Category: Psychology

The Soul in Germanic Lore

This essay is based on works by Ingrid Fischer and Edred Thorson

The idea that the soul is the essence of a person that survives physical death whereupon it will experience some kind of afterlife comes not even close to the complexity of what we find in the Norse sources. Whenever dealing with Norse Mythology it has first to be understood that neither the Germanic Tribes nor the Scandinavian Peoples living during the Viking Age ever created a unified religious practice. There was no interconnected priesthood, no official “church” and no pope or other kind of figurehead of the religion as a whole.… Read more

Heimdallr and the Censor

Heimdallr is a strange figure standing at the end of Bifröst holding watch over the realm of the Gods. As Loki suggests in Lokasenna 48 this is not a sought after job, he actually calls it „an evil fate“. Now Thrymskvida 15 says that Heimdallr can see the future like a Vanir and Snorri tells us in Gylfaginning 27 that he can hear and see about everything while barely needing any sleep. So that is almost all we know about him if we leave the rather strange claim of his creation of the human classes aside for the moment.

So if we assume that he actually is the watchman of the Gods and can see and hear everything we have to come to the conclusion that he does a thoroughly horrible job.… Read more

Gaining Access to the Self

If we look at Yggdrasil as a representation of and a map to the Self, we need to gain access in order to be able to reorganize and improve it. Unfortunately, this is not as easy as it sounds, as we first have to face a rather mighty foe.

Nidhöggr

Nidhöggr is a huge snake or dragon whose name means as much as “malice striker” and it is the guardian of the tree. It’s also its mortal enemy, chewing up the roots of Yggdrasil with its many companions that slither around beneath it and therefore destroying the base of its own existence.… Read more

Waking up the Self

The Norse idea of how the Universe is structured and how it came to be in the first place is something that is very helpful in understanding and restructuring our own psyche. In order to do that, we first have to wake up. This sounds very easy but it is one of the toughest things to achieve especially if we want to stay awake and not go right back to sleep. We have created a world that is perfectly suited to the needs of our species (Anthropocene), which unfortunately is a world filled with constant distractions. Keeping busy is the best way to stay asleep forever but luckily, we still have the tales of old that can help us to understand and induce this process anyways.… Read more