Barbarian Rites: The Spiritual World of the Vikings and the Germanic Tribes by Hans-Peter Ph.D. Hasenfratz

Author:Hans-Peter Ph.D., Hasenfratz
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: History/Folklore
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2011-06-22T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Powers

The religious human being finds himself or herself confronted with a multitude of powers, which are often experienced as individual entities embodied in a particular form. These powers include the human being and whatever manifests itself to him or her, the supernatural beings that make up so-called lower mythology, the deities, and the powers of fate (or fate itself).

The Human Being

A human being is experienced as a power, and power reveals itself to the human being.1 We have seen how in certain respects a dead person as compared to a living person experienced an increase in power. The dead person possessed knowledge of the future, which the living (using death magic) could gain access to and utilize. The living corpse, and the revenant in particular, has command of monstrous physical forces. A revenant could shift its physical location in a way that a living person could not, and it also had the ability to transform its shape.

We have seen how living people could send psychic forces (the so-called Exkursionsseele, or “traveling soul”) out of the body, which then collapsed in immobility, and were able to harm the bodies and lives of their fellow human beings in a cannibalistic way (such as in night travels by witches). We have seen how someone could gain access to sleeping people in an altered form (for instance, as a spider), in order to torture his or her victims as a night demon (the Mahrtenritt), and we have seen how the elite warriors of the Männerbund self-induced the supernatural energies of wild bears or wolves (taking on their forms),2 or were able to release the traveling soul from their body in the shape of an animal and send it into battle. One facet of this phenomenon was the werewolf, feared throughout the entire Germanic realm and beyond: a man (Old High German and Old English wer, “man”; compare the term wer-geld) who was able to transform himself at will into a ravenous wolf.3 The modern German word Geist (which means “mind” or “spirit”) originally referred to a traveling soul that a sorcerer or sorceress dispatched from his or her body in the form of a “frightful spook with which to torment others.”*58 In the southern Germanic realm, therefore, the response to the third article in the Christian confession was a source of potential trouble, because to the ears of the early Christians, the declaration “Ich glaube an den heiligen Geist” may have sounded like “I believe in the Holy Spook”! It was preferable to confess: “I believe in the Holy Spirit (atum wihan).”

Although earlier we saw that the body of the “sender” collapsed into immobility (sleep, stasis) while the traveling soul was engaged in activities, there was an exception to this rule. If those in an active waking state encounter their own traveling soul, this is taken to be a premonition of death: the person is seeing their soul as it is about to leave his or her body. In the north, this soul

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