Ancient German Religion
From their first appearance in historical literature
around 100 BC, the Germans
were polytheistic (believed in
many gods), like the Greeks
and the Romans and the
Persians and the Indians
and other Indo-European people.
The most important German gods are closely related to the Greek and
Roman gods, and all three sets of gods are descended from an original
Indo-European religion.
Like the Greeks, the Germans believed that the world started with nothingness,
and that one god formed out of the nothingness and was the parent of
the other gods. The Germans called this first god Twisto, or Ymir (depending
on the region). Ymir was fed by a cow,
and this cow made a man by licking a salty block of ice. From this man
came the god Odin and his two brothers. As in
the Greek story, Odin and
his brothers killed Ymir. They created the world from his body. His
flesh became the earth, his bones became the mountains, and his blood
became the oceans (the Greek Kronos also had his blood in the ocean).
Odin and his brothers also made the first man
and woman from two pieces of driftwood. The man was named Ash and
the woman was named Vine (probably).
The most powerful of the German gods was Odin (or
Wotan) the oldest and the chief of the gods. He was tricky, hard to
pin down, and magical. Tyr and Freya
and Thor were the other main gods.
The Germans called the main part of the world, where
people lived, Middle-earth, and they believed it was surrounded by a
big ocean (as Germany indeed has the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the
Baltic Sea to the North, and the Mediterranean to the south). Somewhere
within Middle-earth, they said, was Asgard, where the gods lived. You
got there by crossing the rainbow
like a bridge.
The world of the dead, Hel, was in the cold north somewhere, and sometimes
associated with a world of giants, who attack fertility goddesses and
carry them off just as Hades does to Persephone.
Freya
Odin
Thor
Tyr
Loki
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