Was there a Mystery Cult in Pagan Scandinavia? If I was to pick just one Edda poem to argue this case, the Song of the She-Wolf would be the one. Mystery cults were Pagan Pantheist cults of initiation into the Mysteries of the All-Soul, often depicted as the Great Goddess. The initiation involved a journey into the Underworld and the experience of salvation from oblivion in death through the mercy and guidance of the goddess. The most famous Mystery Cults were the Cult of Isis and the cult of Demeter in Eleusis, Greece. The Roman scribe Tactius wrote in his work "Germania" of 90 AD that the cult of Isis existed in Germany. It could, however, have been a cult of Freyia, since Tacitus translated all the Germanic gods into Latin counterparts (Egyptian Isis was latinized by then, and the goddess most similar to Freyia). Mystery Cults spread far and wide and I believe there is ample evidence that it also existed in Scandinavia. As Scandinavia was not converted to the Church until the 11th century AD, the Viking Age poems of the Edda may very well be the last and most recent testimony to such a cult, dedicated to Freyia, the "Lady". I have had to edit out a lot of this poem simply because it is too long, but have tried to leave a coherent whole. Young Ottarr seeks the gold (metaphor for divine wisdom, enlightenment) of Valland (the Land of Death-Choice) and asks the Lady to help him. She takes him down into the Underworld where she wakes her sister, the ogress called Hyndla (She-Wolf). The reason for this is disguised, it appears to be a quarrel about inheritance with a certain Angantyr ("Pleasure Beast - it is not the first time in the history of religions that animal desire is seen as contrary to enlightenment) Ottarr needs to know his "ancestry" in order to legally claim his "inheritance" - a typical Norse way of "hiding secrets within words", as Snorri termed it. The ancestry turns out to be the whole world and to let Ottarr know the mythical lore is not just stories about other beings but actually pertains to him, to his personal journey, and that everyone and everything comes together in the Universal Soul, born of nine goddesses, identified as the nine waves, daughters of Rán and Aegir the sea gods, each one being named. The revelation ends with a reference to the oncoming apocalypse of the world, and it is revealed that Freya will save the soul of her devotee by letting him drink the mead of universal memory, poetry and resurrection. As was traditional in the Edda poem, the contrast between an Ogress and a Maiden is emphasized -the Ogress causes sleep and oblivion in death, the Maiden causes resurrection into a divine state of being - two possible outcomes of dying. The two are of course just aspects of one another, as Hel (Death) is said to be half corpse and half young maiden.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Jun 2013 00:24:59 +0000
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