Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

Under such circumstances it may seem surprising that Icelandic records from the
Middle Ages concerning the heathen belief in regard to the abodes after death should give
us statements which seem utterly irreconcilable with one another. For there are many
proofs that the dead were believed to live in hills and rocks, or in grave-mounds where
their bodies were buried. How can this be reconciled with the doctrine that the dead
descended to the lower world, and were there judged either to receive abodes in Asgard
or in the realms of bliss in Hades, or in the world of torture?
The question has been answered too hastily to the effect that the statements
cannot be harmonized, and that consequently the heathen-Germanic views in regard to
the day of judgment were in this most important part of the religious doctrine
unsupported.
The reason for the obscurity is not, however, in the matter itself, which has never
been thoroughly studied, but in the false premises from which the conclusions have been
drawn. Mythologists have simply assumed that the popular view of the Christian Church
in regard to terrestrial man, conceiving him to consist of two factors, the perishable body
and the imperishable soul, was the necessary condition for every belief in a life hereafter,
and that the heathen Teutons accordingly also cherished this idea.
But this duality did not enter into the belief of our heathen fathers. Nor is it of
such a kind that a man, having conceived a life hereafter, in this connection necessarily
must conceive the soul as the simple, indissoluble spiritual factor of human nature. The
division into two parts, líf og sála, líkami og sála, body and soul, came with Christianity,
and there is every reason for assuming, so far as the Scandinavian peoples are concerned,
that the very word soul, sála, sál, is, like the idea it represents, an imported word. In Old
Norse literature the word occurs for the first time in Olaf Tryggvason's contemporary
Hallfred, after he had been converted to Christianity. Still the word is of Germanic root.
Ulfilas translates the New Testament psyche with saiwala, but this he does with his mind
on the Platonic New Testament view of man as consisting of three factors: spirit
(pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma). Spirit (pneuma) Ulfilas translates with ahma.
Another assumption, likewise incorrect in estimating the anthropologicaleschatological
belief of the Teutons, is that they are supposed to have distinguished
between matter and mind, which is a result reached by the philosophers of the Occident
in their abstract studies. It is, on the contrary, certain that such a distinction never entered
the system of heathen Germanic views. In it all things were of a material, an efni 12 of a
rough or fine grain, tangible or intangible, visible or invisible. The imperishable factors
of man were, like the perishable, material, and a force could not be conceived which was
not bound to matter, or expressed itself in matter, or was matter.
The Germanic heathen conception of human nature, and of the factors composing
it, is most like the Indo-European-Asiatic as we find the latter preserved in the traditions
of Buddhism, which assume more than three factors in a human being, and deny the
existence of a soul, if this is to mean that all that is not corporal in man consists of a
single simple, and therefore indissoluble, element, the soul.
12 "Efni n. [Swedish ämne=stuff, materia and Danish ævne=achievement]: -a stuff, originally like Latin
materia, timber; and so the stuff or material out of which a thing is wrought." Vigfusson's Dictionary, p.
116.