[This part and the forthcoming sequels are an elaborated version of the original article entitled “The Norse Goddesses behind the Asir Veil: The Vanir Mothers in Continental Scandinavia—a late Shamanistic Branch of the Old European Civilization?” by Märta-Lena Bergstedt & Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen, included in Goddesses in Myth, History and Culture (Mago Books, 2018) Edited by Mary Ann Beavis and Helen Hye-Sook Hwang.]
The Old Scandinavian Belief – Mythical and Shamanic Based
The indigenous Vanir culture still vivid in the 400CEs may not have been all that different from the Hyperboreanworld that Tacitus described in c. 98 CE. The old culture may have embraced some core features shared with the long extinct OE-civilization in south-Europe; at least even the 400CE culture shows clear signs of a collective foundation, being peaceful, egalitarian, mythic, and if judging from grave findings, society was lending a peculiar high role and function to women.[1] Rich female graves exceed far in number the significantly less number of rich male graves. In other words; suppose the graves of rich women contained wives and queens, where then are the kings? Medieval writings on Asir mythology unintendedly reveal traditional Vanir customs and society as once being matrilocal and matrilineal. This means that women were guardians of local areas of nature. Land, children, and spirituality were associated with women and the female.[2] The Eddas, Tacitus, and Caesar all report that children have matronymic last names, and that they were raised in their mothers’ families and tribes, belonging to their mothers and socially raised and cared for by their maternal uncles.[3] Also, the Old Scandinavia culture testifies shamanism (sejd) and is considered to have reached a high level of spiritual and symbolic involvement, in line with the OE civilization.[4] The old society was oriented towards the giving and sustaining of life, with no concepts pointing towards war and male domination.[5]
In contrast to all patriarchal religions claiming a historical origin and core around which a dualistic world view and religion is built, the world view of shamanic based cultures is mythical, timeless, and collective.[6] This means these societies are not occupied with insisting on any historical and “true” origin in the physical reality for their own group – instead mythical societies have timeless myths on the theme … Once upon a time the sun and the earth fell in love and had children on land and in the seas…including all living creatures in a common origin. The archaic myth, known from British Islands to Korea about the skipping Cailleach unintendedly building mountains from pebbles dropping from her apron, is a typical example.
At the heart of the mythical thinking of indigenous cultures is theso called one-world concept. This means that there is only one world – the natural world – and it includes everything. In this one physical world that we experience and inhabit, every living entity has a physical body and life – or in Monica Sjöö´s words: Everything has a mother and a spirit.[7]
Life or spirit may be understood as the conscious and communicative side to matter, which in turn grants holiness to everything. Animistic perception allows conscious communication to stretch far beyond the limits of general Eurocentric thinking. An animistic perspective endorses communicative relations not only between humans, but between all the living in the physical world, on their own terms, thus including animals, plants and forests, even seas and mountains, directly or through shamanic journeys. The Sami tradition admits a direct communication with birds and animals, trees and land. Everyone in the Sami culture is familiar with shamanistic skills; and the professionals, the noijades would travel to contact the spiritual guardians of lakes, forests and mountains. Likewise would the Norse shaman, the Völva or Vala have travelled when sejding.
The labeling animism of the indigenous world views may not be wrong per se, but the contents of the term have not yet been explained in its own rights according to indigenous thinking.[8] Earlier, animism was regarded as a lower and more undeveloped kind of religion in comparison to Christianity, even considered primitive. Today there is growing scholarly support for a distinction between indigenous shaman-based mythic systems and traditional patriarchal and hierarchical religions, recognizing two groups with basically different spiritual approaches to reality. For the animistic idea, academy may by now have discerned its contours, but has still not yet been able to catch its concepts in a satisfactory (and respectful) Western vocabulary that on one side is acceptable to indigenous people, and on the other side is sufficiently clarifying to the Eurocentric mind-set. Still, attempts are being made, for instance; Professor of Archaeology Miranda Aldhouse-Green states of the anthropomorphic figurines from Old European Civilization that they may be seen as deriving from early shamanic based cultures, rather than being simple gods.[9] Professor Emerita in Philosophy and Religion Charlene Spretnak observed that a shamanic based world conception was characteristic for all the classical Greek goddesses before their adoption into the patriarchal Olympic pantheon, led by Zeus.[10] Gimbutas observed a distinction between entities from animistic cultures, but apparently lacking descriptive and definite Western words and labeling, Gimbutas, when talking about the OE-figurines, defines goddess, as a one cosmic symbol including everything,[11] and stating that goddess is just a metaphor for the living earth, the sacred and inviolable Mother Earth, and Ultimate Lawgiver.[12]
Thus in OE art, mythic figures do not have personified portraits. They often lack facial expression or wear masks. They are thought of to gestalt life principles in the physical world – not entities.[13] The fashioning in a broad variety of forms and attributes indicate their symbolic status, Gimbutas argues and even suggest that they may represent a kind of Neolithic spiritual language. Pentikäinen highlights how profoundly shamanic based religions differ from dualistic religions, to such extend that maybe instead of religions they would more rightly be identified as world views.[14] Doctor of Anthropology Piers Vitebsky emphasizes for the Arctic shamanic entities or mythological figures that they are not gods.[15] These statements fully line up with Louise Bäckman, Samí-born and Emerita Professor in Religious History and Sami Religious History, who firmly states for the Sami culture that he Sami have no religion and not any gods, whatsoever. [16] According to Bäckman, the present-day pantheon of the Sami gods has been put together exclusively by missionaries and Eurocentric ethnologists, and it does not correspond to the original Sami way of thinking, which used to be based entirely on a shamanic and mythic world views; thus the Sami Akkas (mothers) should be understood as venerated mythic figures, not as goddesses; nor has e.g. fire any fire-goddess attached to it, instead fire is living in its own rights, needing feeding and care. The Old Scandinavian Ways, embracing the maiden-mother-crone-triad, seems most of all to be comparable with the Sami and other indigenous animistic world views. Professor emerita M. Boyce explains animism like this: “man, conscious of himself as being alive, attributes conscious life to all other things, whether static or like him capable of motion. This attitude of mind has been characterized as each natural phenomenon is regarded not as an “it”, but as a “thou”, as a fellow living entity.”[17] The cognitive force uniting all is life understood as think-feel-comprehend. Lately, four Danish researchers, Historians of Religion, have published a feature article in Politiken, the biggest news paper in Denmark, pointing to the relevance of an animistic world view for the modern Eurocentric/Western world.[18] The authors suggest animism, already a part of our cultural heritage, to become one of the main keys for a green revolution in the world.
With the background above as references; the short outlining of the structural difference between dualistic and patriarchal based societies and religions on the one side, and the animistic one-world-perception of collectively and mythical based societies on the other side; and also the above depicted collision between them when they met in Iron Age in Scandinavia, resulting in the most fundamental shift of paradigm in the Scandinavian history ever – we will now embark the animistic world of the old Vanir mothers and travel into it.
The scene is set for the Vanir Mothers.
(To be Continued)
(Meet Mago Contributor) Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen.
[1] Wall, Hägnade Bergens, 177ff. Hans Bolin, The Absence of Gender (Current Swedish Archeology, Vol. 12, 2004, 1-18 (169-183)), 182-3.
To some it seems to be a mystery what men did in a non-military society! Therefore, although the theme of this chapter is the Vanir mothers and their leading and counselling role for the good of early Scandinavian society, a note will be given on men’s activities in a female guarded culture: Having no warriors, men would of course have occupied themselves (like modern men in Western societies) as craftsmen, astrologers, wise men, musicians, artists, architects, farmers, tradesmen, sailors – as would also women! Gender may not have played the separating role that it came to play later in patriarchy.
[2] Fredrik Hallgren. Identitet i praktiken: Lokala, regionala och överregionala sammanhang inom nordlig trattbägarkultur (Uppsala: Inst. för arkeologi och antik historia, 2008).
[3] Cornelius Tacitus, Germania, Cap.20. Julius Caesar, Bello Gallico, trans. Åke Fridh, (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1963). Lone Mogensen, Himlasagor och stjärnmyter, (Stockholm: Alfabeta Bokförlag, 1996), 20. Loke´s matronymic name, Lövö/Leufey in Finnur Jónsson, Den gamle nordiske Gudelære (Gylfaginning), trans. Finnur Jónsson (København: G. E. C. Gads Forlag, 1902), Cap. 32. http://heimskringla.no/wiki/Her_begynder_Gylfis_%C3%98jenforblindelse
[4] Varberg, Young girls gone?, 21-27. Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 72.
[5] Gimbutas, Living Goddess, 134.
[6] Bredholt Christensen, From “Spirituality”, 82. Gilhus, Thomassen, Antikens religioner, 23, 88-90. Wall, Hägnade, 180-184.
[7] Monica Sjöö, The Norse Goddess (Penzance: Dor Dama Press, 2000), 7.
[8] Rather than believing there is a spirit within e.g. a tree it would be more like what has life is communicative in its own rights, as will be explained below.
[9] Miranda Aldhouse-Green, The Celts, (BBC, Ep.3, Sacred Groves. Minute: 23:01. YouTube, 1986), Minute: 23:01.
[10] Spretnak, Lost Goddesses, 45-118.
[11] Gimbutas, Goddesses and Gods, 89ff.
[12] Read and Starhawk, Signs Out of Time, Film: 1.01 min.
[13] Gimbutas, The Living Goddess, 5.
[14] Pentikäinen, Shamanism, 9, 76ff.
[15] Piers Vitebsky, The Reindeer People: Living with Animals and Spirits in Siberia, (Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), 12.
[16] Bäckman, Louise, interviewed by Kirsten Brunsgaard Clausen. Spring 2014-5 and July 2017.
[17] Boyce, M, Zoroastrianism, 53 – Indo-Iranians are likely either from he beginning to have integrated local animistic thoughts, or slowly, due to the skill of metal-working (bronze from tin and copper) have developed from animistic world-apprehension into a dominant creator attitude instead of that of fellow-man.
[18] Nordvig, Mathias Valentin et al., Politiken september 2, 2018. Klimatkrisen kalder.