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world view. We define religion as a world view comprising an opposition
between this world, where we live now, and an other world. the term
other world covers more than one conceptual space, or to put it another
way, there is no contradiction in speaking of other worlds rather than
the other world; and this is indeed what we find in nordic mythology,
with worlds of gods, jǫtnar, dwarfs, the dead – there is more than one of
these – and so forth. they all comprise the other world. “otherness” may
be temporal or spatial: the distant past (or, in eschatology, a future), or a
world to which we have no or only limited access would qualify equally.
that is the conceptual part. this world view requires also the possibility
of communication between two worlds, and communication is the sphere
of the actions. to put it another way: things happen in the other world,
things that we can know about; what happens in the other world can mat-
ter to us; and we can undertake actions – what we usually call religious
ritual – to try to sway the influence of the other world on our world. the
religious world view can influence both society and the individual.
this view of religion goes far beyond the “worship” of “gods.” the
influence of the other world probably affected nearly every aspect of hu-
man life in the pre-Christian world view of the north. Part of the cultural
competence of people living with that world view would have been to un-
derstand communication between worlds: to identify and interpret “signs”
and “tokens” from the other world and to deliver messages and gifts,
through appropriate behaviors, to that world. approaching the remnants
of this world view left behind for us through a lens that is deeply colored
by a notion of a clear opposition between religious and non-religious
spheres of life would be most likely to lead us astray. It is far more likely
that there was a continuum, from, let us say, awesome moments when the
gods were presumed to be present in some ritual time and space, to almost
wholly mundane moments, with much in between.
one consequence of this world view, which is known in many reli-
gions, is a breaking down of the line that seems so clear to us between the
human and the divine, and this will serve as an example of how we under-
stand one aspect of the cultural competence associated with pre-Christian
society in the north. as my late Berkeley colleague robert Bellah, the
distinguished sociologist of religion, wrote in his 2011 book Religion in
Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age: “In archaic socie-
FOLKLORISTICS, MYTH, AND RELIGION