TEUTONIC MYTHOLOGY. - Centrostudirpinia.it

TEMPLES. 87
people s habits of thinking were consulted, and they could believe
that the old sacredness had not departed from the place, but hence
forth flowed from the presence of the true God (see Suppl.).
At the same time we here perceive the reason of the almost
entire absence of heathen monuments or their remains, not only
in Germany proper, but in the North, where certainly such
conf. in chaps. VI. X. XVI.
temples existed, and more plentifully ;
the temple at Sigtun, baer i Baldrshaga, and the Nornas temple.
Either these were levelled with the ground to make room for a
Christian church, or their walls and halls were worked into the new
building. We may be slow to form any high opinion of the build
ing art among the heathen Germans, yet they must have understood
how to arrange considerable masses of stone, and bind them firmly
together. We have evidence of this in the grave-mounds and places
of sacrifice still preserved in Scandinavia, partly also in Friesland
and Saxony, from which some important inferences might be drawn
with regard to the old heathen services, but these I exclude from
my present investigation.
The results are these : the earliest seat of heathen worship was
in groves, whether on mountain or in pleasant mead ;
there the first
temples were afterwards built, and there also were the tribunals of
the nation.
Fana idolorum destruens incendit, et mare daemonibus cultum, immissis quatuor
lapidibus sacro chrismate pemnctis, et aqua purgans benedicta, novam Domino
. . . plantationem eduxit. On the conversion of the Pantheon into a
church, see Massmann s Eradius 476.