"Tell Augustine that he should by no means destroy the temples of the gods but rather the idols within those temples. Let him, after he has purified them with holy water, place altars and relics of the saints in them. For, if those temples are well built, they should be converted from the worship of demons to the service of the true God. Thus, seeing that their places of worship are not destroyed, the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true God.”- Pope Gregory in his 7th century letter to Abbot Melitus before the Abbot joined St Augustine in his mission to convert the pagan English.
In his book Tree of Salvation, Ronald Murphy lays out the ways in which the Christian Church co-opted and used the symbol of Yggdrasil, the tree of life, for their own aims of bringing Christianity to the Norse and Germanic cultures around the year 1000.
I can't know Murphy's intentions in writing the book. Does he write it to urge orthodox Christians to loosen their white knuckle insistence on their religion as the only Truth? Or to give them other ways and places to place that same grip? Is he trying to undo the colonization of the North or to justify it? Is he trying to decolonize Christianity or is he furthering the missionizing that arrived in Northern Europe so long ago? Does he imagine that the God of Christianity could co-exist with the old Gods of the North? Or that those Gods, seeing their better, chose to leave never to return?
I don't know his purposes but reading his book and experiences of learning from and conversing with good and learned older ones over the past few years had me read his words in a particular way and see something in them I might not have otherwise seen and which he may have not intended.
In this essay, I want to lay out the key elements of this Christian colonization of the North that he describes.
It’s a common practice of Christianity to take what is sacred in an indigenous culture and use it for their own purposes. I’ve heard tell that many of the Churches in London, England are situated directly on top of fresh water springs - the likely sacred sites of many people. If you can’t destroy it (e.g. Romans cutting down the sacred groves of the Druids) then you hijack it and second it to your purposes. If you can’t fix it, you feature it and say it was a part of your religion all along.
This is certainly true of St. Patrick's conversion of Ireland as he changed dates of Christian celebrations to times of year sacred to the Irish. He used the three leafed clover (shamrock) to explain the Holy Trinity. It is written in the Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland:
“Nothing is clearer than that Patrick engrafted Christianity on the Pagan superstitions with so much skill, that he won the people over to the Christian religion before they understood the exact difference between the two systems of belief.”
I remember speaking with George MacPherson, an old story teller from the Isle of Skye and him telling me that this was where hot cross buns had come from. They had been made for a pagan, Easter festival. The Church couldn’t stop it and so they added a cross on top of them.
It is, in fact, a central practice of how Christianity came to be in the first place. Consider the original context of the New Testament and to whom it was offered. A Jewish world steeped in the Old Testament. And so, what would you use to justify this new Gospel and help its stories land to the Jewish culture of the time?
In the early days of Christianity, great pains were taken to show that Jesus was the fulfillment of many of the traditions and prophecies. The Old Testament became framed as foreshadowing of the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. These older traditions, to those who knew them, added heft to this new Christ figure. Drawing this line from old to new was central to the establishment of the early Church.
But what if you arrive in Northern Europe amongst a people who have never read the Old Testament? What do you do if they can’t read? How do you communicate the salvific nature of ‘the cross’ and how the man who died on it is the fruiting of the tree of a certain tradition if they’ve never heard of this tradition?
Well, you might see if you can find a symbol in their Germanic culture that means something similar and use that.
Jesus as Chief
For example, you might take the understood function of ‘chief’ and use that. In the Heliand (c. 830):
“Christ as ‘Lord’ is translated in the Heliand as dhrotin, a chieftain, not a dominus, the influential head of a great Roman household. As ‘chieftain of mankind,’ his main duty becomes that of a Germanic chieftain to be a mundboro, to provide protection, mund, against enemies, and frequently in the poem Christ is referred to as a mahtic mundboro, ‘powerful protector.’” (Murphy)
Yggdrasil: The Cross of the North
In Norse culture, one of those symbols was Yggdrasil. And, according to their own stories, the end of the world would come in the form of Ragnarok and,
“The trembling Yggdrasil, seeing and feeling the destruction of the whole world which the tree supports and protests, will open to the last man and woman, or boy and girl, Lif and Lifthrasir, to admit them and provide protection for them throughout the end of the world. Even while Ragnarok is proceeding outside, and the tree is trembling itself, its wood will provide safety and life for Lif and Lifthrasir, and will give them the dew of the morning to keep them alive… At the end of Ragnarok, a new earth will emerge from the sea, there will be the daughter of the old sun to shine in the sky, the stars will return, and there will be a new moon. The earth will come up from the ocean, eternally green as the prophetess predicts a new and happy world of new life.” (Murphy)
When Christianity appeared on the scene with their new, all powerful, father God, the old Gods (Loki, Thor, Woden, Saxnot, Baldur, Freya etc.) had to go.
But what of the tree?
Instead of seeing this tree as a threat, and perhaps seeing a kinship with their own fruit bearing Tree of Life that lived at the center of the Garden of Eden, or with the cross upon which Christ hung, the Christians decided to use it. Or perhaps it simply didn't seem like a threat or just a useful tool, familiar to the locals, to use. This might explain why it can be found at the base of baptismal fonts in churches. After all, doesn't the wood of Yggdrasil save Lif and Lifthrasir when the fires come at the end of the world? Doesn't it offer the dew from its own branches in a manner not far from Christ offering the wine of his blood at the Last Supper? Doesn't Yggdrasil promise new life after the end?
Yggdrasil was not discarded by the Church. It was embraced.
The Christian church even went so far as to construct many of their churches to resemble evergreen trees from the outside (stave churches) and the inside (the round churches). And so the Church itself becomes the tree into which the parishioners go for their weekly salvation. In The Heliand, Jesus is not framed as a colonial divinity imposing from the outside but as one who fulfills the old law of the North. As Odin brought the runes to his people, Jesus brought eternal life.
On The Waters of Life:
But the Christians subverted some things. In Norse tradition, the tree is kept alive by the labours of the three Norns who water the roots of the tree from three wells (about which there is much to be said but for another time). And so, the tree is on the receiving end of these waters.
Murphy points out a different understanding of this arrangement exists in some corners of Christianity. Over the centuries, many Christians have intimated that the cross on which Christ died was made from wood from the Tree of Life that sat at the heart of the Garden of Eden. In the Church of San Clemente in Rome there is a Mosaic that dates to the 12th century. In it we see clearly that the cross "is a shoot emerging from an acanthus bush… The four rivers of Eden mentioned in Genesis (2:10-14) [are] flowing out of the Garden to water the earth… in the apsidal mosaic [they] are flowing out from the base of the acanthus that is the source of the cross.” (Murphy)
And so, although the cross is made distinct from the acanthus, we see an inversion: the Norse tree is the receiver of water. The Old Testament tree is the giver of it.
On Baldr:
Richard North, in his book Heathen Gods in Old English Literature suggests that Christ’s death, in the poem The Dream of the Rood, might be an echo of Baldr's death, a god who was killed by a mistletoe spear at the prompting of Loki. Baldr descended to hel, the land of their dead. He could be released but only if all creation wept for him. And Loki would not weep. But, in The Dream of the Rood, when Christ is seen dead on the tree,‘all creation wept’ weop eal gescaeft (55)." Christ would return.
And so, in another way, Jesus is framed as superior to the old Gods. Not everything wept for Baldr. Everything wept for Jesus.
On The Tree Within:
In the poem, The Dream of the Rood, an “amazing inversion of the tradition” appears:
Who beforehand bears in his breast the best of trees.
Rather, through the tree, each soul shall arrive at the kingdom - [each soul] that,
leaving earth-paths,
Intends to dwell with the ruler.
Murphy spells out the meaning of this:
“These are the concluding words of the cross in the poem. The Germanic tradition has been reversed. Salvation does not come by entering the tree Yggdrasil for its protection against the horrors of death at Ragnarok, salvation comes from having the tree Yggdrasil enter into the person, remaining inside the heart during one’s lifetime. With the trembling tree in the heart, comes the shimmering rainbow bridge. This is a beautiful transformation of the image of the tree/cross from being an external ‘mund,’ an exterior protection into which on can flee to the imagine of having the feelings of the rood within, an internal protection. It is simultaneously a call to have the feelings, to have the reverence and thane-like loyalty [to Jesus] that the tree had when Jesus climbed up on it, and it trembled. One is saved by having the tree's feelings in one’s self. The dreamer’s golden and bleeding tree is not a dual-aspect object, not an interesting riddle to be solved, it is something that work when taken into one’s self, carried in breostum… I think there is a possibility that the one ritual practice that seems hithertofore to have been neglected in the poem is the humble ‘sign of the cross.’ This cross is indeed not carries before a procession of monks and clergy, but is traced on the body of the individual, initially at baptism, and on the forehead.’ ”
We are no longer held in the branches of this old tree, that tree is held in us. It is a part of us, we are not a part of it. The tree ceases to be central and we begin to be. The tree becomes a tool to be used. The tree is no longer something real outside of us but rather a concept or feeling inside of us.
On Death:
What is it that lies underneath Yggdrasil among the roots? The Nidhogg "the dragon-like snake that continually attempts to eat the roots of the tree of life and feeds on corpses - seeing to the annihilation of the dead.” (Murphy)
Though the Norse Gods could bind the violent and chaotic wolf Fenrir until Ragnarok and jail the deceitful Loki the trickster God, they could not, or would not, bind that incarnation and enactor of death, Nidhogg the eater of the dead and devourer of corpses. This was the limitation, voluntary or otherwise, of the Gods. Christ obeyed no such limit.
In Middleton’s Cross B, there is a carving,
“... showing that the dragon-serpent is held bound by the cross of life which is very powerfully sculpted above it. The Nidhogg snake is eyeing the observer, but the sculptor, perhaps remembering the sad fate of Thor at Ragnarok, has carefully threaded the unbreakable bonds right through the poison-delivering openings in the fangs.”
On the other side of Cross B is a soldier depicted as he would have lain in his grave beneath the cross (the wooden box in which he was buried, itself understood as Yggdrasil). Christ's cross, and no other force in the world, was capable of binding the Nidhogg and protecting that buried warrior.
“Even the corpse is protected - a powerful northern way to say that death is completely overcome.”
Murphy describes a scene carved into a cross in the Oldsaksammling,
“...with Christ, descended into hell, standing at the door of the underworld’s dark cave, leading the souls of the dead through the rectangular doorway out into the light. The Oslo cross has the same scene but the depiction in northern. Hell’s gate is not a cave but the mouth of an enormous snake, whose jaws are being forced open by Christ, whose feet are standing on the monster’s lower jaw in a position reminiscent of Vidar’s tearing open the jaws of the wolf Fenrir. One by one the dead are climbing out of the serpent’s enormous mouth, amazement in their eyes, with Christ reaching in to take one by the hand who is stumbling on his way out. The artist sees Christ’s cross as an Yggdrasil that can save far more than the last two of the living, Lif and Lifthrasir. Christ’s tree is depicted as an Yggdrasil that can rescue those whose corpses have been devoured by the Nidhogg - the harrowing of hell is the Nidhogg being forced to release the dead.”
“Yggdrasil rescues only the last two, Lif and Lifthrasir. Christ’s tree cross rescues everyone who steps inside it, at Borgund and Urnes, at Olskirke and Nykirke…”
In The Dream of the Rood, the poet, makes it clear that it was understood that Jesus had gone down to hel and freed the captive souls burning there. He succeeded where the other gods and Yggdrasil had failed and in what they might never have dreamed of attempting. He gathered up the dead and marched them back to heaven.
This is a seismic shift in a culture. Death shifts from being that which turns corpses into food for life, the maker of top soil, the feeder of life, a deep, mysterious ally and part of the greater story into the enemy. If Jesus ‘frees’ those souls then death is the captor, jailor and warden or the death. Our home ceases to be in this Earth, our bodies at home, feeding the soil that those to come might be fed, and Heaven becomes our home instead.
Death goes from being something that the Gods share with men - that even the Gods will die one day. That the Gods agree to be bound by the architecture of how things are and refuse to subvert that architecture.
Norse Odin to Mediterranean Jesus.
In all of this, we see a shift from Woden of the North to the Christ of the South.
Woden gathers us the letters of the runes for his people from the sacred living tree. Jesus gives us the words of his Logos made living with the sacrifice of his life and blood.
Woden hangs from a living tree and Jesus hangs from a cut down, dead, wooden cross.
In the story of Woden on the tree, the tree is the central character. In the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, the cross is a background prop.
We see the shift from a pantheon of Gods, of which Woden is the all-father, and many worlds full of dwarves, ice-giants and more, to a lonelier universe filled only with humans and one single, God.
The old ways are at first accommodated and then, over time, eroded into the more universal, globalized understanding of Christianity.
Redemption:
Of course, all of this could read as defeat, as another story of the colonizer winning over the colonized. Another story of smaller, local cultures being subsumed into a larger, globalizing Empire.
Perhaps it is that too.
But, perhaps, there is also the scent of redemption somewhere in this all.
I recall speaking with an elder I know, deeply steeped in wisdom and knowledgable of traditions from far and wide. He spoke to me of the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe in which a woman appeared to an indigenous, Nahuatl man who was no more than one generation (if that) removed from first contact with the Spanish. She appeared to him four times in a vision and told him to convince the Church to build their basilica at the base of the hill of Tepeyac; a place believed to have been used in pre-Columbian times to worship the goddess Tonantzin. In some versions of the story the woman identifies herself as the Virgin Mary. In others, it is Tonantzin herself.
But why would a goddess insist on her own sacred site being used to house the oppressor?
The story of Beowulf, written down by a Christian scribe, seems to deride and vilify the pagan ways of the Saxons as does the Colloquy of Ossian and St. Patrick give voice to the dismissal of the ways of the ancient Irish Fianna.
But, perhaps, there is more going on here.
“The twelfth-century altar tapestry from the church at Skog is unique in that it shows all this, a stave Church is x-ray form, and perhaps a little more. In the center of the tapestry is a stave church… The church is surrounded by crowds of people and animals coming to it… The artist uses feet significantly to indicate direction. The most fascinating part of the tapestry is the left end… It depicts three very large figures… They are all walking away from the church. As the three large figures walk away from the church on a special carpet or dais, their dogs trotting below express their attitudes - they are leaving with perfect composure. The figure on the left has one eye, and is carrying a battle weapon, the figure in the middle is holding a hammer, and the figure on the right is holding what looks like a sheaf of wheat. Woden, Thor and Frey or Freya… The three gods are leaving peacefully, and quite contentedly, in this artist’s representation, perhaps because they are leaving Yggdrasil’s temple in the hands of Christians and Christ, for whom they prepared the way by embodying ancient stories of wisdom, strength, and happiness - and by helping all to remember the deep roots of Mimir’s old and hopeful story that salvation would come in the form of a tree. It did. And then they left, graciously leaving their stave house to Christ.” (Murphy)
In the round Church at Aakirkby, the master sculptor Sigraf, there are carvings on a baptismal font.
“Eleven images are arranged in an arcade depicting the birth and death of Jesus Christ… There are eight scenes of the bas-relief devoted to the story of the nativity and only three to the crucifixion. Moreover, fully five of the eight scenes of the nativity are devoted to the Magi. It is obvious that the coming and going of the three gentile kings is of major importance to the sculptor in his establishing an interpretive context for the convert’s parallel approach to the font for baptism. Sigraf has [the Magi] all prancing away, high on their horses… Look carefully at their hand. When they arrived they had their gold, frankincense, and myrrh in their hands. In Matthew’s gospel story nothing is mentioned about them receiving any presents in return. Sigraf has imagined a reciprocation on the part of the Christ. Each one of the three kings is holding a long branch upright in his hand as he trots along. They have each been given, in return for their coming to the newborn Christ, a branch of the undying tree of life for themselves, perhaps to take back home and plant.” (Murphy)
Planting a Seed in the Colonial Moment
Perhaps what is going on here is not the Gods abandoning their people and the descendants turning on their pagan ancestors.
Perhaps what is going on is the indigenous Gods expressing their love for their people in this way. They see the situation. They are outgunned. They can read the waters and see the trends. They know that their people will have no choice but to turn away from them. And so, in an act of love, they agree to step to the side, not too far, but away from the main fray for a time. But, before they do, they plant a seed in the plans of the colonizers.
Bayo Akomolafe writes,
"Power is usually framed as totalizing control, as the overwhelming effect of one body over another body. Power, in this sense, resolves into one of two values: victory or failure. But when power is framed as a relational dynamic, we are compelled to jettison a convenient cause-effect binary and are subsequently brought to notice the nuanced ways bodies become different and similar. In this sense, a different story of, say, the 400-year transatlantic plunders can be told: from one perspective, the Europeans won. They took African men and women and children, burned down our altars, bribed our kings, and rubbished our gods. From another perspective, probably tricksters like Esu, those stolen bodies became part of a larger assemblage, a contact zone, a rite of passage, a diffractive meeting of bodies, a risky foray into the threadbare edges of the real, and eventually the creolized futures and possibilities that sprouted in the so-called New World. Normative power says the slave ship was a vessel of trade, or – when it recognizes guilt – says the slave ship was a vessel of moral repugnance. Fugitivity refuses this acknowledgement and says the slave ship was a womb, a sailing seed, a riven crack in the bodies of the imperial, a wound dehiscence that sprouts the impossible, an art studio. The nonsensicality of fugitivity gifts us new creative desires, yearnings, imaginations and senses of aliveness born in the womb of the tragic-joyful."
Dave Chappelle, in a recent stand up comedy special ended with these words.
“Every naturalized American has heard something about what I’m about to tell you… Picture the early 1950s in the United States. This 14 year-old boy goes down from Chicago to Mississippi to meet his extended family for the first time––he’s never been to Mississippi––and before he went, his mother said to him very pointedly: “If a white man looks you in your eyes in Mississippi, look away.” And I don’t know what you know about black people from Chicago, but they’re not a scared people. Legend has it, he was in front of a convenience store with his cousins, having a good time, and a white woman walked out of the store, and he thought she was pretty and he whistled and said “Fly baby,” not realizing that he had just made a fatal mistake. Four days later, a group of adult white men barged into this family’s home and snatched a fourteen year old out of bed––in front of his family, that was powerless to stop them––and he was never seen alive again. His name was Emmitt Till. They found his body a few days later in a creek, tied to a wheel so it would sink. He was horribly beaten and bloated. The woman that he allegedly whistled at admitted on her deathbed that she lied in her court testimony. And you can imagine that when we read that shit we were like “Oh, you lying ass bitch!” I was furious. That was my initial reaction. As we get older, we all learn that initial reactions are often wrong, but more often incomplete. They call this phenomenon standing too close to an elephant. The analogy being that if you stand too close to an elephant, you can’t see the elephant, all that you see is its penis-like skin. You gotta step back and give it a better look. And on stepping back and thinking about it for a few moments, I realized that it would have probably been difficult for that woman to tell a truth that heinous about herself at any point in her life––even at the very end. And I was grateful that she had the courage to tell it before she left this world, because it’s an important truth and we needed to know. And I said to myself “Thank you for telling the truth, you lying ass bitch.” And after time, you can kind of see the whole elephant. And it’s humbling, because you realize that this woman lied and that lie caused a murder. But that murder set in motion a sequence of events that made my wonderful life possible. Made this very night possible. How could it be that this lie could make the world a better place? It’s maddening.” - Dave Chappelle
Perhaps our ancestors and their gods did the best they could and played the long game, throwing a bag of precious seeds into the future in the hopes that we might catch it.
Perhaps Tonantzin, saw the Spaniards coming. She saw their bristling arrogance and the single mindedness of the Church. She saw them conducting themselves with a lack of courtesy and imposition of will on the world that was distinctly ungodly. To impose her will on them would have changed the nature of who she was and, perhaps, upset the architecture of the world which sustained her too. And maybe it was that she appeared to a local man who she deemed to be right for the job and insisted that he tell the Church to build their edifice right on her sacred site, not so that her memory would be erased but so that it would be always protected and preserved so that, whenever the question of 'why was this basilica built here?' came up, if someone dug down deep enough, they would find the old well-spring of indigenous story and tradition still there, still intact. Perhaps it was planted as a sort of time bomb or time capsule full of seeds, protected and intended it to re-emerge or re-present itself many generations later as a delicious subversion of the colonizers plan. As this good elder said to me, perhaps it was a sort of "reverse co-optation of the very Christian, colonizing story that became its secret host".
Was it the colonizer's idea to build their basilica there? Or was it hers?
Perhaps the ancestors of the scribes who wrote down Beowulf or the Colloquy could see the rips and rendings, the tumulted and torn souls of the scribes writing down that old story they no doubt knew as children but now knew as evil paganry. Perhaps the ancestors of the scribes could see them divided between a loyalty to their ancestry on one side and their new God on the other.
Who's to say that those ancestors weren't the ones encouraging the scribes to write it all down?
Perhaps this was their way, from the other side, of preserving the deep ancestral memory of their people for those to come, hundreds of years in the future, their way of planting reliable seeds of redemption in the colonial moment. Perhaps they are patient on the other side and playing the long game.
"It's okay boy," they might have leaned in and whispered. "Write it down. You're not betraying us. This is you feeding us and feeding those to come. You might need to abandon us but we haven't abandoned you and we won't. Go on. Write it down."
Were the Norse Gods leaving forever as they walked away on that Skog tapestry?
Maybe so.
But maybe they weren't going very far.
Maybe it was them who leaned close to Sigraf, a man no doubt raised and weened still on the old stories of his people, perhaps torn inside on how to honour this new and powerful religion from the middle east but also his old timers, and said, "It's okay boy. Carve the story in."
Perhaps it was these same Gods who walked away who turned and said to the early Church founders in the North as they were going, "You know what? You've got us beat. I mean your God is so much more powerful than us. We never had a chance. He's loved by all Creation. He can defeat death. And that magnificent beard! Even on that we can't compete. So we'll go. And, in fact, why don't you even use our tree. Everyone trusts it. It's the center of our whole understanding. You'll be sure to convert people much more easily to your superior religion. You can erase us, sure, but why not use the symbol of the tree since it would be so useful to you. It's kind of like your cross! That's our parting gift to you."
Perhaps this was what they planted in Sigraf's mind, “It's okay. They'll be here for a while. And so we'll tell you what we did as we left. They think they planted their truth in our tradition. It's very clever on their end to try to co-opt our tradition. They're using the old trails of our land against us and it's genius in its own way. But what they haven't noticed, and never will until it's too late, is that we have planted our tree in their truth. And now we'll see which one lasts longer. Perhaps they don't know that those two words come from the same mother. But Tree is the older brother. Truth is so young. They thought they gave us the greater gift but we have given them something greater still. Their Magi came to their Lord bearing gifts but we are giving them back a gift that is far greater than what they offered. Don't worry boy. There are hard times to come. Much will be forgotten, but your carvings will be a tether back to us. They will make sure we aren't forgotten and one day someone will see this all for what it is. The temples of their religion will crumble as temples do. We'll still be here. Their roads will fall apart, worn down by the Gods of the seasons, as roads do, and underneath those roads, our old trails will be there still. You turn your back on us now. It's okay. We understand. You have to. If you stay with us, they will kill you. But you carve this all in. You put the branches in their hands. We'll still be here if your long-time descendants ever come back looking for us. And we'll be here for them, loving them then as we are loving you now. Carve it in boy. Carve it in."
Oh my gosh, so much amazingness here. How I honour your mind, your intention and you constant giving. “We are no longer held in the branches of this old tree, that tree is held in us. It is a part of us, we are not a part of it. The tree ceases to be central and we begin to be. The tree becomes a tool to be used. The tree is no longer something real outside of us...” this reminds me of the way many understand the archetypes and in a way I believe you have written, as internal psychological constructs, as opposed to external old gods, elemental forces that whirl outside of us, that we dwell within.
I’ve been thinking a lot about The Tree of Life, at this season of course, and often recall Heidegger’s words in his book What is Called Thinking, where he writes something akin to, ‘when we sit and behold a tree, we find that eventually we are being held by the tree.’ To be hold is to be held. H. traces the Germanic roots of the word Think to Thank... I wonder in all this about this inside / outside flux.... this being within and without, and the way the old stories and old symbols and gods invite us into a mote somatic understanding of this.
I’ve several times heard versions of this from elders among the various indigenous peoples of Arizona and the Sonoran Desert. One time at a Yaqui deer dance I asked an elder about the Catholic priest hanging out scrutinizing the goings on and he replied with a similar perspective on how the cross came to Yoeme lands and was received by its people. The writer from Oakland, Ishmael Reed, shares similar perspectives through his Jes’ Grew stories.