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Chapter 6. The Sky 161
a kingdom. The individual indeed may have enjoyed certain privileges provided by
the God whom he represented but in terms that would benefit the entire community
in short and the overall functioning of the World Tree in the long run.
Again the ancient Germanic view of individuality resurfaces. A person was an
individual only as he or she fit into a lineage, a family, a community, a nation,
Midgard and, finally, the Tree itself like a series of concentric circles with the center
being the realm of personal experience or the point from which perception originated.
Each had roles and responsibilities to play out within each of the circles. The “force”
of an act diminished the further from the point of the act’s origin with the effects
of the most powerful lineages being felt in ever wider circles (see Chap. 2). The
relationship between an individual and a God, then, was from the very center of a
set of these concentric circles to the outermost circle, and, like throwing a rock into
the center of a lake, for the reverberation of an individual to be felt by the Gods, an
act would have had to have been very powerful indeed with perhaps only the acts
of kings, powerful leaders, and great warriors or entire communities being the most
effective.
There are many speculations by scholars as to why Christianity was accepted
in northern Europe, and many of them have been mentioned to some degree in
the preceding chapters. None of the theories cover all the bases, but they all have
one thing in common: Christianity offered a way for the status of an individual to
be raised to its highest possible level. No longer did a person have to suffer the
supposed indignity of being an insignificant cog/ individual within the workings of
a very large machine/ community; he or she could have a direct line of access to the
widest of the concentric circles but only by accepting the White Christ. In essence,
by accepting the new God, even thralls (slaves) could view themselves on par with
kings.
Christianity had something to offer to everyone. It did not acknowledge slavery,
so in Christian eyes at least slaves were essentially freed men. The large population
of peasants (bonded servants) were offered individual salvation. Kings were offered
political power which through alliances with other Christian kings increased their
political influence from being the king of a small regional kingdom to something
more akin to an emperor. Even though Christianity was supposed to be primarily
a spiritual movement,
“it is likely that political as well as religious considerations were significant
in determining whether a leader received Christianity and whether he could
induce his followers to agree. Cnut the Great is an obvious example of a
great Viking ruler who recognized that political success would depend on his