, with the histories and laws of a ‘free’ people who lived in Northern Europe before our era. Despite the fact that the authenticity of this codex is disputed, Ott recognizes its authentic importance. He makes a translation that makes the work accessible to a wider audience.
His relation to women plays a profound role for Jan Ott during his life and therein lies the origin of his fascination for the pre-Christian Freya, the goddess of fertility, marriage, love and lust. For him she represents the spiritual image of woman, as of a beloved who rises above flesh and blood. When Ott discovers the Oera Linda, a writing in which the folk of Frya (‘the free’) come to life, many pieces of the puzzle fall into place for him.
“Frya represents the spiritual image of woman, as of a beloved who rises above flesh and blood”
Jan is the sixth of seven children and when he is eleven, his six-year-older sister, with whom he has a special bond, dies in a traffic accident. At the age of twenty, he suddenly loses his great love: “In the 1980s, the media and the public debate were much about incest, unwanted intimacies and sexual harassment, which had made me too inhibited and cautious. If I had realized right away that she already had a more incisive boyfriend when she broke up with me, that would have saved me much heartache and self-reproach. For years, I no longer really believed in love resulting in a hedonistic phase.”
In the meantime, Ott studies movement sciences, a medical study with subjects such as anatomy and physiology, but where revolutionary ideas are also discussed, such as the morphogenetic fields of Rupert Sheldrake. It will continue to fascinate Ott — how the physical body relates to consciousness. After his studies, he finds work in a completely different field, the trade union of Cinemas and Film Companies.
“In those seven years I rose from staff member to acting general secretary. I was spokesman and got to know members of the cultural elite. After many short-term relationships I got married, but that marriage lasted less than a year. Burned out and with a golden handshake my old life ended in 2004.”
He enters a new phase in a quest for total rediscovery of himself. He visits festivals with the accompanying experimental mind-expanding substances: “I lost my old mind and eventually got a healthier self- and worldview in return.” From that moment on, his real healing begins. He travels far and wide and lives in ashrams and communities. In the meantime, he has become acquainted with the Oera Linda and his research into it takes more shape. He lives in a Frisian village for a year and then studies philosophy and Dutch language and literature in Flanders (Belgium), after which he decides to rediscover the German language and culture.
After a celibate year, he finds his other half there: “She is seventeen years younger and wanted to have a child with me. I thought I was infertile, but now we have six children. In 2017, we settled in Drenthe (Dutch province), where my mother came to live next door. Our youngest four children were born there, just like the first two at home and without any medical intervention. That, and the growing up of our children, my mother experienced up close, which she enjoyed intensely.”
His mother, who recently passed away, also morally supported his Oera Linda research from the beginning and co-founded the foundation of the same name in 2020.
Long before his quest for the pre-Christian love goddess Freya, Jan did extensive genealogical research: “Searching for identity, I intuitively healed ancestral traumas that continue to affect me and my family. Later I understood that this also works on a large scale and I started to search more consciously for the hidden history of our folk.”
When Jan encounters Oera Linda, he is initially misled. “In a newspaper article I read about a dissertation in which Oera Linda was presented as a 19th century joke, after which I lost interest. When I later read a translation and delved into the source language, I realised that it is indeed a relevant text that has never been properly researched. At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century it was seen as a threat to the authority of church and king, in short, the established order. That is still the case, because it is diametrically opposed to globalism and the slave culture resulting of a thousand years of Christian indoctrination. The history of slavery and Black Pete are the new original sins and infant baptism has been replaced by injections. Everything that has to do with birth and death has been highly medicalised. For many atheists in particular, this has become a substitute religion. I think, as do many others by now, that Oera Linda offers a freeing worldview, which by itself will lead to a more natural and spirited life.”
“ The Oera Linda has a refreshing content. One of the texts states that one cannot lie in the Fryas language without stuttering or blushing”
So what is the Oera Linda? The codex emerged in 1867 from the family estate of Cornelis Over de Linden, a shipwright of Frisian descent from Den Helder. The manuscript contains the history of an advanced civilization with its main burg on Texel (now an island). Jan Ott: “The goddess Freya, whom I was looking for, plays a leading role in the Oera Linda. Its language resembles that of the Old Frisian laws and is a precursor of the ‘Germanic’ languages. The content consists of pre-Christian texts, but the find is a copy of an older original. An enclosed letter from 1255 shows that the copy was made then. The writing consists of two parts and tells the story of a pre-Christian civilization.”
The creation myth is about Frya, the primeval mother of the Northern European race who was supposed to be one of three daughters of Earth. Jan Ott: “This folk called themselves the Fryas, ‘Fryas children’, a word that has everything to do with freedom. Freedom, truth and justice were sacred to this folk. There was no priestly class that prescribed a doctrine, but you could be punished if you behaved slavishly, because that could give rise to a master class that would cause trouble for everyone. Not only was having slaves taboo, but so was being a slave. Being watchful was a desirable attitude and the caption to a letter often said ‘watch!’ or ‘be vigilant’ [Fr. wák].
“To behave like a slave was taboo as well”
The first half of the Oera Linda consists of texts copied from burgs and contains a collection of laws, histories of the submergence of Aldland (or Atland) and of migrations from Northern Europe to the Mediterranean and the Indus Valley.
In the second half, added by later owners of the original manuscript, part of the emigrated folk return and stories follow up to the time of the Roman or Carolingian occupation. The main burg where the Folksmother lived was on Texland (Texel). One of the other burgs was on Walhallagara (Walcheren). Each burg had its Mother and a group of unmarried women, the fámna — the Frisian name Famke is a surviving diminutive — played a significant role. Nevertheless, it was not a real matriarchy, because women did not have absolute power. Land defense, seafaring and trade were men's work. There seems to have been a good balance.
“Around Oera Linda there has been a nervous, giggly atmosphere for the last 150 years”
Cultural institutions in Friesland, in particular the
Frisian Society, the
Frisian Academy and
Tresoar, a merger of the Provincial Library with the Frisian Centre for History en Literature, guard the narrative that was designed in the early nineteenth century under King William I. Jan Ott: “There has been a nervous, giggly atmosphere around Oera Linda for 150 years and it is apparently taboo to ask the question whether it could be authentic after all. But even if one assumes that it is a modern creation, it would be worth serious research, especially the language. What did the alleged creators do well and why can't it be authentic after all? The Oera Linda has a refreshing content, written in a language that not only Dutch and Frisian descend from, but also English, German and the Scandinavian languages. One of the texts states that one cannot lie in the Fryas language without stuttering or blushing. There are examples of old words that are more understandable than modern variants, such as
eerbied [Fr.
érbjadenese, lit. ‘honor-bidness’] instead of respect or
zinnebeeld [Fr.
sinnebyld, lit. ‘sense-build’] instead of symbol.”
In 2021, after twelve years of study, the first printed version of Ott’s English translation was published. A Dutch and a Spanish working version are currently only available on the internet. The aim of the Oera Linda Foundation is to promote research into, translations of and publications about the Oera Linda. Jan: “In the coming period, the website, including wiki and forum, will be renewed and I will consider a continuation of this project. A motivated publisher for the printed versions would be nice.”
Jan Ott was previously interviewed by, among others, Catherine Austin-Fitts [shorter version], Boris van de Ven [shorter version], Niels Lunsing en Jorn Luka. These conversations can be found on YouTube.
