evil, virtue and vice, right and wrong. As Rudolf Keyser beautifully expresses himself:
The gods are the ordaining powers of nature clothed in
personality. They direct the world, which they created; but
beside them stand the mighty goddesses of fate and time, the
great norns, who sustain the world-structure, the all-embraceing
tree of the world (Ygdrasil). The life of the world is a struggle
between the good and light gods on the one side, and the
offspring of chaotic matter, the giants, nature's disturbing forces,
on the other. This struggle extends also into man's being:
the spirit proceeds from the gods, the body belongs to the world of
the giants; they struggle with each other for the supremacy. If
the spirit conquers by virtue and bravery, man goes to heaven
after death, to fight in concert with the gods against the evil
powers; but if the body conquers and links the spirit to itself
by weakness and low desires, then man sinks after death to
the world of the giants in the lower regions, and joins himself
with the evil powers in the warfare against the gods.
Nature is the mother at whose breast we all are
nourished. In ancient times she was the object of
childlike contemplation, nay, adoration. Nature and
men were in close communion with each other, much
closer than we are now. They had a more delicate
perception of, and more sympathy for, suffering nature;
and it were well if some of the purity of this thought
could be breathed down to us, their prosaic descendants,
who have abandoned the offerings to give place
to avarice (die Habsucht nahm zu, als die Opfer aufhörten.—Grimm).
It was a beautiful custom, which is still preserved in some parts of Norway, to fasten a bundle of grain to a long pole, which on Christmas eve was erected somewhere in the yard, or on the top of the house or barn, for the wild birds to feed upon early on Christmas-day morning,—(our heathen ancestors also had the Christmas or Yule-tide festival). In our degenerate
