Page:Norse mythology or, the religion of our forefathers, containing all the myths of the Eddas, systematized and interpreted with an introduction, vocabulary and index.djvu/89

 or aberration from, the true religion, which was revealed to man in the earliest period of the history of the human race and is found pure and undefiled in the Bible; that it presents sparkling waters from the original fountain of tradition. They point with seriousness to it as something that bears us on toward the primal period of one tongue and one religion. In reference to the Elder Edda, they say that it descended through vast ages, growing, like all traditions, continually darker, and accumulating lower matter and more divergent and more pagan doctrines, as the walls of old castles become covered with mosses and lichens, till it finally assumed the form it which it was collected from the mouths of the people, and put in a permanent written form. These interpreters claim that through all mythologies there run certain great lines, which converge toward one common center and point to an original source of a religious faith, which has grown dimmer and more disfigured, the further it has gone. The geographical center, they say, from which all these systems of heathen belief have proceeded is the same—Central Asia; they point to the eastern origin of the Norseman; they assert, with full confidence, that the religious creed of the Norseman is the faith of Persia, India, Greece, and every other country, transferred to the snow-capped mountains of Norway and jokuls of Iceland, having only been modified there, so as to give it an air of originality without destroying its primeval features. They argue that Loke of the Norsemen, Pluto of the Greeks, Ahriman of the Persians, Siva of the Hindoos, etc., are all originally the devil of the Bible, who has changed his name and more or less his personal form and characteristics. The biblical Trinity is degenerated into the threefold trinity of Odin, Vile, and Ve; Odin, Hœner, and Loder; and