Abstract
In Old Norse mythology, gods like Freyja, Odin, and Thor are usually characterized as human-like creatures: they walk and ride animals, eat, grow old, and even die. Was there more to conceptions of Old Norse gods than those anthropomorphic representations? This article presents evidence that the gods of early Scandinavia were sometimes thought of as superperceiving and able to act in ways that defied the limitations of a physical body. It engages with and challenges theological correctness, a prominent theory in the Cognitive Science of Religion, to elucidate the sources of Old Norse religion and the cognitive and contextual foundations of the representations of gods encountered there. Following an examination of the mechanisms through which Old Norse gods’ superperception and disembodied action were narrativized and rationalized, the article concludes with a discussion of the consequences of non-anthropomorphic representations of the gods for understanding Scandinavian worshippers’ everyday religious life.
Highlights
When I was very young, I was taught in school how I should wait to receive the Eucharist in church
Was there more to Old Norse gods like Thor, Freyja, and Odin than those anthropomorphic representations? The study of Old Norse religion, for a long time oriented by philology, comparative mythology, and the legacy of national romanticism, as well as by the nature of the extant sources, has at times over-relied on mythological motifs for its understanding of day-to-day perceptions of the Old Norse gods (Nordberg 2012, pp. 123–24)
Given the empirical evidence that survives, the possibility remains that Old Norse worshippers would have directly reported beliefs in superperceiving gods, able to intervene in the world without the use of a physical body, but this cannot be confirmed
Summary
When I was very young, I was taught in school how I should wait to receive the Eucharist in church. That is the simplest explanation for the paucity of non-anthropomorphic gods in the material that survives, though non-anthropomorphic representations of gods like Thor and Odin may have been prevented from enduring by other factors, such as the Christian environment in which sources on Old Norse religion were recorded (and in some cases composed) and in which images of non-people-like gods would have been heretical (see further Taggart, under peer review). The theory will be criticized below over the original experiments’ methodology and for how it stands up to real-world religious situations It is worth assessing and building on here, given its potential for enhancing knowledge of Old Norse religion and the cache it has in CSR, where it has been accepted with little correction among those employing it and conducting overviews of the discipline (e.g., Lawson 2017; McCauley 2017; Slone 2004; Tremlin 2005)
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