CHAPTER XI

SCANDINAVIAN BELIEFS CONCERNING THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE

THOUGH the old Norse mythology has become largely familiar to frequenters of modern opera,—thanks to the mighty genius of Richard Wagner, who has drawn freely from mythologic sources and endowed the old heroic tales with new life and vigor,—it was not till Marie Corelli gave us her fascinating Norwegian story “Thelma” that the people of England and America came to realize that the race of Vikings may not be yet extinct in rugged picturesque Norway, where the majestic fjords and the general sublimity of natural scenery form an appropriate back-ground for those splendid, but tragic, beliefs and ceremonies to which Olaf and his clan still cling with undying tenacity.

We cannot study the religion and philosophy of India without becoming soon convinced that the warm, and often depressing, climate of the peninsula and its adjacent islands has had much to do with the introspective tendencies of the inhabitants. The temperature is usually high, the heat often intense, and in such conditions external existence often seems a bore rather than a blessing. Amid such surroundings has grown up a profound theosophy and also a sense of indifference to all external things, which, when carried to its extreme, has begotten distaste for all physical exertion.

In Greece, one of the loveliest countries of the earth and blessed with a charming climate, grew up an æsthetic cult, heroic on the one hand (as in Sparta), effeminate on the other. Love of life reached its maximum point in the Greece of classic days, and this led to a distaste for the idea of any cessation of physical existence.

Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, the ancient homes of Norse mythology, differ very widely in all respects from the placid Orient and from beauteous Greece and the lovely islands of the Mediterranean; and as Professor Tyndall was wont to declare, climate has very much to do with religious sentiment and all phases of its expression, we are not surprised to find that Scandinavia has proved the seat of a war-like faith, which, though hard and tempestuous, like the physical aspects of the country, in many of its details is by no means destitute of sterling heroic qualities which may profitably be incorporated as a much-needed backbone for many modern creeds.

Though at root all religions and philosophies are one,—for all start from the same point, viz., human endeavor to decipher the hieroglyphics and solve the riddle of the universe,—the multifarious endeavors of humanity to accomplish this herculean, and always unfinished, task have given birth to the innumerable speculations which divide the world into sects and parties, which can never be harmonized except on the basis of a truly synthetic philosophy.

Taking, as we do, a sympathetic rather than a harshly critical view of the world's many creeds and doctrines, we see good in all, but the whole of truth in none; therefore do we consider it irrational and impious to seek to convince the whole earth that one form of religious doctrine and worship is entirely true, while all other cults are dangerous and false. When Christianity began to make headway in northern Europe it freely incorporated Norse traditions, which still prevail to some appreciable extent, even as in southern Europe this same eclectic Christianity took to itself the temples of paganism and gave the names of saints to the older gods and goddesses. The Christian church has proved extremely flexible and adaptable whenever it has been ruled by an accommodating priesthood, though whenever some few men of stern prophetic temper have held for a while the reins of command, no temporizing or conciliatory policy has been tolerated. The genial side of Christianity is soft as butter and smooth as oil, but its relentless, persecuting aspect is sharp as steel and remorseless as flame. We cannot understand so complex a system as the Christian, ranging as it does from simple Theism to revolting phases of idolatry, without tracing its many origins to the manifold earlier systems from which it freely borrowed and out of which its hybrid aspects grew.

But, protest as we may against inconsistencies, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that human nature itself, as well as the elements all around us, are extremely inconsistent in behavior, giving rise to a belief in many conflicting deities, even though all may originally proceed from one ineffably good source and eventually make manifest the goodness of their origin. Those are not wanting who claim that Norse mythology is of Atlantean origin, and that it closely resembles the mythologies of Greece and Rome, which were derived from the same source. Those of our readers who wish to pursue this interesting question are advised to peruse “Atlantis” by Ignatius Donnelly, and also a work on the same subject of profound archæological interest by Scott Eliott (Theosophical Publishing Society). It is not our immediate purpose to peer into such remote and necessarily dim origins, but simply to briefly map out a few of the leading features of the ancient Scandinavian religion which has left many a trace in those popular parts of northern Europe which afford delightful summer camping-grounds and opportunity to gaze upon the wondrous glory of the midnight sun. Dr. Alger says that "many considerations combine to make it seem likely that at an early period a migration took place from southern Asia to northern Europe, which constituted the commencement of what afterwards grew to be the great Gothic family. The correspondence of many of the leading doctrines and symbols of the Scandinavian mythology with well-known Persian and Buddhist notions,—notions of a purely fanciful and arbitrary character,—is too peculiar, apparently, to admit of any other explanation.

"But the germs of thought and imagination transplanted thus from the warm and gorgeous climes of the East to the snowy mountains of Norway and the howling ridges of Iceland, obtained a fresh development, with numerous modifications and strange additions, from the new life, climate, scenery, and customs to which they were then exposed. The temptation to predatory habits and strife, the necessity for an intense though fitful activity arising from their geographical situation, the forceful spirit nourished in them by their actual life, the tremendous phenomena of the Arctic world around them,—all these influences break out to our view in the poetry, and are reflected by their results in the religion of the Northmen." Following this telling quotation, may we not add also that as the spirit-world with which we are all in closest touch is the temporary home of those of our own race and kin who have recently laid off their mortal robes, we do actually receive impressions from this surrounding psychic zone which builds up still further a system of belief and practice congenial to the immediate condition of ourselves and our unseen coadjutors? That one consideration, estimated at its due worth, would almost suffice to answer the innumerable queries constantly propounded concerning the diversity of views expressed by communicating intelligences, who, in every land and to every race, have some special message to deliver which does not altogether tally with what is elsewhere received from the denizens of the world of spirits. Again and yet again are we compelled to insist that communications may be thoroughly genuine and yet at variance with each other, because the act of dropping a material body neither transforms character nor introduces the freed spirit to any greater possession of knowledge than is warranted by previous growth and aspiration.

A war-like people enter into close communion with departed warriors with whom they are in intimate affinity, and just as the Japanese now declare that warrior spirits assist them on the battle-field, and that these are often their former comrades, so did the hardy Norsemen in days of old declare the same. Valhalla, the hall of Odin, chief of Norse divinities, is pictured in the Eddas as a place of judgment as well as of glory. Some of the descriptions are martial and terrific in the extreme; spears and all instruments of war figure plenteously in Odin's magnificent, though barbarous, abode. Valiant souls, who while on earth were the heroes in distinguished battles, are received with great honor at the celestial court; these are the elect of Odin, who causes the Valkyrs, white-clad virgins with flowing ringlets, to wait on them as cup-bearers. Every morning at cock-crow these heroes go forth to battle, and are often seriously wounded in their desperate encounters, but every evening their wounds are completely healed and they are furnished with a luxurious banquet. Such, no doubt, was regarded by the ferocious Norsemen as a blissful life in Paradise, and as they loved fighting on earth, so they conceive that they would fight in heaven.

It was from Sweden, a land in which such vivid mythologic ideas had taken abiding root, that Swedenborg came forth to give to the astonished peoples of Europe in the torpid eighteenth century his graphic delineations of many heavens and many hells all constructed upon the plan of dominant affection at their base. Valhalla contains no women, only the most valiant among heroic men; but it is by no means the whole of heaven. Vingolf, the Hall of Friendship, stands beside the Hall of the Slain, and here are troops of noble women, for there are goddesses as well as gods in Norse mythology. Then there are the still higher and far more beautiful heavens, the abode of the rarely-named Omnipresent One, the true All-Father, who will finally come forth when this manifested universe shall cease to exist, and build a new and yet more glorious one.

Concerning terms of admission to any heaven or banishment to any hell, we are told that the path to glory is only through cultivation of all the heroic virtues, while the road to infernal states is always through the practice of deceit and falsehood. Not unreasonably did those hardy people associate strength with goodness and feebleness with vice, and in so doing they taught a doctrine in complete accord with our common word virtue, which is but a translation of the Latin virtus, which certainly implies both strength and courage. Those who die in arms are called the “Chosen of Odin”; all who pass from earth after lives of “despicable ease” or who die of sickness have no bright future immediately awaiting them; such souls find themselves in Hela, a gloomy cavern where there seems to be but little active misery, though there is no active joy. Perjury, adultery and murder are considered hateful crimes, and for these offenses penalties of a severe character are meted out in the future state. Stern morality, though consistent with a barbarous code, is proclaimed in Norse mythology.

As in the Zoroastrian faith, so in the Scandinavian also do we find one supreme note triumphing above all others— the ultimate destruction of evil and the everlasting perpetuity of good. There is to be a universal battle, and at the end of the “Twilight of the Gods,” a term applied to the present divided creation in which light and darkness are constantly at strife, all discord will cease and harmony prevail forever.

With the quaint and peculiar superstitions of the Norsemen regarding their finger and toe nails and other minute particulars, we need not greatly concern ourselves; there is doubtless a symbolic meaning to be attached to the statement that no one should die with unpaired nails,— this probably means that no slightest duty should be neglected, for the entire life produces its result even in minutest matters.

The beautiful story of “Baldur the Good” reminds us of many other tales of self-sacrificing heroes who willingly die that others may enjoy a larger and more glorious life. In Bohn’s Antiquarian Library we find a masterly edition of Percy’s translation of Mallet’s “Northern Antiquities,” in which the scholarly editor, Blackwell, argues with conclusive force in favor of the view we strenuously hold that the Norsemen looked forward to the ultimate glorification of the entire human race, though the virtuous in “Gimle” and the vicious in “Nastrond” would respectively experience joys and sorrows of indefinite duration previous to the glorious age of unmarred felicity which awaits the whole creation.

No writer has better described the funeral customs of the Vikings than has Marie Corelli, who shows us Thelma’s father sailing out to sea in his burning ship, departing from his robe of flesh triumphantly, as his ancestors had gone before him, while the vessel burns around him, and when he has expired the ship he had loved so well sinks at once into the waves. No suicide, no thought of self-destruction mars the heroic splendor of this awe-inspiring scene. The aged warrior has grown feeble and knows that his earthly end has come. Not till it is evident that his moments are rapidly nearing their close does he call upon his ever faithful attendants to bear him to his ship; then, when the life within his frame flickers so feebly that at any instant it may expire, he gives the order that the ship put out to sea and be ignited, and the brave soul has left its earthly tenement before it is possible that the blazing vessel can sink into the ocean. Cremation, rather than burial, has always been the choice of heroic peoples. To bury the dead into the ground is to pollute the earth, and endanger the health of the living, and it seems to encourage and perpetuate materialistic and gruesome practices which encourage mental morbidity as well as physical disease. The crematories of to-day in all civilized countries, which are rapidly supplanting burial grounds or cemeteries, are not only highly sanitary and therefore most commendable, they are also calculated to do much to end the necromantic rites, and the hideous beliefs connected with them, which invariably cluster around a place of interment. Not every one would like to see a beloved parent go out to sea in a ship of flame, knowing that his flesh had descended into the depths of the ocean, whether buried or otherwise; but so romantic an ending of the earthly career was only intended for the naval warriors even in the old Norse days. The sea-kings were not the only heroes, and amid the snows of Norway many another type of warrior was buried with his splendid horse and all the accoutrements of battle. Thomas Carlyle summed up his glowing description of the old Vikings in these majestic words: "Worthily bury the old hero at once in the sky and in the ocean." No doubts were entertained by their survivors that these men of valor and renown entered upon a glorious life beyond and still took interest in the affairs of earth, a faith which has persisted through all ages and lives to-day unquenchably in the inmost heart of our humanity.