TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

GODS.
without invoking the gods (precatus deos) and who regards himself
as a servant of the gods (ministros deorum), of a regnator omnium
deus, of the gods of Germany (Germaniae deos in aspectu, Hist. 5,
IT), of the diis patriis to whom the captured signa Eomana were
hung up (Ann. 1, 59); when he distinguishes between penetrate
Germaniae deos or dii penates (Ann. 2, 10. 11, 16), communes dii
(Hist. 4, 64), and conjugates dii (Germ. 18) ; when he even distin
guishes individual gods, and tries to suit them with Eoman names,
and actually names (interpretatione Eomana) a Mars, Mercurius,
Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Isis, nay, has preserved
the German
appellations of the deus terra editus and of his son, and of a goddess,
the terra mater ; how is it possible
to deny that at that time the
when we
Germans worshipped veritable gods ? How is it possible,
take into account all the rest that we know of the language, the
liberty, the manners, and virtues of the German!, to maintain the
notion that, sunk in a stolid fetishism, they cast themselves down
before logs and puddles, and paid to them their simple adoration ?
The opinion of Caasar, 1 who knew the Germans more super
ficially than Tacitus a hundred and fifty years later, cannot be
allowed to derogate from the truth. He wants to contrast our
ancestors with the Gauls, with whom he had had more familiar
converse ; but the personifications
of the sun, fire, and the moon,
to which he limits the sum total of their gods,
will hardly bear even
a forced interpretatio Eomana . If in the place of sun and moon
we put Apollo and Diana, they at once contradict that deeply rooted
peculiarity of the Teutonic way of thinking, which conceives of the
sun as a female, and of the moon as a male being, which could not
have escaped the observation of the Eoman, if it had penetrated
deeper. And Vulcan, similar to the Norse Loki, but one of those
divinities of whom there is least trace to be found in the rest of
Teutondom, had certainly less foundation than the equally visible
and helpful deities of the nourishing earth, and of the quickening,
fish-teeming, ship-sustaining water. I can only look upon Caesar s
statements as a half-true and roughcast opinion, which, in the face
of the more detailed testimony of Tacitus, hardly avails to cast a
1 Deorum numero eos solos ducunt, quos cernunt, et quorum opibus aperte
juvantur, Solem et Vulcanum et Lunam; reliquos ne fama quidem acceperunt.
B.G. 6, 21. Compare with this E.G. 4, 7 where the Usipetes and Tenchtheri
say to Csesar : Sese unis Suevis concedere, quibus ne dii quidem immortelles
pares esse possint.