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Chapter 2. Connections 34
be brought back into a balance or “wholeness.” This was the job of the King 18 or
the Cunning Man.
The Problem of Balance
In many worldviews, including the so-called New Age, there is generally something
or some force which actually is balanced or is used in balancing, but review of
the ancient Germanic literature, etymology, or linguistics does not reveal ‘concepts’
of power, energy, force, or balance. This is the problem:
If the early Germanic peoples accepted this idea of balances and checks
between the different Lands in their worldview, which, by all indications,
they did, then shouldn’t there be a single word or concept by which they
called ”that which is balanced,” this ”power” which supposedly poured forth
from Hvergelmir?
The Polynesians, after all, have the concept of mana; the Ojibwa have manitou; the
Chinese, chi. Sorting through all the literature, eddaic, sagaic, and even modern
folklore, one runs across several terms which seem to indicate some form of localized
power, but an overall term is lacking. I’ve seen books in the New Age section of
bookstores which apply these foreign terms to the northern Germanic worldview,
but the authors admittedly made these deductions themselves. Swain Wodening in
his booklet Beyond Good and Evil: Wyrd and Germanic Heathen Ethics 19 lists main
(OE = mægen) as “the magical, spiritual, or life force possessed by every human being”
(p. vi), and he considers it to be comparable to the mana of the Polynesians and
equates it with ”hamingja” of the ancient Scandinavians. Thorsson calls hamingja
“a magical force” attached to a human being, 20 even though it is usually defined
as a “guardian-spirit” in glossaries, dictionaries, and books on northern mythology,
but he does not explain why this force is attached only to human beings and not
to mountains, trees, etc. Of course, one can always speculate that trees have a soul
but no hamingja, or that trees are only objects plain and clear, and that being the
case hamingja is a poor candidate as the counterpart to mana. Bauschatz in The
Well and the Tree provides some very clear evidence that the early Scandinavians
18 We have not yet discussed the King’s role and how it relates to the role of the Cunning-Man.
Whether one became a King or a Cunning-Man really depended on (at least before the Conversion
to Christianity) where one lived. The roles and functions relate closely to one another, and as we
shall see later, both are instrumental in the luck of the community.
19 Wodening, Swain Beyond Good and Evil: Wyrd and Germanic Heathen Ethics (Endweorc
Press; Watertown, NY) 1994.
20 Thorsson, Edred Futhark: A Handbook of Rune Magic (Samuel Weiser; York Beach, ME)
19 , p. 150.