e, and by pious artifices; but innumerable
familiar shapes and figures, customs and ideas, were kept alive, nay,
they not only were kept alive, but they entwined themselves in a
peculiar manner with Christianity. As Christian churches were erected
on the very spots where the heathen worship had been held, and as the
figure of the crucified Saviour, or the name of an apostle was attached
to sacred places like Donar's oak; thus the Christian saints and their
traditions took the place of the old gods. The people transferred their
recollections of their ancient heathen deities to the saints and
apostles of the Church, and even to Christ himself, and as there was a
realm in their mythology which was ruled by the mysterious powers of
darkness, this was assigned to the devil. The name devil, derived from
the Greek (diabolos), was changed into Fol, from the northern god
Voland, his ravens and the raging nightly host were transferred to him
from Wuotan, his hammer from Donar; but his black colour, his wolves or
goat's form, his grandmother, the chains wherewith he was bound, and
many other traditions, he inherited from the evil powers of heathendom
which had ever been inimical to the benevolent ruling gods. These
powerful demons, amongst whom was the dark god of death, belonged
according to the heathen mythology to the primeval race of giants,
which as long as the world lasted were to wage a deadly struggle with
the powers of light. They formed a dark realm of shapeless primordial
powers, where the deepest science of magic was cultivated. To them
belonged the sea-serpent, which coiled round the earth in mighty
circles, lay at the bottom of the ocean, the giant wolves which lay
fettered in the interior of the earth or pursued the sun and moon, by
which, at the last day, they were to be destroyed; the ice demons which
from the north sent over the land snow-storms and devastating floods;
and worse than all, the fiendish Helia, goddess of the dead. Besides
the worship of the _Asengoetter_, there was in heathen Germany a gloomy
service for these demons, and we learn from early Christian witnesses
that even before the introduction of Christianity, the priestesses and
sorcerers of these dark deities were feared and hated. They were able
by their incantations to the goddess of death, to bring storms upon the
corn-fields and to destroy the cattle, and it was probably they who
were supposed to make the bodies and weapons of warriors invulne