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Chapter 2. Connections 54
The spiritual philosophy of the early Germanic peoples, unlike that of Christianity,
was not a route to salvation since they did not believe that anything to be
saved from. One starts out in life as part of a family lineage and remains part of his
lineage. The worldview and its proscription for action and responsibility was a way
to access the power/ luck flowing with the Waters that fed the World Tree and a way
for an individual to participate in the overall functioning of the Universe bringing
meaning and value into a life well-lived. Our primary concern today is generally
for personal comfort through life, but for the ancients, the ultimate desire was to
fit comfortably into the scheme of things which, of course, brought with it a sense
of personal comfort and well-being. Really, once one realizes that no individual life
is separate from any other, the main desires in life, i.e. to be the best that any
one can be, to live life to its fullest potential, and to go to the grave as a complete
human being, are the same no matter the century or the place. Only the process of
achieving these ends is different.
Common 20 th century philosophy is something like “I must learn to love myself
before I can love, care for and nurture others.” A quaint philosophy and rather
commonly heard, but it is very ego-centric (almost pathologically so) and typical
to this century. People already do love themselves above all others often to the
point that they sometimes forget that others even exist (on freeways in the USA,
in grocery store lines, at garage sales, etc.) and in their forgetfulness, they take
the lives and conditions around them for granted sometimes actually causing great
harm and destruction while engaging in their personal use of the world around
them. Self-gratification has been the rule for ages. In fact, it was the very thing
that brought the Roman Empire to ruin. Folks sate their desires for money, comfort,
love, material goods, possessions, land and power without thought or concern for
the effects that greed is wreaking. They search for royalty in their pasts to satisfy
and pacify egos that have grown great at the expense of everything around them,
but, in reality, these modern folks are the inheritors of Andvari’s gold. It is not that
we do not “love ourselves” but that there is no value to our lives.
For the ancients, the spiritual goals of the 20 th century would seem crude at
best, for they believed in leading a life that was “worth” (from the same IE root as
Urð; Wyrd) something, and that interacting with the Waters of Life was the means
to a life of “worth.” The Hávamál or the ”Sayings of the High One” (one of the
poems in the Elder or Poetic Edda) is often viewed as the Viking Code of Conduct
as Lee Hollander’s introduction to her translation of it would indicate:
“They (the poetic verses) stress especially the laws of hospitality, the
rules of decent conduct, the value of circumspection in one’s dealings with
men, the need for moderation in eating and drinking, the vanity of mere
wealth compared with true merit–all in the spirit of Germanic Heathendom,