Vol. 3 Preface

To my thinking, Polytheism almost everywhere arose in innocent unconsciousness: there is about it something soft and agreeable to the feelings; but it will, when the intellect is roused, revert to the Monotheism from which it started. No one taunts the Catholic doctrine with teaching many gods, yet one can see in what respect Catholics stand in the same relation to heathens as Protestants do to Catholics. Heathenism bowed before the power of pure Christianity; in course of time heathenish movements broke out in the church afresh, and from these the Reformation strove to purify it. The polytheistic principle, still working on, had fastened on two points mainly, the worship of saints, of which I have spoken, and that of relics (conf. GDS. p. 149). A stifling smell of the grave pervades the medieval churches and chapels from an adoring of dead bones, whose genuineness and miraculous power seem rarely well attested, and sometimes quite impossible. The weightiest affairs of life, oath-takings, illnesses, required a touching of these sanctities, and all historical documents bear witness to their widely extended use, a use justified by nothing in the Bible, and alien to primitive Christianity (conf. p. 1179). But in idololatria and saint-worship the dominion of the priesthood found its main stay.

Of Dualism proper I have aquitted our heathenism (pp. 895-6. 984). Unlike Polytheism, it seems to me to take its rise, not in gradual corruption, but in conscious, perhaps moral, reflexion, and at a later time. Polytheism is tolerant and friendly; he to whom all he looks at is either heaven or hell, God or devil, will both extravagantly love and heartily hate. But here again let me repeat, that to the heathen Germans the good outweighed the bad, and courage faintheartedness: at death they laughed.

Between deifying much and deifying all, it is hard to draw the line, for even the most arrant Pantheism will admit some exceptions. The limit observed by the Greek and even the Norse religion appears in those sets of twelve; Personification indeed, on which I have inserted a chapter, seems to dip into the domain of Pantheism; yet when elements and implements are thought of as divine, they scarcely mean more than our old acquaintances, the gods, presented in a new form: the air melts into Wuotan, the hammer into Donar, the sword into Eor, and Sælda (fortune) into Wuotan again. The human mind strives to conceive the unfathomable depth of Deity in new and ever new ways. Some would give our heathenism Fetishism for a foundation (p. 104); the truth is, hammer, spear, flint and phallus were but symbols of the divine force, of which there were other types, both material and moral, equally valid. From thing to person, or from person to thing, was in this matter but a step. As the gods change into heroes and are born again, so they sink even into animals; but this precipitate of them would require certain explanations, which I mean to complete once for all in a new treatment of the Beast-fable. The faster the brood of deities multiplies, the sooner is faith likely to topple over into denial and abuse of the old gods; striking evidences of such atheistic sentiment Scandinavia itself supplies, both in undisguised mockery, and in reposing confidence in one's own strength and virtue (p. 6). The former is expressed in O. Norse by goðgâ (irrisio deorum), O.H. Germ. kotscelta (blasphemia). And this revolt of heathens against heathenism increased as Christianity came nearer: thus the Nialssaga cap. 105 says of Hialti, that he was charged with scoffing at the gods, 'varð sekr â þîngi um goðgâ'; conf. Laxd. p. 180. Kristnisaga c. 9.

An element (stoiceion, upostasij) is firm ground, basis, for which the Goth still has a good Teutonic name 'stabs' (=staff, whence the Romance stoffa, étoffe, and so our stuff again), or 'stôma' (whence our ungestüm, OHG. ungistuomi, unquiet). It meets the eye of man in all its glory, while deity remains unseen: how tempted he must feel to give it divine honours! But his senses and his mind link every exhibition of nature's forces with subjective impressions bodily and mental, the promptings of language teach him to connect. How came Zio to unite in himself the ideas of sky and war? The Gothic veihan meant pugnare, vaíhjô pugna, veihs sacer, veiha sacerdos (p. 68), the OHG. wîg pugna and Mars (p. 203); the hallowed, the holy was at the same time the bright, the beaming. To the Gothic hveits corresponds the Skr. svêtas (albus), to this the Slav. svety, sviatyi (sanctus), and svèt, swiat, svetlo signify mundus, coelum, lux. But again Svetovit, Swantowit, is Ares and bellum, and the parallelism of Wuotan, Donar, Zio to Radigast, Perun, Svetovit stands unquestionable: the god of victory shines in the battle. To the Indians Sûryas denotes the sun, light, day, and he resembles Zio; when Sûryas is taking hold of a victim, it bites his hand off, and a golden one has to be put on: is not this Týr, whose hand the wolf bit off (p. 207)? and who knows but the like was told of the Slavic Svetovit? It was beautiful to derive the eye from the sun, blood from water, the salt flow of tears from the bitter sea, and the more profound seem therefore the myths of Sif's hair, of Freyja's tears; earth and heaven reflect each other. But as even the ancient cosmogonies are inversions of each other (pp. 568. 570, man made of world, world made of man), we have no right to refer the heathen gods exclusively either to astrology and the calendar, or to elemental forces, or to moral considerations, but rather to a perpetual and unceasing interaction of them all. A pagan religion never dropt out of the clouds, it was carried on through countless ages by the tradition of nations, but in the end it must rest on a mysterious revelation which accords with the marvellous language and the creation and propagation of mankind. Our native heathenism seems not to have been oppressed by gloomy fancies about the misery of a fallen existence (like the Indian doctrine of emanation), it favoured a cheerful fatalism (p. 860-1), and believed in a paradise, a renovated world, deified heroes; its gods resemble more those of Greece, its superstition more that of Rome: 'tanta gentium in rebus frivolis plerumque religio est.'

The question has been gravely asked, whether the heathen gods really existed; and I feel disgust at answering it. Those who believe in a veritable devil and a hell, who would burn a witch with a will, may feel inclined to affirm it, thinking to support the miracles of the church by the evidence of this other miracle, that in the false gods she had crushed actual fiends and fallen angels.

Having observed that her Language, Laws and Antiquities were greatly underrated, I was wishful to exalt my native land. To me one labour became the other: what was evidence there was also a confirmation here, what furnished a foundation here served there as a prop. Perhaps my books will have more influence in a quiet happy time which will come back some day; yet they ought to belong to the Present too, which I cannot think of without our Past reflecting its radiance upon it, and on which the Future will avenge any depreciation of the olden time. My gleanings I bequeath to him who, standing on my shoulders, shall hereafter get into full swing the harvesting of this great field.
JACOB GRIMM
BERLIN, 28^th April, 1844.