Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 6. The Sky 147
Interestingly, it was the Heathen definition of a God which eventually allowed
for the acceptance of the Christian religion. Initially, people did not give up their
religion, their allegiance to the Æsir, the Vanir, the landvættir, and the ancestors at
all but accepted the triune God of the Christians, particularly the “White Christ,”
(see Chap. 8) into their pantheon as an equal. Traders, kings, warriors, and, of
course, entire communities, have all been recorded in the sagaic literature as being
prone to “dual-religionism.” Traders, because of their occupational need to deal
with a great number of people, would often accept the God of the new religion
but continue sacrificing to the Gods of their fore-fathers as well. Helgi the Lean in
Iceland
“ . . . one of the best known of these [dual-religionists] 8 . . . grew up in
Ireland. He believed in Christ, but would call on Þór to guide him at sea,
and when great decisions had to be made. When he drew near to the coast
of Iceland, he called on Þór to tell him where to land, and the answer came
that he must go to the North. But when he had established his new home,
Helgi called it Kristnes (Christ’s Headland), as it is called today.” 9
The tolerance of the early northern Teutons, however, was not their undoing; it was
a combination of the intolerance of the new-religionists, conversion of high profile
political figures, Christian customs which essentially tainted all Heathen holidays
with “christianized interpretations,” and forced conversion of the common folk by
figures such as King Olaf the Holy who viciously persecuted, and executed, as many
Heathens as he could possibly find. Even so, the tenacity of belief in the northern
Gods in conjunction with the Germanic world view made the conversion to be a
very slow and painful process.
The Germanic view of the world as being a place of ever changing flow of power/
luck was a system which supported the northern pantheon and was provable through
personal experience. For the early Germanic people, the all-or-nothing philosophy of
the Christian worldview left too many paradoxes which could only be reconciled with
very weak explanations. The northern view allowed for “good years” and “bad years”
although each would strive to improve their lot over the course of time. Personal
experience showed that ancestral lands which have been long cared for tended to
produce more consistently, for example, because the family over time had aligned
itself with the power/ luck of the land through sacrifice and through the laying of
the dead into the soil. New land, on the other hand, was a more precarious venture
8 Note: the term "dual-religionism" would be from a Christian point of view because for the
Heathen the acceptance of Jesus would be simply adding one more God into a pantheon which
already existed.
9 Turville-Petre Myth and Religion of the North (Greenwood Press; Westport, CT) 1964, p.
88.