TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

10-4 GODS.
doubt on other gods, much less to prove a bare worship of elements
among the German!.
All the accounts that vouch for the early existence of individual
gods, necessarily testify at the same time to their great number and
their mutual relationship. When Procopius ascribes a TroXu? Oewv
o/u\o9 to the Heruli, this great host must also be good for the
Goths, just those of whom we know the fewest particulars, and for
all the Germans together. Jornandes would have us believe that
Diceneus was the first to make the Goths acquainted with gods,
cap. 11 : Elegit ex eis tune nobilissimos prudentiores viros, quos
theologiam instruens numina quaedam et sacella venerari suasit ;
here evidently we see the ruler who promoted the service of
particular gods. But that Jornandes himself credited his Goths
with unmistakably native gods, is plain from cap. 10: Unde et
sacerdotes Gothorum aliqui, illi qui pii vocabantur, subito patefactis
portis cum citharis et vestibus candidis obviam sunt egressi paternis
diis, ut sibi propitii Macedones repellerent voce supplici modulantes.
The fact here mentioned may even have been totally alien to the
real Goths, but anyhow we gather from it the opinion of Jornandes.
And if we also want evidence about a race lying quite at the
opposite extremity of Germany, one that clung with great fidelity
to their old-established faith, we have it in the Lex Frisionum,
addit. tit. 13, where the subject is the penalty on temple-breakers :
Immolatur diis quorum templa violavit.
We have now arrived at the following result. In the first
century of our era the religion of the Germans rested mainly upon
the northern
gods ; a thousand or twelve hundred years later, among
section of the race, which was the last to exchange the faith of its
fathers for a new one, the old system of gods is preserved the most
perfectly. Linked by language and unbroken tradition to either
extremity of heathenism, both its first appearance in history and its
fall, stands central Germany from the fifth to the ninth century.
During this period the figures of the heathen gods, in the feeble
and hostile light thrown upon them by the reports of recent con
verts, come before us faded and indistinct, but still always as gods.
I must here repeat, that Tacitus knows no simulacrum of
German gods, no image l moulded in human shape ; what he had
1 Grk. ayaXpa, signum, statue ; Goth, manleika, OHG. manalthho, ON.
Uknesld (see Suppl.) ; can the Sloven, malik, idol, have sprung
from manleika?