Soul and Symbol by Nico de Haas

ON PSYCHOLOGY AS AN AUXILIARY SCIENCE IN THE INTERPRETATION OF SYMBOLS

In recent times, various more or less serious attempts have been made here and there to bring the ancient Germanic symbols closer to the contemporary Germanic people. Generally, even the best-intentioned publications in this area cannot be considered particularly convincing. The easiest way is to let these symbols speak for themselves with many illustrations and as little text as possible. However, this presupposes a "receiver," an audience that is still attuned to the inner radiance of these symbols. It assumes resonance in the soul of the viewer. However, practice shows that this resonance usually does not exist, and when it does occur, it is often completely false.

Symbols on the Flyhof rocks (West-Gotland, Sweden). 

No wonder: the contemporary person — and especially the city dweller — is completely estranged from the old symbols. And not just now, but generally has been for generations, even centuries.

The danger that lies in this type of "bringing closer" is that the folk forms are misused due to this misunderstanding for completely irresponsible imitation and senseless combination of the inherited motifs and signs. The "kitsch" that is emerging everywhere proves that this danger is anything but imaginary.

More important, therefore, are the serious, thoroughly researched books on the study of symbols, which, in addition to illustrations, also provide explanatory text, but they generally fail to be very convincing. While they often offer a far-reaching systematization and compete in giving precise content definitions of all kinds of symbolic representations, an impression of arbitrariness and chaotic mingling of various significant factors cannot be avoided.

WHAT SEPARATES US FROM THE SYMBOL

When interpreting symbols from the Germanic ancient times and the "timeless" peasant art, it must never be forgotten that these symbols, although they emerged from our racial soul, do not necessarily correspond with the spirit of this time and therefore cannot simply be "understood" by the contemporary person. On the contrary: the fact that we feel so attracted to ancient Germanic and peasant life today is more due to the feeling that we can perceive in it the spontaneous expression of a truly nature-connected way of life, which has been lost to us since the Christianization and for which we passionately long to return. But our thinking is no longer wholly nature-connected, no longer unbiased and all-encompassing. Consciousness has sharpened, concentrated — certainly, but also narrowed to a new schooled logic, to a systematization that has particularized itself in the sense of superficial civilization and turned away from nature. Therefore, with reason, we cannot encompass the symbolic primal values; they were originally deeper, more general, and more comprehensive than we can reasonably perceive today.

If we do not find a way to revise or supplement our "modern" mindset with the values that have been pushed out of our current consciousness, we have the certainty that we will inextricably mix contemporary thoughts with the heritage of our ancestors. Such unconscious falsifications are currently rampant in the study of symbols.

PURIFICATION OF THE METHOD

P. E. Schramm, in his introduction to the study by Berent Schweinekoper, "Der Handschuh im Recht, Amterwesen, Brauch und Volksglauben" (1938), has set some conditions for first achieving a reliable method of symbol research.

It is not only sufficient to distinguish between symbolic objects (symbols in a narrower sense) and symbolic actions — a distinction that is usually recognized — but also the origin of a symbol (folkdom, space), the century in which it is found, the developmental course of its content and representation, and the possible changes or reversals it underwent over time are of utmost importance.

Furthermore, a clear distinction must be made between true symbols and externally (almost) similar representations or signs of a different nature.

It makes no sense at all to consider a motif or sign on its own without examining its binding and origin in relation to people, time, and culture.

To begin with, we must therefore not only distinguish between different types of symbols but also investigate from which space a symbol originates, what role it played in that space and specifically with that people or tribe, what changes this symbol underwent over the centuries, and how its content developed or changed. If we do the same for all the symbols from a specific ethnographically defined area, we get an overview of the symbolism in its binding to people and land, i.e., an insight into the specific local significance of generally used symbolic representations and signs in the Germanic world.

The best approach for this research starts from entire series of studies on individual symbols in their spatial and temporal binding. In the field of legal symbolism, excellent work has already been done in this manner (e.g., by Von Schwerin on the sword symbol).

Bronze Age European Swords

However, more significant than the research into the particular meaning of a Germanic symbol tied to place, time, and people is currently the research into the general, original meaning of ancient Germanic symbols, that is, the content that we may consider the primordial value of a symbol. Namely, that initial and undivided meaning that the symbol had before the described diversity arose.

For that diversity necessarily represents a further advancing particularization, delimitation, restriction, and derivation of the primordial value. An increasing concentration and consciousness, thereby a significant loss of scope and depth. It is a gain in clarity and rationality, but a loss in cosmic connectedness, in onconscious divinity. It is a path from the sacred to the profane.

MODERN AND FOREIGN HINDRANCES

We must therefore reach back to the primordial values that have been hidden behind these symbols, but which were once unmistakably conveyed by them.

We cannot rely on what "one" on the countryside today might say about a certain symbol. On the contrary, we can be sure that in many cases, a completely subjective interpretation is given, a series of coincidences or a local historical peculiarity that has very little to do with the ancient Germanic meaning. Furthermore, since the Christianization, many new meanings have been attributed to old and original things by various cultural currents, and surely some of this has also passed onto the symbols of the rural land.

Thus, the study of symbols is extraordinarily difficult.

In the first place, we are now obliged to consciously articulate and express in contemporary words feelings that once lived almost unconsciously in the folk soul and were understood without the almost always misleading use of words. After all, if a symbol truly lives, it speaks for itself and neither needs nor tolerates an "explanation," which can never be anything other than an arbitrary restriction and can never give more than the intellectual description of what lives a thousand times richer and deeper in the heart.

To dress the meaning of a symbol in words means inevitably to obscure the symbol, to violate it, to strangle it in misplaced concepts that are inseparably connected to our words as contemporary thought associations.

The symbol is primarily a matter of the soul, indeed, exclusively a matter of the soul, both of the individual soul and of the folk soul and racial soul. But it is precisely from this side, from the psychological science side, that the symbol has been the hardest to approach. For the science of the soul has, especially in the last few decades, in which prehistory, folklore, and racial studies have developed, completely lost its way to the soul of the Northern race.

The path to understanding the soul life of our own ancestors was blocked in 1927 by the sensational and noisy publication of the book "L'Âme primitive" by the researcher L. Levy-Bruhl. His alien thinking influenced an entire school of ethnologists, making it natural to deny the "primitive man" any rationality.

L'Ame primitive.

ETHNOLOGICAL ERRORS

This perspective — according to which Hottentots, Papuans, and the ancient Germans are "equal," namely uncivilized, irrational, and superstitious beings plagued by fears and trapped in black magic — was inherently blind to all cultural values that cannot be "understood" according to contemporary logic. These ethnologists completely overlooked the fact that it does not mean the same thing when two different groups do the same thing. They recognized only the savage, the barbarian, the heathen. What kind of heathens they were did not matter; red, black, yellow, or white played no role: these beings were alike in backwardness and thus "all" did the same things. They worshipped trees and springs, carved rough idol images, made sacrifices, kept sacred animals, and practiced solemn ancestor worship.

And since many black tribes still live in the Stone Age, one only needed to study their customs to know how our ancestors acted and thought during our Stone Age. And if stone axes, fire drills, and sacred stones from the South Seas could be shown, whose forms greatly resembled similar items from our cold North, then the essence of the "primitive soul" was clearly proven! At least, that was the assertion of the "Parisian" school of Levy-Bruhl.

It has been very difficult to overcome this line of thought, which was indeed seductive. But racial science has taught us that "race" does not only mean "body," but also "soul." Rosenberg succinctly put it: "Soul means race seen from within, race is the outside of the soul." Body and soul are both expressions of the same blueprint determined by race (i.e., hereditary traits). Therefore, Nachenius repeatedly emphasizes that race is "style," meaning attitude. And no "attitude" is conceivable without harmony and unity of both body and soul.

Thus, it follows that it is not so important what two people anywhere in the world do, but rather what ensouls them, what they feel, think, and intend when they do it. This entirely depends on their attitude towards life, i.e., on their worldview that is inseparably connected with their blood and inherited from generation to generation.

So, when examining what someone does, it is about their blood, their race, because the decisive factor is the manner in which and the purpose for which they do something.

We must therefore take the inspiration, the soul of a race, a people, a person as the starting point for our conclusions and not consider and compare an external action, an object, or an art form in isolation and compare it with other forms that may outwardly resemble it somewhat (or even very much)!

PSYCHOLOGICAL ERRORS

The disastrous confusion in folk studies about the "primitive" soul was already preceded by an even greater deviation within psychology itself. The psychological science, barely fifty years old at the time, had been preoccupied with the "psychoanalysis" of Sigmund Freud since 1900.

Sigmund Freud

This is not the place to delve much deeper into it, but it should be noted that for Freud, all psychic energy that did not serve the drive for self-preservation always and everywhere had a sexual character. From cradle to grave, the soul is tormented by sexual inclinations and "repressed complexes." Faith, art, culture are expressions of sexual drive just like all human relationships, even those of the child to the parents. Repressed sexuality constantly threatens to overwhelm the soul by disturbing it from the unconscious and making the nerves sick. However, dreams allow the soul analyst to gauge these impending dangers. They are, as it were, messages expressed in symbols from the unconscious to the conscious about what is happening and living in the depths of the soul.

It all comes down to being able to "interpret" these dreams, i.e., to decipher the symbols rising from the depths of the soul in order to understand what is happening deep within us beyond the reach of consciousness and influencing our lives and actions unnoticed.

It hardly needs to be stated that this "interpretation" could not succeed in the embittered, sex-obsessed mind of Freud — and certainly not regarding the soul of the Nordic race. His entire theory was more a literary form of speculative thinking than a scientific method, a fact of which he himself was well aware, so much so that he ultimately showed little confidence in his own theory.

For the study of symbols, it is of the utmost importance that this Freudian way of thinking has been overcome and refuted, allowing us today to talk about the unconscious, about dream symbols and the life of the soul, without immediately triggering a flood of sexual insinuations!

Carl Gustav Jung

In this regard, the work of Prof. C. G. Jung, the founder of "depth psychology," is of groundbreaking significance. Not only did Jung break the fatal circle of eternal sexuality, but he also brought to light some highly important properties of the unconscious life of the soul for the study of symbols. His teachings have thus become significant both for the psychology of race and for prehistory and folk studies. Hans Burkhardt repeatedly refers to Jung in "Die seelischen Anlagen des Nordischen Menschen" (— Eine rassenpsychologische Untersuchung, 1941), as does Fr. Adama van Scheltema in his "Symbolik der germanischen Völker" (Handbuch der Symbolforschung II, 1941).

JUNG'S DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY

It is very encouraging that the somewhat stalled research into symbols has found new possibilities through the science of depth psychology, which were urgently needed. This need was by no means obscured by the increasingly fantastical and unmotivated elaborations on the few scientifically responsible certainties of the object-collecting and classifying symbol research. The psychologist Jung is a strong personality and a healthy mind. He took a stand against "the dark greats from the East" (Blavatsky, Besant, Krishnamurti, etc.) whose thoughts gripped the instincts of the masses and, "from below," besieged the universities, from which they were expelled three centuries ago.

He sees our inner life threatened and undermined by the perversity of Havelock Ellis and Freud and our reality made suspect by Einstein's theory of relativity. He saw through the "comedy" of Christian "moral mist" and established that superstition, in essence, is nothing but perversity. Therefore, he wants to make the European person know themselves by rejecting all dogmas and opening the soul to the "Primeval Experience," without letting them fall into the hands of Western charlatans with astrology, theosophy, and spiritualism.

In doing so, he wants to replace the sickly modernist interest in the dark and unhealthy expressions of contemporary inner life with a healthy interest in the deeply hidden precious heritage that has been preserved intact through thousands of years. The treasure of the soul instead of the sediment, as he himself puts it. This soul is primarily safe among the people, among "the quiet ones in the land, who are often laughed at, who, less corrupted by academic prejudices than the dazzling peaks of society, let themselves be carried along by the unconscious urge of the soul." Great renewals never come from above, but always from below, just as trees never grow down from the sky, but always up from the earth, although their seeds once fell from above to below." (Jung: "Problems of the Soul of Our Time").

REDEMPTION FROM MATERIALISM

The greatest merit of C. G. Jung is, however, that he was the first to oppose the metaphysics-of-matter produced by the 19th century with the reality of the soul. Materialism understood "soul" to be a product of "matter," a chemical reaction. Soul, mind, psyche were phenomena of the brain or hormones. Others preferred to speak of instincts or drives, but to attribute an independent existence to the soul was simply ridiculous nonsense for materialism.

Just as in the Middle Ages it would have been madness to deny the substantial uniqueness of the soul, or to doubt that all matter essentially originated from a divine, matter-independent spirit. However, Jung reminds us that we do not ultimately know what matter or spirit truly are.

He also does not deny the close connection between spirit and matter, body and soul, and he does not deny that the content of our consciousness is largely governed by the perceptions of our senses. He admits that the soul first appears to us as a faithful reflection of everything we call material, tangible, and earthly. He is not blind to the power of drives and instincts — but he takes a strong stand against the modern materialistic belief that the physical is ultimately the only reality and cause of everything.

He found the courage for a new "psychology with soul," that is, with the soul as a reality closely connected to matter, but still autonomous and inherently unique.

THE SOUL AS REALITY

Jung refers to the Old Germanic origin of the word soul (Gothic: saiwala, Proto-Germanic: saiwald). The word means: moving force, life force. An original symbol for this was fire or flame, as a source of movable warmth. Warmth and breath (wind) are also signs of life.

The name of someone is also a symbol of the soul, namely the recognition of the awareness of the self. Originally, someone's name was indeed their essence. Hence, the Germanic custom of inheriting ancestral names.

This already shows how much in the old conceptions the soul was understood as a source of life, as an objective reality. For the "primitive" ancestor, i.e., for the spirit of our forefathers still entirely connected to nature and not constrained by "civilization," the soul was not something totally subjective and personal, as it is for us today, but something impersonal, living by itself, whom one could listen to and speak with.

This original conception is not at all narrow-minded, foolish, or backward, but is essentially confirmed by modern experience, even if we act as if we do not know this.

Just think about it: we cannot suppress most of our feelings, we cannot control our own moods, we cannot order or prevent dreams. Our thoughts can make the wildest leaps without us being able to prevent it. Ideas occur to us that we never sought or asked for.

Indeed: soul and consciousness are very different things. In reality, we are very much dependent on our unconscious soul life working healthily and not letting us down or obstructing us. For then our nerves would soon be in disarray. Where do all good or bad "inspirations" come from? Where do our inspiration, our enthusiasm, our ecstasy come from? They well up from the unconscious, which already lives in the smallest child long before it has even the slightest demonstrable self-awareness. (Hence the absence of memories of the first years of life.)

Therefore, the primitive (nature-connected) person feels in the depths of his soul the source of life, the divine breath of life. He is not as arrogantly foolish as we are and does not believe himself to be the lord and master of life, but feels his dependence on the unconscious-living-in-him. This feeling is his faith in the deeper and higher, which he believed he had to honor as an eternal value.

Dolmen near Rolde, Netherlands.
The entire landscape here acts as a symbol.

SUPRAPERSONAL WISDOM

And not without reason, for although the idea of the immortality of the soul may sound like medieval nonsense to modern, materialistic ears, it is essentially a primitive truth whose original meaning still applies today. So, what about this immortal soul?

Where does it reside? Even if it were more than a mere chemical reaction, this has never been explained, as we feel our thoughts in our head, our feelings in the heart area, and other emotions in the abdominal cavity.

In other cultures, these things are very different, as countless researchers have established. Does the soul occupy a mathematical point or an entire starry world? We do not know. We only know that all ancient cultures attributed higher knowledge to the soul than to our human understanding. The soul participated in eternity, as opposed to our self-consciousness, which remained trapped in the temporal, everyday, and material.

Thus, in all ancient cultures, certain dreams were perceived as symbolic messages from the unconscious soul to the conscious soul life, to the self. As divine tidings, laden with a wisdom drawn from the experiences of eternity.

A primitive foolishness? Psychology teaches otherwise. That the nature-connected person attached so much value to the unconscious soul life is not as fanciful as Western rationalism would like to believe. Because today, we know from an abundance of experimental material that the unconscious soul life holds information (contents) that—if it could be made conscious—would mean an immeasurable increase in our knowledge.

The human unconscious also contains the inherited forms of the life functions of the ancestors, so that even in the child there is an adaptive readiness for the functions of the soul long before any "consciousness" or conscious soul life is present. But even in adult, conscious life, that unconscious instinctual function of the soul is constantly present and active. One should not regard the teaching of the unconscious soul life as a modernistic deviation. The ancient cultures have been working practically with it for thousands of years, just as the East still does today.

But it is nothing new in the science of the West either. 

Leibnitz spoke two centuries ago of an "unbewusst Seelisches," a hundred years later, Kant dealt with "the immeasurable field of dark representations." Janet, Flournoy, Breuer, and Carus further developed the concept of the unconscious. Contemporary psychology builds upon their work.

THE UNCONSCIOUS

The difference between the conscious and the unconscious soul life is primarily that consciousness, although intensive and concentrated, is also superficial and focused on the present and the surrounding environment. Additionally, it only possesses personally acquired experiences, meaning at most a few decades of a human life. The rest is artificial and consists of our well-known "paper memory" with all its alarming errors and falsehoods.

The unconscious, on the other hand, is entirely different. Jung describes it approximately like this: The unconscious is not concentrated and intensive, but dim to dark. It is extremely extensive and can juxtapose the most disparate elements in the most paradoxical ways. Alongside an indefinite multitude of perceptions that remain below the threshold of consciousness, it holds a tremendous treasure trove of deposits from the life of the ancestors, which have contributed to the "diversity of species" merely by their presence.

If one were to imagine this unconscious as a person, it would be someone beyond gender or age, possessing the experience of one or two million years, thus practically the insight of an immortal.

He would have lived through the lives of individuals, kin, tribes, and peoples countless times, and the rhythm of becoming, flourishing, and perishing would be one of his most vivid feelings...

This personality, however, is not self-aware; it merely dreams within us. It is also not a "person," but something like an endless stream, a sea of images and life forms that occasionally come to our consciousness through our dreams.

To dismiss this unconscious as an illusion would be as grotesque as considering comparative anatomy or physiology nonsense, because our tangible body still shows various traces of ancient development.

It is only an illusion to try to explain this unconscious solely from the outside and only through consciousness, as Freud attempted.

THE ESSENCE OF THE DREAM

The personal consciousness floats like a ship on the endless, dark sea of the unconscious soul life. This ocean can, at times, be very threatening, even life-threatening. In the case of the mentally ill, the small ship of the ego, of consciousness, is tossed around aimlessly and sometimes completely engulfed. Occasionally, the waves of the unconscious crash high over the ship. In such cases, depending on the severity of the symptoms, one speaks of "losing oneself," "going mad," "being possessed," or "losing one's soul."

For this reason, it is beneficial to understand the messages that rise from the fathomless depths to the surface of the sea and thereby to the boundary of our consciousness.

Making these comprehensible is the task of the scientific interpretation of dreams. "Dreams are deceiving," preached rationalism. "Dreams are merely the fulfillments of unfulfilled and repressed desires," taught Freud's metaphysical materialism. These convenient excuses have long been outdated.

We now know that we actually know very little. What is the unconscious, really? We do not know — and precisely because of this, we call it by the grand name "The Unconscious." We know it just as little as the physicist knows what matter really is. We have only theories, concepts, word constructions. One day our theory collapses. Our words become meaningless — but matter and soul exist as always, they are no less real for it.

So it is with the value, with the symbolic content of our dreams. Dream interpretations and dream interpretation theories perish, but for centuries, indeed thousands of years, dreams have continually shown the same unchanging ancient motifs, leading forms, or symbols, derived from the inherited experience of thousands of generations before us.

"Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious soul life, beyond the control of our consciousness. They are pure nature — and thus unadulterated truth. Therefore, they are particularly suited to giving us back our natural and original attitude towards life if our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundation," says Jung. "Engaging with one's dreams is a form of reflection on one's own essence."

DREAM AND SYMBOL

Unfortunately, there is not yet an absolutely reliable method to interpret all dreams, and the remark that one cannot rely on speculations and fantasies is quite justified.

However, there is at least a useful method that leads to practically usable and striking results, disregarding special cases.

A dream should be examined entirely without bias, without modern superstition, as an "unknown object." It should be turned over and over, discussed, and approached from all sides through emerging thought associations.

In ancient cultures, this was done with significant, so-called "great dreams" in a public assembly. Ancient accounts of this practice have been preserved.

From the insights gained in such gatherings, the meaning of the dream was usually more or less approximated. Psychology has elaborated and refined this method in very ingenious ways, building on the comparative study of an extensive amount of dream material from antiquity to the present and using the information provided by ethnology, folklore, mythology, and archaeology.

For the research of symbols, not all dreams are naturally useful. On the contrary.

Here, only those dreams are considered that the primitives regard as "great dreams," namely, those dreams that rise from great depths and thus originate from an ancient past. This is in contrast to the dreams that float more or less on the surface of the unconscious and mostly consist of pieces that have fallen down from consciousness, thus made up of fragments of personal experience. Just with the "great dreams," an intuitive "guessing" of the meaning is pointless.

Modern thought associations cannot help here. The specialist must work here, who completely masters the treasure of symbols and motifs, mythology, and comparative ethnology.

Therefore, says Jung, these dreams cannot be learned to interpret from books. Methods and rules are useful for those who cannot work without these aids. What matters is mastering the level of the dream completely as a personality with heart and mind; one must be literally "up to the mark" in those depths.

Only years of preparatory study and comprehensive practical work can create the conditions to achieve reliable results here.

Jung has been accused of undermining culture with his teachings and delivering our highest values to a primitive soul life. He has rightly responded that this fear stems from a fear of nature and primal reality.

Freud had turned the unconscious into a sexual monster, a destructive demon. But, says Jung, the unconscious is not a demonic beast, but a morally, aesthetically, and intellectually insensitive natural being, which only becomes dangerous if our consciousness's relationship with it is hopelessly wrong. On this basis alone, there can be no question of a demonic character of ancient symbols. They are always positive life and health signs.

But even to the most general, ancient, and thus relatively "fixed" symbols, Jung still attributes a somewhat indefinite character regarding their content. If the content were not indefinite, they would not be symbols but signs or symptoms, he writes in his "Reality of the Soul."

The "great dreams" and general symbols cannot be explained from the "personal unconscious," which contains everything forgotten or repressed in personal existence, as well as perceptions, thoughts, and feelings that remained below the threshold of consciousness.

Besides these "personal" elements, the unconscious contains the aforementioned inherited contents from the life of ancestors, including mythological representations and motifs and various unconscious connections that our logic no longer recognizes. But they arise within us everywhere and at all times, even without historical tradition or any other bridging aid.

MYTHOLOGICAL ARCHETYPES

These ancient mythological connections, these original representations and motifs, upon close examination, turned out to consist of a multitude of characteristic images or figures that continually reappear. Examples include: heroic figures, monsters, father, mother, the old wise man, etc.

Jung calls these figures "primitive images or archetypes." They are general forms stemming from timeless primordial depths and have become ideas.

Repeatedly, one encounters religious representations among these messengers that alert the consciousness. No wonder, says Jung: the strongest and most original activity of the spirit, namely the religious, has been more than any other spiritual experience, suppressed from conscious life and banished to the primordial depths of the soul in modern humans.

When these archetypes resurface, they thus contain fresh, unadulterated, and most universal primal values in symbolic form. This is especially true since the process of bringing these images to consciousness happens so quickly and automatically that practically no distortion occurs. Understanding them entirely depends on the scientific training, talent, and intuitive ability of the researcher.

For no person can derive more from a symbol than they are capable of imbuing it with themselves, and no person can sense what is not inherently present in their own soul as an inheritance from their ancestors.

Therefore, the study of symbols can never be undertaken by anyone other than trained, racially conscious Germanic researchers.

SYMBOLISM OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLES

Professor Jung has not entirely become aware of the necessity of the racial standpoint. Nevertheless, being predominantly of Nordic spirit, he has solved the problems he posed in accordance with that spirit, which naturally makes his teachings so valuable. However, he did not specifically feel drawn to the ancient Germanic symbols, which is undoubtedly very unfortunate.

On the other hand, the excellent researcher and renowned describer of ancient Nordic art, Adama van Scheltema, has indeed engaged very intensively with these symbols, using Professor Jung's insights in the process. In his latest work, "Symbolik der germanischen Völker" (1941), he supplemented his art and style-theoretical findings and his ethnological research with some results from Jung's depth psychology.

However, in my opinion, he did not sufficiently distinguish between ancient Germanic and pre-Germanic concepts, so a revision is needed here as well. I will elaborate on this further in a separate article.

Nico de Haas in Hamer (September 1942).

The Spring Bride by F.E. Farwerck

 In Tacitus' Germania, which provides descriptions of various Germanic tribes in its final chapters, we find mention of several tribes such as the Reudigni, Aviones, Anglii, Varini, Eudoses, Suar-dones, and Nuithones. These tribes lived in areas protected by forests and rivers. Tacitus notes that although there are no specific details about their way of life, they all shared a common practice of worshipping Nerthus, also known as Mother Earth... On an island in the sea, there is a sacred forest, within which rests a revered wagon veiled in cloth. Only the priest is permitted to handle it. He perceives when the goddess is present in the innermost sanctuary and accompanies the wagon, which is pulled by cows, with the greatest reverence. Then come joyful days; all places where the goddess graciously visits and is a guest are festively adorned. There, strife ceases, and weapons are set aside. All iron is locked away. Only peace and tranquility are known, only these are cherished until the goddess is satisfied with her interaction with humans, and the priest leads her back to the sanctuary. Then the wagon, cloth, and, if one chooses to believe, the goddess herself are cleansed in the lonely sea..

Nerthus procession

Here we clearly have a ritual of worship, similar to what we find among other peoples. In the Phrygian cult of the Great Mother, held in Rome since Emperor Claudius in March, they paraded the image of the Great Mother in a wagon pulled by cows, and finally, it was bathed in the Almo, a stream that flows into the Tiber. It is therefore not impossible that we see in Nerthus a variant of an Indo-European mother goddess, and that her procession celebrated the reawakening of Mother Earth.

The name Nerthus is not transmitted to us from Scandinavia, but that of Njordhr is, which etymologically corresponds precisely with it. However, in Scandinavia, Njordhr was a god and not a goddess. He was the father of Freyr and Freyja, of whom the former was especially revered as a fertility god. Perhaps there were once a brother and sister, Njordhr-Nerthus, and the worship of one was preserved in Scandinavia and the other in Germania, while in the former land, the old pair was revived as Freyr-Freyja. However, this is only a conjecture for which there is no evidence.

In an old saga, a Swedish religious ritual is recounted, where a priestess rode around a man believed to be the god Freyr, and to the great joy of the people, she became pregnant. Apparently, this was seen as an omen that the god's fertility powers would also extend to cattle and crops. It appears that we are dealing here with a similar practice as in the procession of Nerthus, which presumably also related to fertility. Originally, the procession likely involved an image of Freyr. There have been various explanations proposed for the name of the goddess, but only three are somewhat plausible. Firstly, the name is associated with the Sanskrit word "nrtd," meaning dancer. Dance held great significance in the worship of all ancient peoples, including the Germanic tribes, and it is possible that the goddess's procession was accompanied by dancing. Secondly, some connect the name with the Celtic "nertos," meaning strength, particularly emphasizing vegetative forces closely associated with the worship. Lastly, some link it to the Greek word "nerteroi," meaning the dead. As Mother Earth, a chthonic deity, Nerthus may have also been a goddess of the underworld, which according to various Indo-European and non-Indo-European beliefs, was closely tied to fertility, as life emerged from it.

Tacitus also mentions in his Germania another goddess revered by the Suevi, whom he refers to as Isis. Presumably, he followed the Roman custom here and gave the goddess a name that was known among the Romans and of which the bearer more or less possessed the characteristics that were communicated to him of the Suevic goddess. 'A part of the Suevi,' he says, 'sacrifices to Isis.' The meaning and origin of this strange cult I could not ascertain; only the emblem, shaped like a ship, indicates the introduction of a cult from across the sea—a conclusion that we entirely leave to Tacitus' account. We have images of the Egyptian Isis, with which he apparently identified the Suevic goddess, sitting in a boat. Cows were dedicated to her, and she was, among other things, a goddess of fertility, the underworld, and the sea. Similar representations were perhaps also associated with the Suevic goddess, and this was presumably the reason for Tacitus to label her with the name Isis.

Isis

A third goddess, who may have been the same under a different name, has been handed down to us as Nehalennia. Like Isis, she is also depicted with a ship. Ship and wagon, however, seem to be interchangeable attributes, sometimes combined in the form of a ship-chariot. Other forms of the same attribute may be the sled and the plow, with which in various folk customs processions are made in the spring. The connection between ship and fertility may be indicated by the tradition that the Scandinavian Freyr, the god of fertility, possessed a miraculous ship, Skidbladnir, which could be folded up like a cloth.

Nehalennia

Tacitus's account is notable for mentioning a goddess and a priest, whereas Scandinavian lore speaks of a god and a priestess participating in a procession, during which the priestess's pregnancy played a role. It is possible that both instances involved a "hieros gamos" [holy marriage] as part of the ritual, a phenomenon seen in various forms among different cultures.

Within the Eleusinian Mysteries, a ritual likely symbolizing the union of Zeus and Demeter, or more broadly, the Sky Father and Mother Earth, was enacted. Here, the hierophant and a priestess symbolized the divine couple, with the hierophant concluding the ceremony by displaying an ear of wheat, symbolizing the anticipated outcomes of the divine union. A similar practice was observed in the annual union of Dionysus with the 'queen of Athens,' representing a woman of high moral standing from the city. This ritual, held in February, aimed to boost the fertility of grapevines and other plants sacred to Dionysus. Homer's Iliad also celebrates the union of Zeus and Hera, linking their marriage to the flourishing of nature on earth. Customs in Argos and Samos involved leading a priestess to the temple, part of which included preparing a ceremonial bridal bed. Pausanias's writings mention Hera's annual bath in the Kanathos spring, symbolically renewing her virginity. These myths and rituals collectively underscore themes of fertility and renewal. In ancient Rome, kings were regarded as representatives of the fertility god and held personal responsibility for agricultural success, a belief echoed in Scandinavian traditions. 
The legend of the marriage between the Roman king Numa and the nymph Egeria likely preserves remnants of the "sacred marriage," in which the kings of Rome once united with the goddess of fertility. Some have argued that the Greeks, Romans, and Germanic peoples borrowed these rites from Oriental religious practices, where the mother goddess often held a dominant role. However, an Oriental analogy does not necessarily imply that the ritual was borrowed from the East, even when one considers the argument that these rites should be seen as non-Germanic. Such reasoning only aligns with more conservative modern views. We can assume that for a farming society like the Germanic peoples, where fertility in crops and livestock played a crucial role, the connection between agricultural fertility and sexuality was apparent. They likely celebrated the renewal and fertility of nature through a ritual where human procreation symbolized what was happening throughout nature.

Marriage of Numa and Egeria

Some support for this idea may be found in the following. In Sweden and adjacent areas during the Bronze Age (1600–800 BCE), many rock surfaces with numerous engravings were covered. The meaning of these engravings was long debated, but it is now established that they depict, at least in large part, religious rituals. Among these engravings are numerous depictions of ships, the significance of which is not always clear due to the lack of specific details. Ships featuring dancers, horn players, a sun symbol, a deer, or a tree, or ships carried by a man, likely played a role in cultic processions where the ships were presumably pulled on sledges. At Sandéker in Bohuslän, there are two images of ships that belong to this category. On the first ship is a deer, a sacrificial animal par excellence, which was likely sacrificed after being carried in a ship during the procession. A trace of a similar ritual is found in the now largely disappeared practice of leading the decorated Easter ox through the streets before it was led to slaughter. On the second ship are a man and a woman performing a hieros gamos ritual. Evidently, this was a religious ritual deemed worthy of being documented in the rocks.

Rockcarvings at Sandéker in Bohuslän

From the centuries after the Christianization, we have several reports similar to what Tacitus has conveyed to us. For instance, Gregory of Tours, the Frankish historian born around 540, relates that in Autun, the Franks had the custom of driving the statue of a goddess in a cart pulled by oxen, with the intention of safeguarding the rye against natural disasters. However, detailed information is lacking, so the complete context remains somewhat speculative. Cult wagons, likely used for a similar purpose, have been preserved to this day. The image below shows a wagon found at Dejbjerg in Jutland. Also, in the Oseberg ship, originating from the Viking Age and found in a burial mound possibly belonging to Queen Asa of Vestfold, the mother of the historically known Harald Fairhair, such a ritual wagon was discovered amidst numerous ceremonial and artistic objects.

Dejbjerg Wagon

A depiction related to that of a goddess transported in a wagon can be found in the stories about Frau Holle, which were circulated during the Middle Ages and even afterward. They are not mentioned in older sources, but this does not exclude the possibility that they already existed back then, given that very little from Germanic antiquity has been preserved. Frau Holle was sometimes believed to live in a pond, sometimes in a mountain, but mostly underground, displaying various characteristics of an underworld goddess, especially because she is associated with fertility. According to legends, she rides in a wagon, and her annual procession was thought to take place during the "twelve nights," the period between Christmas and Epiphany. It was primarily this procession that brought fertility, but Frau Holle also traveled at other times, such as during the flax harvest. Her connection to fertility is also evident in the custom in Kerstlinrode of leaving a handful of uncut ears of wheat during the harvest as a thanksgiving offering to Frau Holle. The procession of Frau Holle in her wagon is likely related to that of Berchta with a plow and also to that of the "countess in a black coach," with the latter variant likely intended to provide a "natural explanation" for the supernatural elements deemed undesirable in the legend.

Frau Holle

In Christian times, spring was associated with Mary in the form of May festivals, through which she adopted various traits of the pagan mother goddess. This is particularly evident in her association with fertility. She is often depicted in a blue mantle adorned with ears of wheat, and according to legend, in 1694, she caused three ears of wheat to sprout from the snow at a location where she wished to have a church built. Similarly, around a Marian statue in Kaltenbrunn, Tyrol, ears of wheat are said to have grown miraculously, although no one knows how. Old pagan beliefs and rituals were also transferred onto various saints. For instance, in Nivelles, Belgium, the wine of St. Gertrude was drunk from a glass shaped like a ship, and like Nerthus, the statue of this saint was paraded in a wagon, which was later kept in the church for a long time.

In latere folk customs, we find various traces that remind us of the old pagan rituals. However, they are no more than traces because, influenced by the Church, the original meaning has been largely lost over time. Due to this forgetfulness of the background, there has been a mixing with various foreign elements and loss of other components. As a result, these later folk customs, which have almost ceased to exist now, have preserved very little of the old rituals except for a few main features. Yet, it is precisely these few features that point towards the old beliefs, although it is difficult to historically prove their origins.

One of these folk customs is that of the May Queen. In France, on May 1st, the "reine du printemps" [queen of spring], dressed in white and wearing a flower crown, was paraded in a wagon followed by a procession in the Cote d’Or region. In the Jura department, a girl led by shepherds and adorned entirely with flowers and ribbons was called "la belle de mai" or "la reine de mai" [the beauty of May or the queen of May].

The crowning of the May Queen

The antiquity of this custom is evident from a mention by a prior of the Saint-Claude monastery in 1466 regarding a gift given by the monastery, which was intended for "the queen and the nine girls under nine years old who formed her entourage." In Bresse, a girl called "the bride" walked through the village on May 1st, also adorned with flowers and ribbons, accompanied by a young man. In England, the May Queen tradition was quite widespread. In Warwickshire, it was represented by a little girl paraded in a wagon. This tradition also persisted in parts of Germany for quite some time, but like in England, it often merged with customs related to the battle between winter and summer.

The old customs were forbidden in Christian times. If banning them outright proved impossible because the population held onto them despite the prohibitions, they were modified and associated with Christian holidays. This was not done uniformly everywhere, and so we see the May Queen tradition in our country associated with Pentecost. There are already old examples of this practice. Aegidius, who wrote a history of the bishops of Liège in the thirteenth century, mentions that during the time of Bishop Albero, who died in 1155, the priests, along with the people, would choose a girl from among the priests' concubines as their queen during the festivities from Easter to Pentecost. She would be dressed in purple, adorned with a diadem, and placed on the bishop's throne. The clergy would then dance a round dance while singing psalms and honor her as a goddess, "as if they were possessed by idolatry," adds the writer indignantly.

We also find, as a purely Dutch folk custom, especially during Pentecost, the practice of parading a girl known in the western regions as the "pinksterblom" [Pentecost flower] and in the eastern regions as the "pinksterbruid" [Pentecost bride]. The customs do not differ much. A girl dressed in white and adorned with flowers walks through the village, sometimes being carried on a platform. This tradition has persisted in some places until our century. One of the reasons why it was not abolished earlier, like many other misunderstood customs, may be because the Pentecost girl collected gifts that benefited the participants.

Pinksterbruid

Next to the processions of various descendants of the fertility goddess, we also find the custom of young men or boys parading as the May King, May Count, or similar titles, which may have been the last distorted remnants of an ancient procession of the fertility god, influenced primarily by medieval forms and beliefs. In Antwerp, the May Count held his processions around mid-Lent, a practice associated with Count Louis' entry into Antwerp in 1358, clearly aimed at erasing any connection with pagan times. May games were held in Sweden and Norway, where the May Count led a procession, and this custom was widespread in Lower Germany as well.

May King and Queen

Besides the independent role of the May King or May Count and that of the May Queen or Pentecost bride, there are also examples where a boy and a girl jointly hold a procession. An example of such a practice in Bresse was mentioned earlier. In East Flanders, it was customary until 1930 for the May guild to plant a Maypole. At sunrise, the May Count stood before the pole, the girls circled around hand in hand singing, and the May Count then crowned one of them with a wreath, making her the May Countess. Various forms of this custom are also known in Germany, where a May King chooses a May Queen, and in England, they also had "the lord and lady of May." In Twente, during the May processions, Jaan and Greet often participated, two humorously dressed individuals usually with a baby carriage. Here, the couple is portrayed comically, but the baby carriage might hint at a marriage ritual as its origin. Finally, it's possible that in the old children's game, which was also popular among adults and began with the words "There walked a little priest along the side," we see a distorted form of an old spring custom. The lines "hey, it was in May" and "come priest, give your nun a kiss" at least point in that direction.

Dance around the Maypole

In these and similar folk customs, three traces can be found that suggest a possible connection with the distant past. First is the practice of parading the May Queen or any other name given to the girl in a carriage; carrying a girl or boy on a litter or on a ladder may be variations of this. Furthermore, it is noticeable that there is often a reference to a wedding: the name "bride" or the appearance of a May couple. And finally, during the processions, there are often dances performed, which may be related to Nerthus and the cultic dances performed in ancient religious ceremonies.

F.E. Farwerck in Nehalennia, March 1957.