THE GERMAN'S GOD

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 48, 24 February 1917, Page 16

THE GERMAN'S GOD

HIS ANCESTRAL RELIGION

HOW IT' HAS BEEN EXPRESSED.

Heine foresaw the terrible consequences of the German's devotion to his ancestral god, Odin, and wrote "When Christianity is given up, in Germany, the pagan gods of war will rise from out their dusty. tombs, and Thor's great hammer will destroy - Christ's cathedrals." ■ He little knew how literally true that, was, remarks a writer, in : The Field. "The bells no longer chime in the twin towers of Reims. . . . the Benediction will be said no more upon its shrine . ... its idolatries have been shattered with our fire!" That is the cry, not of an Attila or a Genseric, but of a German writing for the readers of Berlin on the first day of 1915. It is not without a deeper significance than has yet been recognised that' the German race, in the crisis of its' fate, has been roused by appeals.. to "Our Old God." The German had been cut off for centuries from the progress seen in Greece or Rome. He had remained in the backward'strength of brutal prehistoric man. He chose the god Wotan, or Odiri, as. his early divinity, typifying the Wind that blew through his enormous forests, the spirit of Death, who rode his pale horse through the storms escorted by the phantoms of the heroes slain in war. The God of Battles, typified in that naked sword, stuck in the mound of sacrifice, which earlier ages knew, Odin had for his' wife "the personification of the fruitful earth, and their son was-Thoi', the god of thunder and of iron. Around them rode the Valkyries, those battle-virgins who gallop'through'the spear thrusts of the fray and .bear the fallen ' heroes '■ up to Valhalla, where -eternal fighting alternates with eternal-beer. It was—and is—the most ferocious creed imagined by mankind. It was—and is—the . reverse of all that Christ had taught, of all ideals of justice, mercy, chivalry. ' It celebrated, the joys of killing and of the feast not _ in this, life only, but in the everlasting , future stretching beyond . the grave. It marked the German soul so deeply that this soul has never'once forgotten it. The' German people' answered to the ghastly signal of destruction given by their Kaiser as readily ac the dead shall answer the last trump, or as the skeletons in Holbein's Dance of Death throng-.with a dreadful.eagerness to the summons of King Death. That summons the Germans will be always ready to obey. They may wea.r-the, garb of material outward civilisation, but beneath it is the hammer of Thor, desecrating- the altars,of the Christ.. They may preach philosophy" and science; but beneath both is ,the hunger of the sepulchre, . the hideous joy in blood and sorrow, the bestial gloating over human sacrifies, which will last? until the tw,ilight of their' cruel gods is ended in the outer darkness of the pit. , ■ , Similar returns to atavistic creeds, though none so terrible as that of 1914, have marked the history of the.Teutonic race since'its beginning;'but the ritual-, istic' details of. the ancestral cult itself began to fade rather earlier, than ;might have been expected, .after its zenith had been reached in the third century 8.C., when the sacrifices of horses.and of prisoners still took place in the dim forest glades with every circumstance of primevalcruelty. Still, in some clearnig'of gnarled oaks, rose the great tree-trunks, roughly hewn into the semblance of a deity, like the Saxon -"Irminsul,". which stood till Charlemagne's soldiers threw it down, as many must have thought, for ever. But in 1915 ; and 1916 the. wooden statues v rose again,all over Germany, gigantic resemblances of warriors, colossal ravens, monstrous shapes of ancient evil, born of Chaos and of Night—called, indeed, by the names of Hindenburg or Tirpitz or other, momentary; heroes of the atrocious national ideals, ■■ but actually the evocation of those racial emblems of old Teutonic savagery, the idols of the bloodstained cult, of Odin .and of Thor; idols they hammered thick with iron nails as prehistoric cannibals 1 adorned the reddening fetish.of -their ghoulish rites. Fora time^ it seemed that Odin- ] ism would overspread the land of Northern and.of.-Eastern-Europe.-,- And when I Attila swooped down on Gaul, .there marched with him on either wing- a Teu- | ton, host already thirsting for the conquest of the world.; ;.Their descendants are being slowly crushed to-day close to /the spot, where Attila's own army was annihilated fifteen hundred, years ago. Gaul stood firm against the barbarian then as she stands firm to-day, and with the .coming of" Christianity and] Clovis Gaul became France. Charlemagne's wars were the victories of the kindlier creed. But the very questions 'put' by his Christian priests to their -Thuringiah or Saxon converts prove how much Odinism still survived— "Hast thou eaten of the- horse or other -consecrated beast?

• • '■''.' '. Hast; thou '"cledicatfedVthe. I last' sheaf of corn to the Night Hunter? • . i . Hast thou attended/the secret ceremonies of the Pagan Gods?" The priests had indeed,passed into Scan, j dinavia,' but. their'.<cult was ' far from dead in, Germany; its oold brutality, which has lived on until to-day, persisted through ■every step-in history, and "even German poetry reflects a different vision from. that. of.- the' Roland, the' Lancelot, the A mad is of a-gentler chivalry. Siegfried, in the . Nibelungenlied, proclaims the eternal saga..of. his cruel race:,"l-am a warrior, and -v/hether it shall please you or not I will, fake from,you your.possessions, your cities, and pastures.-and your wealth. This is my .Will. .If you. cannot keep, your'lands" by, the sword, I shall take all.of. them." . .:■ '„- ■ ..•.•'.''■ , The Kaiser is a faithful echo of the Fatherland. There is Ijttledpubt that, in one aspect, the .first incursions of the pirates of the North in Europe were the vengeance of. Odinism' upon Christianity. The characteristic warfare' of the early Normans showed every trace of .its descent, their fury against priests and ruined edifices, thoir.'brutality to.every noncombatant. ' The liturgy of those miserable years round the .fateful, date' 1000 rang with.the urgent supplication:. "A furore Normannorurn libera nos, Domine.!". But.pdinism was not the Normans' racial-creed." Under the greatest of their conquerors they became the most faithful of the vassals of the Pope. "By the eleventh century Scandinavia itself was Christianised. Over' ' the „■ Teutonic origins of Odinism the dust of forgetful, ness seemed, to have settled,, thick and obliterating.. But. the' baleful fire still glowed beneath. ■