When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
In: Culture
One point is that polytheistic religions (like the Norse one) are usually more tolerant of other religions than monotheistic religions. To them the christian God would have been just another God and would see no problem in worshipping all the gods. It is quite common to find Christian crosses and Thor’s hammers in graves of a certain time period. Then gradually the local priests would convert the populace out of believing in the old Gods.
Sometimes people were converted by force, sometimes peacefully, but as the Christian faith had the backing of the elite (because being Christian was a smart move politically) in the long run they stood no chance.
I assume its kind of like how we all slowly left Myspace and got on the Facebook train…Less corporate and more social but if everyone around me at work keeps talking about this “Christianity” thing I assume at some point I’ll pick it up. Especially if the King says so
Cannot confirm, but I suspect most religious beliefs stemmed from human projections on nature – someone must care about crops, so we’re going to revere the god/goddess of crops – someone must care about reproduction, so we’re going to worship the god/goddess of reproductions. As we learn more from science and grow accustomed to our collective “self,” we start figuring out that we are gods/goddesses/manipulators of nature and stop relying on “the old gods like Greek and Norse.” I honestly just wrote all this out with exactly 0 real sources, but it kinda makes sense.
I just finished re-reading Mythology by Edith Hamilton. One of her themes touches on this (at least in regards to the Greeks). She discusses several times how the Greeks of the Classical Period were uncomfortable with many of the recurring elements of the mythological stories including human sacrifice and the dishonorable ways the male gods behaved towards young women and their children.
Additionally she relates a story about Socrates in which he is asked if he believes a particular myth and he replies:
“‘The wise are doubtful,’ Socrates returned, ‘and I should not be singular if I too doubted.’ This conversation took place in the last part of the fifth century B.C. The old stories had begun by then to lose their hold on men’s minds.”
I’m not sure if this represents the common view among classicists, but Hamilton certainly seems to think the Greeks had begun to outgrow their myths by the Classical period.
When was the last person celebrating the fertility feast of Eostre ?
Last April.
When did the people last celebrate the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Last October 31st, and we will again this October 31st.
there’s your answer.
European perspective.
1. The spread of Catholicism / Christianity, starting with Roman Emperor Constantine. Christians were pretty aggressive at spreading the faith, at least once they got to the point where they had material political and military power,
2. Arguably, the ‘old gods’ where a god would be dedicated to a specific purpose, desire or topic (god of fertility, hunting, farming, lost causes,…) was replaced with the Roman Catholic canonization of saints.
If you’ve ever listened to Viking metal you would know there’s lots of people who still believe it
A few thing to note that a lot of people generally miss out on:
1. The Roman Religion was already on the outs when Christianity was picking up steam. The Romans were already flirting with ideas like monotheism with concepts like Sol Invictus and the official religons days were numbered. In actuality a lot of what falls under that traditional umbrella is separate competing religions like Simonism which was at best mildly syncretized but has it’s own philosophy and cosmology. Something was going to give eventually.
2. The Norse religion only appears in it’s earliest Germanic form hundreds of years into the common era and *after* Rome was already christian. Some of the older viking runestones talk about historical kings and leaders but some of those were already christian despite having been dead for centuries by the time of that carving.
3. To be particular Theoderic The Great was a Gothic king and Patrician who was very much an Arian Christian. However like a lot of historic figures he got twisted around into a mythic form. Christians in Germany interpreted him as Dietrich Von Bern, a kind of Arthurian hero who both fights historical battles but also slays dragons and fights dwarves. He runs into other historical figures that similarly got twisted around to be nearly unrecognizable. However, at more or less the same time this is going on the Norse were carving his name as Tyrker the bold and telling a mostly exclusive but similarly outlandish set of stories about him. Some of the other historic figures become Valkyries or immortals.
4. As you can probably tell at this point folklore and mythology kind of blend into each other and become context sensitive. People didn’t just stop believing in Dwarves and Giants and didn’t stop telling stories. They also didn’t really stop with sorcery. You can see some surviving incantations where Odin and Balder just got replaced with God and Jesus. Norse style sorcery continued for centuries past this point. One of the things people forget is that there’s a lot of folk catholicism that uses spirits and monsters and weird figures that at best just kind of become saints of that the church just kind of allows to happen because it keeps the wheels spinning smoothly.
5. A lot of these folk ideals can still germinate past that point and spread to other, almost entirely different folk ideals elsewhere. Brigid the celtic god became St. Brigid to Catholics. But then at some point she also became Maman Brigitte, a voodoo death goddess.
So there isn’t really a linear A-B. It’s more accurate to think of it like genetics where there can be a lot of branches and cross pollination between them and some genes become dominant but others don’t really go away.
Here’s why, in bullet points:
* Christianity appeared.
* Local rulers noticed that the main point of Christianity is “life sucks, but grin & turn the other cheek and then you get eternal rewards (TM) after death.”
* Local rulers thought, “hey, this means God is telling them not to rebel against me when I raise taxes, sweet!”
* Rulers then found God and converted to Christianity.
* Any vikings who weren’t so sure about the new, merciful God got burned at the stake or murdered.
* The Vikings who remained alive decided that it was safer to follow Jesus than not to.
Long story short? Christianity spread like a very violent plague.
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