We have close to zero primary sources on Norse and Germanic religion. Even the Edda was written down after Christianization and its stories can be interpreted in different ways. Is ragnarök a cyclical event or not? Is Baldr influenced by Christ or not? Etc.
What if while the Germanic faith was at it’s greatest extent it reformed into an organized religion
- Thread starter bob123456789
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What about Ulfilas? No, he was not pagan, nor even Germanic, but he was the individual responsible for translating the Bible into Gothic and helping to popularize Arian Christianity among several hitherto pagan Germanic peoples, such as the Goths, Lombards, and Vandals.
However, what if he had "gone native", so to speak, and instead formed a new syncretic faith which married elements of Christianity (especially a similar organizational structure and the simple process of writing things down) with a codified version of the Germanic religion?
Jesus and Christianity is clearly in the Jewish tradition, that's why he refers numerous times to Old Testament passages and derives his legitimacy on fulfilling Old Testament prophecies regarding the Messiah (Islam agrees on this point but does not agree the New Testament is inspired scripture). Religious people prefer a tradition, and religious elements have always been on the conservative side.
I'm curious what you think is an "invented" religion. Scientology is certainly invented, but gained power based on New Age approaches to UFOs, self-improvement, etc. (few Scientologists knew who Xenu was until that doctrine was leaked by critic, and now they're told to ignore it).
Ragnarök in North Germanic culture doesn't seem to be cyclical. It doesn't seem like anything equivalent in other European mythologies is cyclical either. But there's room for interpretation.
Yes... but why are you telling me this? Like, I totslly agree but im not sure what the relevance to what I have been saying is.
A religion that is demonstrably a fiction made by an individual.
European mythology is filled to the brim with cyclical themes. The celts for instance had an afterlife that one reincarnates into, before then reinvarnating from that world to ours in an endless cycle stuff like the winter and summer courts of fey mythology is naturally linked to thr seasons etc.
You could say the same about the Bible, of course, which is interpreted and reinterpreted depending on who's using it for what purpose. I mean, it's well known that Christmas Day was appropriated from pagan Yule to make it more palatable to the Germanic and Norse Pagans, so it's not as though influence doesn't go both ways. In any case, the Edda are as good a source as we're like to get, bolstered by accounts made by others during various periods of history (though most of those accounts are of course written by priests and other churchfolk, so there's always a degree of bias).
It would take an Emperor. A powerful Emperor who worshiped the Æsir and whose lands covered much (but by absolutely no means all) of the range of the religion. I mean, that's what it took to reform the proto-Christians into a remotely consolidated religion agreed upon scripture. I don't see why it would be too different here. Take a Heathen version of Charlemagne or Knut the Great, and you're already 90% of the way there.
Hard, but by no means impossible; as I mentioned, similar accomplishments have happened many times in history.
How this changes history would, of course, depend on the exact circumstances of how and when and where and who. Difficult though it may be to pull this off, there are simply too many different ways for it to happen for me to speculate without a more specific scenario to build off of.
Hard, but by no means impossible; as I mentioned, similar accomplishments have happened many times in history.
How this changes history would, of course, depend on the exact circumstances of how and when and where and who. Difficult though it may be to pull this off, there are simply too many different ways for it to happen for me to speculate without a more specific scenario to build off of.
Would such an event be possible if Clovis marries a Germanic woman who is still of the old religion?
Possible? Yes; he was converted to Christianity by his wife historically, so replacing her with a Heathen would be good first step if you wanted Clovis to preform the codification. He'd still need to be convinced somehow that a codification was necessary.
Perhaps a christian missionary who rolls the proverbial natural one on a diplomacy check; "Christ is better than þonar because Christ's Holy Book ensures that all of Christendom worships him correctly, while the false idol Þonar is worshiped differently everywhere you go!" "At last you've opened my eyes... I should get a Holy Book for Þonar." It has a nice ironic ring to it, I guess.
More likely, he would need to come to the conclusion after decades of ruminating on the matter, observing communities slowly shifting from the Old Gods and wondering why, eventually hitting upon a solution.
Thinking on it, it would probably be even more historically plausible to use both of those; the actual answer to how he came to the conclusion is "after many years of thought," while history instead primarily remembers his very-public/apocryphal eureka moment.
All of those are just possibilities I'm throwing out; don't feel tied down to any of them. Just try and make it feel like an organic decision. When you're writing it, I recommend drawing inspiration not from Julian the Apostate, but rather from Constantine the First. Julian tried to codify his religion, Constantine succeeded. So if you want to write a plausible Reformation, Constantine is a good place to look for how events could plausibly go down.
I'm not the OP, I was just interested in how it would play out. How different would a Europe be in which Clovis successfully codified Germanic paganism?
Philip
Donor
How many of his subjects were already Christian? Were Franks the majority of the population in the area they ruled?
Well, the royal you.
Well, there'll be some good potential Plot to work with from all the many Germanic Heathens whom are not under Clovis's control, and how they feel about things. Some accepting the authority of Clovis's church structure, others ignoring the arrogance of the Franks, thinking they can know the truth of the Gods. And others still who take such offense to the specifics of Clovis's doctrine (or just hate Clovis) that they decide to have their own reformation, and this time they'll do it right. Saxony's a good pick for that one.
Arianism could well just stay the dominant form of Christianity in Germania; with a big Heathen polity in France, the Nicaean church is going to have problems enforcing their canon on the heretics north of the Alps in general. How important the Arians are in Germania, that'll be up to the writer.
A Codified Germanic faith could well have a strong edge over Christians when it came to converting other pagans. You could, for example, see culturally Germanic and religiously Christian realms scattered around south-central Europe, but have huge swaths of the Slavic world worshiping the Germanic Gods in some form.
The Franks were mostly germanic pagans, but that's just (roughly) modern Belgium. Clovis's Empire covered most of Gaul.
However, all is not lost for your dreams of Clovis codifying the religion of his forefathers! Christianity was far from a perfectly unified thing in those times either, with loads of groups out of communion with the Nicenes all over the place. Furthermore, the lands had only converted to Christianity in bulk at all very recently. There would still have been pagans, crypto-pagans, and pseudo-pagans out the wazoo.
Depending on Clovis's talents (or the talents of people he delegates to), he could play his majority Christian subjects off each other by magnifying their differences, and unite his deeply divided minority pagan subjects behind himself(1) by magnifying their similarities. "Mars, Mithra, Tiwaz, these are all names for the same Great God of Victory!" You know, syncretism, except only one point of view is written down.
It would be a complete administrative nightmare, but not necessarily undoable. Kublai Khan could have pulled something like this off, but I've got no idea if Clovis had the chops. Still, the really important bit is getting the idea of Codification as a Necessity out there. If Clovis's attempt fails, but a powerful Saxon King pulls it off thirty years later inspired by Clovis's work, that's still a reformation.
Also, I don't know if this is economically plausible, but if Clovis conquered in the opposite direction and managed a similar breadth of conquests in Germanic Heathen lands as he managed in Christian lands, the administrative problems with the lead up to reformation I was just talking about go away. It would also allow for a much more united church for the Germanics, although schism is inevitable regardless over the kind of area they were spread around at that point.
(1)Or more likely, whichever Goði he wants running his new church while he plays Good Cop with the Christians. "I'm holding the pagans back as best I can, but you've gotta give me something to work with!" etc.
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