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Chapter 6. The Sky 142
as those promoted by Frazer, Anderson, or Kaufmann were related to the idea
that religion must have developed from a primitive form comprised of vegetation
and fertility Gods since these were the only things that a cave-dwelling hunter and
gatherer could have been concerned about. When these men wrote about Germanic
mythology, they did so with a historical approach; the “old Gods had passed on.”
To them this was obvious and inevitable because the natural evolution of society
from the simple agrarian to the much more complex industrial/ scientific necessarily
created the need for a “new God,” being more sophisticated Himself, and, therefore,
more sympathetic and suitable to the needs of a new world.
Later, beginning in the late 1800’s and continuing on for nearly a century, the
development and practice of behavioral sciences such as psychology, sociology, neurology,
and anthropology, helped to produce a whole new breed of “interpreters”
which includes the famous Freud, Jung, and their descendants, Georges Dumezil,
Jan DeVries, and a list of followers much too long to be included here. Their interpretations
included much material that had come before, but they also modified some
of it to suit the development of the “new sciences.” This generation of interpreters
believes that the Gods have not passed completely away but that they continue
to live on in the folk-, collective-, cultural-, or genetic memories of mankind as
archetypes, and that they resurface on a regular basis to guide folk towards their
eventual destinies as whole and complete beings. This resurfacing of archetypal
thought-patterns has been interpreted as the cause or at least the facilitator of
every great event of mankind from time immemorial. 1
By continuing to pursue this line of reasoning, these new behavioral scientists believe
that their understanding of archetypes will eventually lead to the understanding
of why people do what they do; at any rate, that is the theory. For these scientists,
the Gods do not live outside human consciousness but are actually part of its very
fabric; they live within the very neurochemical patterning of human existence. The
new move in sciences is towards either existentialism or Taoism, saying that there
is no such thing as objective existence, that all perception is subjective, i.e. can
be had only from the viewpoint of the observer. The observer and the observed
are inextricably intertwined so that it becomes impossible, in a Cartesian sense,
to determine the existence of anything outside the self. Oddly enough, however,
these same men of science continued to present their material from the traditional
viewpoint of the “objective observer”; they were not able to make a clean break
from the viewpoint of their predecessors. Right or wrong, this anthropocentric view
1 Carl Jung, the psychologist and foremost promoter of the ”archetype theory” wrote an essay
in the 1930’s called ”Woden” which attempted to show how an entire society could be lead to
accept a single worldview. The upshot of the essay was that Germany was being reshaped by the
northern Germanic archetype of Woden (ON Óðínn).