There was, however, no necessity to think and reason as these two main schools in our age have done. One might also from the beginning, have taken the same road and arrived at the same conclusion as, for instance, Granfelt in his “Christian Dogmatic.” “It has been demonstrated beyond doubt by natural science,” says this prominent theologian, “that the matter of a human body is, even here on earth, in continuous circulation, so that in the course of a few weeks all atoms of the whole body are replaced by new atoms. The only lasting attribute of the soul during this process is the spiritual body, which assimilates, typically forms, and again secretes the earthly matter. It must be this spiritual body, then, that constitutes the combining element between man’s earthly body and his glorified body in the eternal life.”
Christianity speaks not only of a material resurrection on the day of judgment; it also says that man possesses within him a spiritual body, which after death immediately arises to everlasting life. This latter conception is not confined to Christianity. In all religions we find two tendencies side by side, the one idealistic and the other more realistic, which indeed are not really opposed to each other, inasmuch as the belief in a spiritual body may be said to constitute the basis even for the realistic conception that places the spirit in co-relation with the body in the grave.
The idealistic tendency may be traced away back even to prehistoric times and has generally been connected with some other burial methods, among which cremation was the most common. The place cremation occupied in ancient thought and the connection fancied by our forefathers between the elements which make up man’s spiritual body, may be gathered from Victor Rydberg’s researches in Germanic mythology.
“The popular ecclesiastical dualism of soul and body,” says Rydberg, “was as foreign to the Veda-Aryans as to the heathen Germanic race. According to the latter, man consisted of six different elements: First, the earthly element of which the visible body is made; second, a vegetative; third, an animal; fourth, the so-called liten (litr), an inner body shaped after the gods, and invisible to earthly eyes; fifth, the soul; sixth, the spirit.”
The earthly and the vegetative elements were already joined in the trees, Ask and Embla, when the gods came and changed them into the first human pair. Each of the three gods gave them separate gifts. From Lodur they received la, that is the blood, and laeti, that is the power of intentional movement inherent in the blood, which attributes have been considered by all peoples as the characteristics that distinguish animal from vegetable life. Lodur gave them further the god-image, liter goda, by the power of which man’s earthly substance receives the form in which it appears to the senses. The Germanic race, like the Hellenes and the Romans, believed that the gods had human form, so that this form originally belonged to the gods. To the Germanic hierologists and bards man was formed in effigiem deorum and possessed in his nature a liter goda, a god image in the literal sense of the word.
This image may for a short time be separated from the other human elements, so that a person may assume the appearance of another without changing his spiritual identity.
The soul, odr, is the gift of Höner, while the spirit, önd, is the contribution of Odin.
Earthly death consists in the separation of the higher elements, spirit, soul and liten, which form a unity for themselves, from the lower elements and a removal of the former to Hades. The lower elements, the earthly, the vegetal and the animal, continue in the grave for a longer or shorter time to co-operate and form a certain unity, which, from the higher elements, retain something of the living man’s personality and qualities. This lower unity is the ghost, the wraith, which usually sleeps during the day in the grave, but in the night might wake either spontaneously or by other people’s prayers and sorcery. The ghost possesses the nature of the deceased; it is good and benevolent, or evil and dangerous, according to his disposition. Because animal and vegetal elements form part of his nature, he is tormented by a craving for nourishment if he wakes from his slumber.
These conceptions of a dualistic life after death, common among the Veda-Aryans, as well as among the heathen Norsemen, were closely allied with the idea of cremation. Agni, the god of fire, removed the dead man to a better world, while the coarser body, with its faults and defects, was consumed by the flames.