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Chapter 6. The Sky 144
of personal experience, altering one’s frame of reference (state of consciousness), and
the overall effects that these things had upon reality or perception of reality (160).
For these folk whether the Gods lived inside as archetypes or outside as part of an
objective reality made no difference: experience through personal participation was
the only possible key.
What is the validity of human experience? Who knows? Interaction between
Gods and men is well documented in the eddaic and sagaic literature (160), and to
take a man’s description of such an interaction and to reinterpret it as a meeting
with an inner archetype or as an encounter with a Dumezilian function, or as an
encounter with a “Christ-metaphor” is to demean or degrade the personal experience
to suit another’s needs and desires. For an individual, an encounter with a God, a
spirit, or a dead ancestor is a meeting with power/ luck, i.e., a lineage. It is a full
participation in a personal experience and needs no further interpretation . This is
the approach taken here. Often it may sound as if the Gods as They are presented
here do have an objective existence beyond the human realm of perception, and if
that is the case, so be it.
Personal experience, as well as group experience, was obviously very important
to the early Germanic peoples. Evidence for this lies in the fact that even
though their religion was organized to some degree, at least a local level, individuals
and communities varied greatly from each other in their approach to the northern
pantheon, so that some communities, such as many early Swedish kingdoms, were
more closely allied with the Vanir and landvættir, while others, particularly in the
later-developing Viking communities, aligned themselves with warrior Gods such as
Óðínn. Not only were there differences between geographical locations, but a single
community could change its godly allegiances over time so that a community that
was once part of a Vanic cult would gradually become part of the cult of Óðínn or
Þór. Iceland’s history also shows a wide variety of approaches to religion so that
individuals arriving in the same fleet could belong to the cults of Óðínn, Þór, and
even the White Christ, while some of the professional warriors professed atheism.
Obviously, the northern Germanic people, for the most part, were very tolerant of
differences between themselves, and that personal experience (or group experience)
and cultural legacy were of primary importance.
The northern Heathen view of the Gods was much different than that of the
Christians towards their God, which has kept Heathenism almost incomprehensible
to the Church of Rome for almost two millennia. In the Christian mind, as with the
followers of many of the other “southern religions”, the “true God” is omnipotent.
The Heathens, on the other hand, knew that their Gods, although powerful, are
subject to the same universal laws as any other part of Creation (the Tree), i.e.,
¸orlög (see Chap. 2). The Æsir and Vanir were considered to be long lived, true, but