ON THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF THE MYTHOLOGY.

The account now given of the myths concerning the lower world shows that the hierologists and skalds of our heathendom had developed the doctrine in a perspicuous manner even down to the minutest details. The lower world and its kingdom of death were the chief subjects with which their fancy was occupied. The many sagas and traditions which flowed from heathen sources and which described Svipdag's, Hadding's, Gorm's, Thorkil's, and other journeys down there are proof of this, and the complete agreement of statements from totally different sources in regard to the topography of the lower world and the life there below shows that the ideas were reduced to a systematised and perspicuous whole. Svipdag's and Hadding's journeys in the lower world have been incorporated as episodes in the great epic concerning the Teutonic patriarchs, the chief outlines of which I have presented in the preceding pages. This is done in the same manner as the visits of Ulysses and Æneas in the lower world have become a part of the great Greek and Roman epic poems.

Under such circumstances it may seem surprising that Icelandic records from the middle ages concerning the heathen belief in regard to the abodes after death should give us statements which seems utterly irreconcilable with one another. For there are many proofs that the dead were believed to live in hills and rocks, or in grave-mounds where their bodies were buried. How can this be reconciled with the doctrine that the dead descended to the lower world, and were there judged either to receive abodes in Asgard or in the realms of bliss in Hades, or in the world of torture?

The question has been answered too hastily to the effect that the statements cannot be harmonised, and that consequently the heathen-Teutonic views in regard to the day of judgment were in this most important part of the religious doctrine unsupported.

The reason for the obscurity is not, however, in the matter itself, which has never been thoroughly studied, but in the false premises from which the conclusions have been drawn. Mythologists have simply assumed that the popular view of the Christian Church in regard to terrestrial man, conceiving him to consist of two factors, the perishable body and the imperishable soul, was the necessary condition for every belief in a life hereafter, and that the heathen Teutons accordingly also cherished this idea.

But this duality did not enter into the belief of our heathen fathers. Nor is it of such a kind that a man, having conceived a life hereafter, in this connection necessarily must conceive the soul as the simple, indissoluble spiritual factor of human nature. The division into two parts, lif ok sála, líkamr ok sála, body and soul, came with Christianity, and there is every reason for assuming, so far as the Scandinavian peoples are concerned, that the very word soul, sála, sál, is, like the idea it represents, an imported word. In Old Norse literature the word occurs for the first time in Olaf Trygveson's contemporary Halfred, after he had been converted to Christianity. Still the word is of Teutonic root. Ulfilas translates the New Testament psyche with saiwala, but this he does with his mind on the Platonic New Testament view of man as consisting of three factors: spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma). Spirit (pneuma) Ulfilas translates with ahma.

Another assumption, likewise incorrect in estimating the anthropological-eschatological belief of the Teutons, is that they are supposed to have distinguished between matter and mind, which is a result reached by the philosophers of the Occident in their abstract studies. It is, on the contrary, certain that such a distinction never entered the system of heathen Teutonic views. In it all things were material, an efni of course or fine grain, tangible or intangible, visible or invisible. The imperishable factors of man were, like the perishable, material, and a force could not be conceived which was not bound to matter, or expressed itself in matter, or was matter.

The heathen Teutonic conception of human nature, and of the factors composing it, is most like the Aryan-Asiatic as we find the latter preserved in the traditions of Buddhism, which assume more than three factors in a human being, and deny the existence of a soul, if this is to mean that all that is not corporal in man consists of a single simple, and therefore indissoluble, element, the soul.

The anthropological conception presented in Völuspa is as follows: Man consists of six elements, namely, to begin with the lower and coarser and to end with the highest and noblest: