Winifred Hodge Rose
Primitive Germanic *saiwalo; Gothic saiwala; Old Saxon seola, siole; Anglo-Saxon sawol, sawl, sawel; Old High German seula, sele; Old Frisian sele; Old Frankish sela; Old Norse sál (apparently a later word borrowed from Anglo-Saxon).
In Hel-Dweller (part 1) and The Soul and the Sea (part 2) I primarily explored views of Saiwalo and its Dwimor in the afterlife. Here, I pursue old Heathen views of Saiwalo’s nature and role during life in Midgard, without distinction between Saiwalo and Dwimor. As we shall see, major changes occurred in views of what the Saiwalo is, as the transition to Christianity progressed. Please note that I use many different forms of the word ‘Saiwalo / soul’ here, depending on the language source I’m discussing.
Old Heathen Saiwalo is a mysterious, nebulous soul. During Midgard life it is not closely involved in our personality, emotions, thoughts, will, motivation, nor with the activities of the physical body, other than preserving its life. Thus it is different from the more Midgard-oriented souls we’ve explored: Ferah, Hama, Aldr, Mod, Hugr and Sefa.
Eggers relates that early Christian usage shows only an eschatological (afterlife) concept: the living soul must be prepared for its journey to God, and be protected from sin so as to ensure this destination after death. It doesn’t play any direct role in earthly life. Where the Latin word for ‘soul’, anima, is used in relation to earthly life, in the southern and western Germanic languages it is translated using Mod or another soul-related word. Saiwalo is never part of the activity-realm of Hugi, Mod, Sebo / Sefa; it is very unlike them: never ‘happy, sad, grim, cruel,’ etc. (p. 19).
Almost no compound words, adjectives or verbs are made in the Old Saxon Heliand out of Seola or modifying Seola, in sharp distinction to other soul-words such as Hugi and Mod, which are combined into a huge number of compound words and word-forms (Becker p. 30-1), such as the forty different adjectives used to modify Hugi (Becker p. 51). My thought is that Heathen Seola is far removed from everyday life, simply not involved with it, and so it isn’t necessary to come up with compound words and phrases to describe its activities and nature.
Becker (p. 86 f.) notes that in the Old High German poems of Otfrid, one cannot speak of the Sela with respect to emotion, thought, or volition (will), namely our normal Midgard life-functions. Sela is not the subject nor the actor of action-words, in contrast to other actor-souls, especially Muat (Mod). Even the activity of worship itself is not done by the Sela, but by Muat and other souls, as also are the activities of ‘sinning’. The body and the Midgard-oriented souls do the sinning, while the Sela pays the price in the afterlife. (In contrast to this, I will note that the Saiwala in the Gothic Bible does sometimes take action in the context of worship, for example in the Magnificat of Mary (Luke 46): “my soul / Saiwala magnifies the lord.”)
In spite of its lack of involvement in Midgard-life activities, Saiwalo is nevertheless essential for the maintenance of physical life in Midgard. Living persons are called gesawelod (be-souled) or sawol-berend (soul-bearing) in Anglo-Saxon, while lifeless persons are sawol-leas or soulless. The body is called the sawolhus or soul-house (compare also the body as the ferh-hus, home of the Ferah soul, and as the ealdorgeard or the yard / enclosure of the Aldr soul), while physical life is the sawol-hord, the sawol’s treasure-hoard. Sawlung or ‘souling’ is a noun meaning ‘the death-process’. It aptly refers to the process of changing from a physically living-being having a body and a number of Midgard-involved souls all wrapped together, into a shadowy, mysterious Sawol-being.
Here is something to keep in mind as we proceed: although our modern word ‘soul’ comes from the Primitive Germanic *saiwalo and its Anglo-Saxon descendant sawol or sawle, our modern concept of ‘the soul’ is greatly changed from its Heathen antecedents. This is due to the heavy influence of Christianity and of Classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Neoplatonic philosophy which in turn influenced the early development of Christian thought on this subject.
The consensus of the modern academic scholars I’ve read is that in ancient Heathen belief, Saiwalo (Sawol, Siola, etc.) is what is left after we die: the ‘shade’ of a once-living person which sinks down into Hel. According to Eggers, based on the Old Saxon Heliand, “the Germanic Seola has no psychological function during life; it is only the afterlife being (p. 19).” “The Seola fares to Hel, and many Seolas gather together there (p. 21).” The souls which are active in Midgard life, such as Ferah, Hugr, Mod, Sefa, are not spoken of in the plural in the Heliand; they remain within the living person and act within that person individually. But the Seola souls are seen as independent beings continuing their existence after death, as entities gathered together in Hel, and can be spoken of in plural form. In fact, Eggers notes that five of the seventeen uses of seola in the Heliand are plurals, even though the Latin word anima they are translating does not occur in the plural (p. 20). He considers this to be the ancient, pre-Christian understanding of Seola: a shade which naturally descends to Hel in the afterlife, and continues its independent existence there, in company with other Seola-souls.
Archaic Greek imagery of the psyche or afterlife shade of a person in the Homeric poems gives us the same picture. “The only meanings of psyche clearly attested in Homer are the ‘shade’ and the ‘life destroyed at death’.” This psyche is not an abstraction (such as ‘life force’); it has an objective existence as an entity. (Claus, p. 61.)
Archaic Greek texts are valuable for supplementing an understanding of pre-Christian Heathen beliefs because they are the oldest European writings that deal with such subject matter, written hundreds of years before Christianity and well over a thousand years before the earliest Germanic writings. Yet the archaic (Homeric period) Greek and the Heathen Germanic cultures and traditions have a good deal in common in spite of this great span of time-difference. Thus, their concepts about the various souls can in some cases enhance an understanding of the Germanic ones, as I have shown, for example, in Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World with the Aldr and Aion souls.
The Gothic Bible, translated from Greek around 360 C.E., used Gothic saiwala to translate Greek psyche. It’s notable that the meaning of Greek psyche changed radically under the influence of later Classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, in the same ways as the meaning of Germanic sawol etc. did under the influence of Christianity. Our modern understanding of what ‘the soul’ is reflects these changes: we generally think of ‘the soul’ as our inner self, our spirit, playing an important role, even the defining role, in the conduct of our life in Midgard. We don’t much think of it as being a shadowy afterlife-being lurking at the fringes of Midgard life. I’ll explore here how and why this concept of ‘the soul’ changed, and offer thoughts about its implications for Heathen spirituality.
The Sawol in Beowulf
I examine Scandinavian and German lore and folklore views of the Saiwalo soul in Hel-Dweller and The Soul and the Sea. Here I’ll begin with a view of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. Though the author of the Beowulf poem writes as a Christian, there are some expressions he uses that hark back to Heathen usage, in my view. For example, the warriors fighting Grendel are ‘seeking his soul (sawol secan, l. 801)’, and this isn’t intended in a Christian sense at all. They want to kill him and remove his soul, not convert him or save his soul in a Christian sense. The same type of expression is used, in this and other writings, about other Heathen life-souls, for example killers are called ‘Aldr-snatchers’, Aldr-robbers’, ‘Ealdor-banes’, and the Ferah life-soul is considered the debt that must be paid by criminals in verdicts of capital punishment. Seeking the sawol or any of the life-souls, in the ancient texts, meant ‘the intent to kill’.
Beowulf in his old age must fight the dragon, and knows he will die in this struggle. There are beautiful lines in the poem describing the upcoming separation of his souls: “His Sefa was troubled, restless and wael-fus (eager for death, eager to go on the death-road). Wyrd was immeasurably close, greeting / challenging the old man, seeking his Sawol-hoard, dealing the blow to sunder life from lich (body). Not for much longer would the ætheling’s Feorh be wrapped in flesh.” (Lines 219ff.) Here we see Sawol as something which maintains life, a hoard that will be ravaged by the dragon under the impetus of Wyrd’s power.
As Beowulf lay dying after killing the dragon, he spoke to his brave thane Wiglaf, the only one with the courage to follow him into the lair. Beowulf told his thane that Wiglaf was the last of Beowulf’s own kin: “ ‘Wyrd has swept all my kinsmen toward metod-sceaft (the shaping of metod, similar to wyrd: their doom), those undaunted eorls. I shall go after them.’ That was the old man’s last word from his breast-gehygd (the Hyge or Hugr in his breast) before he chose the high war-wylm (whelming flames of the bale-fire) as, outgoing from his breast, his Sawol sought its soothfast doom.” (Lines 2814-20.)
Soothfast (soðfæst) means ‘true, trustworthy, honest, just, righteous.’ (‘Sooth’ is an old-fashioned word for ‘truth’, as we see in the old word ‘sooth-sayer’. ‘Soothfast’ is a very fine word, well-deserving of being brought back into the language, especially now when we need trusty truth-tellers more than ever!) The Christian poet probably had the idea of Christian ‘righteousness’ in mind here, yet he knew that Beowulf had not been Christian, and there are other indications of Heathen attitudes in these lines. The last thing Beowulf speaks of is his brave, undaunted kinsmen (also Heathen) gone before him, and he intends his Sawol to follow them. The kinsmen were trustworthy, faithful to their beliefs and their people, and have gone to a soothfast doom. The poet could not place Beowulf in a Christian heaven, and so portrayed his death in the Heathen way of going to join his famed and trusty kin.
I think the use of sawol in this context stands in between Heathen and Christian usage. The idea of the Sawol as the entity subject to the doom or judgement of a deity is more Christian than Heathen, while the Sawol as an entity that leaves the body at death is indeed Heathen as well as Christian. All of the souls leave the body at death, of course, with various different fates when this happens. My observation is that the tendency of different souls to head toward a specific location, fate, or condition after death, without the controlling influence of a judgmental deity, is a characteristic of the ancient Heathen tribal beliefs as well as all other tribal beliefs I’ve studied through anthropological writings. The more we see moral judgments affecting the afterlife, in the old texts, the more I believe we are seeing Christian influence blended with Heathen thought. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, interestingly, we can often see that it is Wyrd, a power that we can understand as a natural process, which brings about the fates of souls, rather than the judgment of a deity. The two quotations from Beowulf, above, are examples.
This is not to say that ‘worthiness’ was not an issue for the ancient Heathens; of course it was. The dying words of Beowulf are that he will follow his worthy, ‘undaunted’ kin to his soothfast doom, his honorable place of trust. And the thing is, he is fully expecting this to happen naturally, for his Sawol to join his kin; he is not pleading with a deity for a merciful judgment on his Sawol. He knows he has earned his honorable place in the afterlife by the worthy deeds of his lifetime, and he makes a confident statement to that effect. No Gods need apply here, to pass judgment on his soul!
In Aldr and Orlay: Weaving a World I discuss the idea of the Gods’ doom or judgement upon the worthiness of our Werold-hama, the weaving our Aldr soul makes out of all the deeds and experiences of our lifetime, which establishes the quality of our ‘reputation’ and lays it in the Well as a layer of ørlög. The judgment passed on our ‘reputation’, on the totality of what we’ve accomplished during life in order to decide whether it is worthy to become a layer of orlay in the Well, is a different thing than the Christian God’s judgment of the soul as a being in itself, sending it to torment in Hell or bliss in Heaven. Beowulf fully expected that his deeds and reputation were enough to win him a ‘soothfast doom’ with his honorable kin, without going through a divine process of judgement.
The Ferah-Saiwalo Dynamic
Let’s move on now to another important aspect in our quest to understand the mysterious Saiwalo soul. Again and again in the Continental Germanic and Anglo-Saxon writings we see a sharp contrast between the Saiwalo soul and the Ferah soul (see Born of Trees and Thunder: The Ferah Soul). Both of them are life-souls; when they depart the body then physical life is over. In a Heathen context this did not cause any ambiguity. Ferah is the life-force, a vital soul engaged in the flows and powers of life in Midgard; the word itself (feorh, ferhð, fjor, verch, fair, etc.) was used synonymously with ‘life’. Saiwalo (sawol, seole, sele, saiwala, etc.) was most definitely not the life-force. Saiwalo was what was left after the Ferah, Hugr, Mod, Ahma, etc. departed the dying body: a shade or wraith who headed for the afterlife domain in Hel.
Saiwalo’s natural domain is Hel, as I explored in previous articles about Saiwalo. The key thing is that in Heathen thought, it is clearly implied that the state of Saiwalo in Hel is not ‘life’. It is ‘existence,’ certainly, but ‘life’ is what happens in Midgard. ‘Life’, in Heathen thought, is not simply a physical state of being. ‘Life’ itself is substance, energy, flow, ensoulment, interaction with the powers of nature at all levels within Midgard space-time. I discuss in the series on The Alchemy of Hel my understanding that, rather than being composed of life-force / life-energy as the other life-souls are, Saiwalo’s Dwimor is a spiritual-alchemical matrix which, during life in Midgard, attracts and holds together our other souls and the life-forces and energies that they draw into our ‘soular-system.’
I showed in earlier articles that the Ferah and the Aldr souls were conceptualized in quite physical ways. Ferah is a substance that ‘fills’ the living body and drains away at death, as many expressions in the Old Saxon Heliand show. The life-soul Aldr was considered so close to the physical level that a spear shot at a sea-serpent ‘stood in the Aldr’ of the serpent (Beowulf ll. 1433-5). This is an image of the flesh or body, the Ealdor-yard, permeated by the Aldr soul-substance, and the Aldr being endangered by the spear piercing the flesh. Ahma and Ghost souls provide Athom / Önd, the breath of life, which Saiwalo does not possess on its own. Humans and other Midgard beings are alive, not simply because we are physically functioning, as modern materialism would have it, but because we possess souls which generate, gather and contain active powers, energies, and spiritual substances of life.
When Christianized Germanic-speakers began to translate and write Christian texts in Old Saxon and other Germanic languages, they had a great many linguistic and conceptual difficulties to deal with. For one thing, the Latin words for various soul-functions and soul-entities did not map neatly onto the richer and broader vocabulary of the Germanic soul-related words; they could not use a one-to-one translation of specific words, but had to vary the words according to the context.
Even more difficult for them, however, was the whole Christian concept of ‘everlasting life’ of the soul in the Christian heaven or hell. Germanic-speaking peoples already knew about the Saiwala / Seola / Sawol which dwells in Hel, so the Christian idea of souls surviving death must have come as no surprise. When Latin Christian texts mentioned the anima soul in the context of afterlife survival, Germanic-speakers knew they were referring to the Seola: so far, so good. The idea of the Seola having ‘life’, however, simply didn’t work for them. ‘Life’ is what all our souls, gathered together in Midgard, give to us. When Saiwalo separates from the other souls and leaves Midgard, ‘life’ does not go with it.
In fact, I have noticed that in the Heliand and other southern and western Germanic writings, the phrase that writers often used to describe Christian afterlife and heaven was not ‘everlasting life’ but ‘everlasting light’ (langsam lioht, literally ‘long-lasting light’). Here is one example from the Heliand, describing Jesus’ death: “Christ’s Seola was sent along the soothfast way, to the long-lasting light; his limbs cooled, the Ferah was gone from the flesh.” (Heliand 5710-3.)
Referring to the ‘long-lasting light’ (though they did sometimes use ‘long-lasting life’ as well), as the place where Seola dwells, seems to have been one of their solutions to the problem of Seola being the recognized afterlife soul but not having ‘life’ as Heathens understood it, so that the Christian promise of ‘everlasting life’ could be described and accepted by converted Heathens. The idea of a world of ‘everlasting light’ was not difficult to imagine and accept. They already knew that the Saiwalo has an ongoing existence after life. Imagining Saiwalo in a ‘land of everlasting light’ was attractive and posed no philosophical conundrums about what ‘life’ is and whether Saiwalo could be described as having it.
Here is an important passage from the Heliand (4057-60) showing the Ferah-Saiwalo dynamic, and also the challenges of translation. To make my point here, I need to provide, first, my translation of the original Latin passage from which the Heliand material was drawn, and then show how it was changed when rendered into Old Saxon. (The original text passages are from Becker p. 40. I provide the original Latin and Old Saxon texts at the end of this article, for those who wish to cross-check my translations.)
These were Jesus’ words to the women who came to attend his body after his crucifixion, and arrived to find him resurrected. He told them that whoever believed in him would not die, and continued as follows. Latin version: “Though he dies out of time because of the death of the flesh, he is not dead in eternity because of the life of the spirit, and is resurrected into immortality.” Old Saxon version: “Though the Eldibarn (children of Aldr) bury him…he is nevertheless not dead. The flesh is buried, the Ferah is retained / held onto, the Seola is in good health / is sound.” Overall, one can see here that there is a considerable difference in concepts, between the Latin-Christian version, and the Saxon version which makes use of Heathen-rooted words and concepts to try to explain Christian concepts. (I like the poet’s use of ‘Eldibarn’ here, since the Aldr soul is associated with Time, so there is that link with the Latin text.)
All modern translators I’ve read translate ‘Ferah’ as ‘spirit’ in this passage, and say that it is ‘saved’ rather than ‘held onto.’ Presumably they might be influenced by the original Latin text, which does say ‘spiritus.’ However, the text is referring to vitam spiritus: ‘the life of the spirit’. ‘Ferah’ is not translating ‘spiritus’ itself, but rather the ‘vitam’ part of this phrase, meaning ‘life, the life belonging to the spirit’. The Ferah is ‘held’ (gihaldan) in this text, which I read as ‘it is held onto, it is not let go.’ The life-soul Ferah is retained, even after death, and its presence gives health / life to the Seola-soul. Without Ferah, it would be impossible for Seola to have ‘eternal life,’ even though it does have ‘ongoing existence.’ This existence is not ‘life’; ‘life’ is bestowed by the presence of Ferah. Old Heathen concepts could not envision ‘life’ without Ferah’s presence, not even life for the soul / Seola.
I am not arguing here that the Ferah is not a soul, because I think it is. But it is not ‘the spirit’, as it is meant in the Latin passage: this ‘spirit’ is our Ghost / Gast / holy Athom, the spirit sent from the Gods, who brings the breath of life with it, and carries the breath of life away when it goes. This spirit, the Ghost or Gast, though it is referred to in the Latin spiritus, is actually not mentioned in the Old Saxon passage at all; it is not the same thing as the Ferah or Seola souls.
This is not the only example of how early Germanic Christians struggled to conceptualize and explain Christian ideas in Germanic Heathen languages and contexts. In spite of the superlative poetic skill of the authors of the Old Saxon Heliand and other early Christian texts in poetic form, there are awkward, ill-fitting passages describing death scenes, trying to express Christian concepts in Heathen vocabulary. Here is another example.
The beggar Lazarus died of hunger outside a rich man’s house. Then: “God’s angels received his Ferh and led him forth from there, so they could set the poor man’s Siole in Abraham’s bosom.” (Heliand ll. 3349-3353). This is indeed awkward: the angels received the Ferh soul, then led either the Ferh soul (a neuter noun in Old Saxon) or the ‘man himself’ (‘him’, a masculine pronoun) away from there. When they arrived at Abraham’s location, presumably heaven, they set Lazarus’s Siole (a feminine noun) in Abraham’s bosom. So here, grammatically, we have three different entities: neuter Ferh, feminine Siole, masculine ‘him / Lazarus,’ along with a lot of confusion. Where did the Siole come from? Did the Ferh turn into the Siole en route to heaven? Did the Ferh disappear somewhere and the Siole magically appear in the angels’ hands upon reaching Abraham? Was only the man’s Siole set in Abraham’s bosom, and not the man ‘himself’? If so, what happened to the ‘him’ which the angels led forth, after they received his Ferh? And what happened to the Ferh received by the angels, after the Siole was deposited?
To me, this illustrates the difficulty and confusion of trying to translate Christian ideas into a language and culture that have very different ideas of what ‘souls’ and ‘life’ are. To provide context, the original text from which the Heliand was translated simply says: “The poor man died, and the angels conveyed him to the bosom of Abraham” (Luke 16 v. 23). In the original Latin version, there is no convoluted discussion of different souls; the text just refers to “him.” The way the Heliand was translated shows the importance, in Saxon language and thought, of being clear about which souls are involved in the action.
Here is another example, showing Grendel’s death in the Beowulf poem. As he received his death-wound, Grendel “knew that his Aldr had come to an end” (l. 822), and then he “laid aside his Feorh, heathen Sawle, there Hel received him” (ll. 851-2). First, the Feorh must be laid aside, before anything else can happen. Then the Sawle takes center stage, and then Hel receives ‘him’. Sawle is a feminine noun, so the ‘him’ which Hel receives must be Grendel ‘himself’. Again, the Sawle is somehow involved here, yet the entity received by Hel is ‘him’—apparently Grendel ‘himself.’
It seems that the Heathen Sawle / Saiwalo is the afterlife representative of who the living person was, but this representative is missing other souls who provide the actual substances and powers of ‘life’, including the breath of life provided by Ahma / Ghost, and the full life-force and substance of Ferah. The afterlife being, the Saiwalo, is an image of who the person was, but does not possess the powers and essences of life. I want to note here the very clear contrast between Ferah and Saiwalo souls. A dying person can’t simply give up their Saiwalo forthwith; their Ferah has to go first. Only when Ferah / life is definitely gone can the Saiwalo take up its natural afterlife existence.
Here is an example of this point. The Heliand says that “Christ gave Ferah to the fey, those who were ready to go forth, heroes on the Hel-way; the savior himself quickened them (brought them to life) after death” (ll. 4704-9). The word ‘fey’ is used in its Germanic sense: ‘ready to die, knowing death is near, doomed to die soon.’ This passage says that Christ gave Ferah-souls / Ferah life-substance to those who were dying and even to those who were already dead, the ‘heroes on the Hel-way’, and thus returned them to a state of life. The souls on the Hel-way presumably turned around and went back to join the living persons, after Jesus gave Ferah-soul back to their Lich-Hamas in Midgard.
Ghost versus Soul
It’s interesting to note that throughout the whole Grendel episode in Beowulf, Grendel, while living in a physical body, is referred to as a gast or ghost, often an ellorgast, an alien spirit or ghost from elsewhere, and once even a helle-gast (l. 1274), a spirit from Hel (though he is still alive). The folk of Heorot, plagued by the Grendel-gast, pray to the gast-bona, the ghost-bane or ghost-slayer (presumably Woden) to rescue them (l. 177). The physical dragon that Beowulf killed is also called a gast while alive.
A gast or ghost in this context is an otherworldly being roaming in Midgard, often a fully physical being, while a Sawol is a non-physical being attached to a physical being living in Midgard, which goes to an otherworld after death. There’s a very clear difference between ‘ghost / spirit’ versus ‘Saiwalo soul’ here that’s important to keep in mind when studying Heathen souls. This is in contrast to modern English, where it’s often difficult to pinpoint the difference between ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’; the old Germanic languages don’t have this problem. This fuels my annoyance that all Beowulf-translators I’ve read (and the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, too) inaccurately translate gast-bona, used to describe a Heathen God, as ‘soul-slayer’ rather than as ‘ghost-slayer / ghost-bane / ghost-buster’. The desperate folk of Heorot are not praying to a soul-slaying God; they are begging their powerful God to get rid of Grendel, a bloodthirsty ghost-monster, which the God does by sending Beowulf as his response to their prayers. A ‘soul-slayer’ and a ‘ghost-bane / ghost-buster / monster-slayer’ really are not the same thing!
This picture of the energy and strength of otherworldly gasts roaming Midgard can carry over to our understanding of human Ghosts. Our own Ghost / Gast, during life and after death, is more active and powerful in a personal way, while Saiwalo is more passive in this respect; its activities are more in the nature of alchemical / ecological phenomena, rather than personally-motivated activities. The activity and personal power of our Ghost is strengthened by what I believe is a partnership formed between our own Ghost and our Mod-soul, which continues after death (see Dances with Daemons: The Mod Soul). Picture the difference in these traditional afterlife views, between Ghost as an Einherjar warrior in Valhalla, daily fighting and feasting, versus Hel-dwelling Saiwalo’s need to be awoken from ‘sleep’ by a living person who wishes to speak with it, as is told in the ancient tales. Saiwalo’s ‘sleep’ is a productive state of ongoing alchemical transformation, but it is a different kind of activity than our afterlife Ghost engages in: less personally-oriented, more cosmic in nature.
One of my favorite Heathen-flavored views of the Ghost and Athom, the sacred breath, comes in the Heliand, after Jesus has been crucified and is lying dead in the sepulcher: “then did the Gast / Ghost come, by God’s power, holy Athom under the hard stone, into his Lich-Hama.” (ll. 5770-2). Here is a picture of the holy Athom, the breath of Spirit, literally creeping under the stone that was rolled in front of the sepulcher and entering Jesus’s body to bring him back to life. This is very literal, and definitely ghostly! It is not something the Saiwalo could do, returning from Hel and restoring life. Saiwalo has no breath of life to give; if it miraculously returns from Hel, this is because Ferah has first been restored to the Lich, as I described earlier. Only then, could Saiwalo return to life.
The life-giving abilities of the Ghost are shown again in the description of how Mary conceived Jesus. The Holy Ghost didn’t just cause the conception to occur; “the Helago Gest became the child in her womb” (Heliand 291-2). Again, this would not be said about the Seola. In fact, none of the Germanic languages, past or present, have ever named the Christian Holy Spirit as “Holy Soul” or the equivalent. It is always “Holy Ghost / Ånd / Ahma / Athom / Spirit.” Soul and ghost are not the same thing.
The understanding that ‘ghost’ and ‘soul / Saiwalo’ are different entities is strengthened by looking at what happened in the Old Norse language during the Christian conversion process. I mentioned in previous Saiwalo articles that, while the ‘soul’ word (saiwalo, sawol, sele, siola, etc.) existed in all the other branches of the Germanic languages, and in proto-Germanic, it dropped out of Old Norse, though I argue in Hel-Dweller that I believe their afterlife concepts included beings that the other Germanic languages call ‘soul, sawol, sele,’ etc. This loss of ‘Saiwalo’ is a mystery, and another one is layered on top of it: the question of why the Old Norse language found it necessary to borrow (from Anglo-Saxon) the soul-word sál back into their language during the process of Christianization.
The Norse already had the words ånd, önd, that referred to ghosts, spirits, wights, dwarves, monsters, as well as referring to the living human spirit and the breath of life (see Önd, Ahma, Ghost and Breath: Basic Meanings), and they used this word to name the Christian ‘Holy Spirit / Holy Ghost’, as Hellige Ånd. Their usage of ånd, önd clearly paralleled Anglo-Saxon and Saxon usage of gast. As Heathens, the Norse already had the idea that disembodied people go to Hel after death. They apparently didn’t need a ‘soul-word’ to express this concept; instead, they referred to the person after death simply by name, as the ongoing ‘personhood’, so to speak. In other words, they didn’t say a person’s ‘soul’ went to Hel, Valhalla, or wherever; instead they said the person himself or herself went there.
Once Christian spiritual ideas started taking root, it was necessary to have accurate terms to express them. Why was the already existing word ånd / önd, meaning ‘spirit’ not adequate for describing human afterlife-beings? Apparently, to express Christian ideas about the afterlife, they needed to borrow another word: Sál / soul. Latin and Greek languages, from which the Germanic language Bibles were translated, also had two different soul-terms: spiritus / anima, and pneuma / psyche. These words in turn translated Hebrew ruach, neshama, and nefesh. All these languages had, and have, more than one word for souls. Why?
One answer is clear to me: because we all have more than one soul. But there are some other subtleties here. As I described earlier, Ånde and Ghosts were considered to be supernatural but physical beings in Midgard, beings possessing the breath of life and other life-characteristics. They are ‘alive’ in Midgard, even though they have supernatural traits, and they are potentially subject to death. Essentially, though these entities might die, they are not really ‘afterlife beings’, from the old Heathen viewpoint. A Germanic afterlife-being is something else, something which is not involved with, nor characterized by, Midgard life and breath. Instead, it comes into its own full nature and existence only after the body has died and the breath of life has departed.
My thought about why the Old Norse language needed to borrow the soul-word sál during Christianization, is that they needed a word for the specific afterlife-soul, the soul which comes into its own after death. They certainly had this concept, as I discuss at length in “Hel-Dweller”, but they didn’t have a word for it that fit into the context of Christian afterlife beliefs, so they needed to borrow one.
Looking at these two concepts, ‘spirit / ghost / önd’ versus ‘soul / Saiwalo’, the difference between them is that ‘spirit / önd’ is the breath of life, and Midgard-embodied wights possess this breath. Saiwalo soul, on its own, has no breath; its existence does not depend on breath, though its tie to a living human body does depend upon the breath. Saiwalo in Hel does not ‘breathe’, yet it continues its existence. Saiwalo, in itself, does not possess ‘life’ as it is understood in Midgard, though it does exist as a spiritual phenomenon with powers of its own.
What’s the Big Deal?
We might wonder what’s the big deal about whether we consider Saiwalo’s afterlife situation to be ‘life’ or simply ‘existence’. This issue, and the relationship between Saiwalo and the other souls that is defined by this issue, was a big deal for elder Heathens, so big a deal that it was a major underlying cause for all of the transformations and losses of the old soul-related words as Christianity permeated Germanic cultures. And as the soul-words transformed or fell out of use, so too did the old understandings of what souls are.
It boiled down to a Heathen understanding that ‘to be alive’ meant ‘to be in possession of life-souls, and especially of the Ferah soul.’ Once Ferah, Ghost, and the other life-souls departed, one simply could not be considered ‘alive.’ The powers, the energetic flows and substances, of ‘aliveness’ were gone. So when Ferah was gone from the corpse and from the ‘shade’, the afterlife remnant, one could not speak of this shade or Saiwalo possessing ‘everlasting life.’ Yet, this was the Christian promise: that if one believed (and ‘behaved’), one’s soul would be ‘saved’ and given everlasting life. If the Christian missionaries couldn’t back up the promise of everlasting life in heaven or torment in the Christian hell, then they would lose much of their power to tempt and coerce people into Christian belief and practice.
In order for the Christian ‘hell’ to be perceived as a terrible place that people wanted to avoid at all costs, Heathens had to be persuaded that their Saiwalos could suffer, could react to this place of torment and despair the way a living person would. Likewise, to enjoy Heaven’s everlasting bliss, a soul would need to have the capacities to appreciate and participate in it. This meant that the abilities and natures of the other souls: life-souls, Midgard personality-souls, had to be grafted onto Saiwalo, so that it could ‘live forever’ with full capacity after death, either suffering in hell or rejoicing in heaven.
A telling example of this process is how King Ælfred the Great (848-899 CE) in his translation of some of the biblical Psalms into Anglo-Saxon, translated the two Latin-Christian soul-words ‘spiritus / spirit’ and ‘anima / soul’ into three Anglo-Saxon soul-words, namely Gast (Ghost, spirit), Sawle (Saiwalo, soul), and Mod. When the poet of the Psalms cried out to his God to save his ‘soul / anima’ from the power of death in Psalm 15:10, Ælfred translated this as a plea to save “my Sawle and my Mod” together. It was not enough for him to plead salvation for his Sawle; his Mod, representing his sense of himself, his Midgard-life faculties, needed to be included, as well.
Mod, in late Heathen and early Christian times in the Southern and Western Germanic branches, was seen as a soul which contains the Inner Self, the Personhood of a person, along with their character, their volition, and other components that make up a person, as I mentioned earlier (see also Dances with Daemons: The Mod Soul). The afterlife souls, Ghost and Saiwalo, were not considered to possess the full complement of these aspects of personality and Selfhood. Ælfred took the Christian promise of salvation of his full ‘self’ seriously, and thought very carefully about how to translate Christian texts so as to convey this belief to his people.
Heathens already had beliefs about survival of Saiwalo after death. What was new, was the idea that the full, living Selfhood of a person could be ‘saved’ or ‘damned’, and consequently rejoice or suffer as a living person would. Therefore, Ælfred cried out for salvation for his Ghost / Spirit, his Sawl / Soul, and his Mod-soul, and in fact, he references Mod at least as often as Sawle, and far more often than Gast, in his translation of the Psalms. Without all three of them, his experience of the afterlife could not be complete, so it was vital that his Mod be included.
This makes it clear that Ælfred, a very thoughtful, spiritual and philosophical person, did not consider that his ‘full personhood’ resided in his Sawl or his Gast. To receive the promise of ‘everlasting life’, he needed a soul associated with life and personhood, not just shadowy afterlife-souls. I do not see that attitude as coming from Christianity, at all. Christianity teaches that by ‘saving the soul’, everything that matters is saved. I think that Ælfred’s understanding of these matters was still influenced by Heathen thought, even though he was a dedicated Christian. The very words he used were rooted in Heathen thought from centuries of use; he could not fail to have his own thoughts shaped by the soul-words and their original, Heathen meanings.
I’m going to make a fundamental point, that requires more discussion than there is room for here: the native words for ‘soul, spirit’ and all their complex associations differed significantly among the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Germanic languages. In addition, there were several quite different philosophical and belief systems through which the terms in the various languages were understood and further developed. These include various forms of Jewish religion, Classical and older Greek philosophy, Hellenistic and Jewish-Hellenistic philosophy and Neoplatonism, Pagan Roman beliefs and culture, various hotly-disputed versions of early Christianity, and various beliefs of the Germanic peoples.
The result of pushing Heathen terms and concepts, during the conversion process, through this philosophical and linguistic meat-grinder is what usually comes out of meat-grinders: sausage! The various distinct ingredients become mashed together and have quite a different flavor as they come out the other side. My efforts at forensic Heathen soul lore are focused on sorting out the sausage, to the best of my ability, and approaching some idea of what the original ingredients were. (For an interesting perspective on the conversion process, refer to Russell’s The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity.)
Impacts of Changing Ideas about the Soul
The new ideas about ‘the soul’ came with some highly significant corollaries, big changes from Heathen ways of thinking. Christians deliberately wanted to keep people’s eyes off of ‘worldly matters’ and fixed on the rewards and punishments of the Christian afterlife. Afterlife was ‘what it’s all about’ in Christianity, as it was taught during that period of time. There was a radical change from focusing on all the domains and activities of the non-Saiwalo souls, acting in Midgard in both embodied and disembodied states, to focusing solely on the Saiwalo’s future existence in heaven or hell. As people were encouraged to shift from a Heathen focus on human life in Midgard, to a Christian focus on ‘being saved from hell and going to heaven’, Saiwalo went from being an obscure, shadowy, remote soul-being, to being ‘The One-and-Only Soul’ which must constantly be protected from the ‘sins’ that all the other Midgard-oriented souls, now demoted to soul-parts, supposedly commit every day during their time in Midgard.
Ælfric of Eynsham, an influential cleric and a prolific writer and speaker, flourished about a century later than Ælfred, and a good deal changed during that century. Rather than ‘expanding’ the number of afterlife-souls to three, as Ælfred did, he shrank it down to only one soul, and threw everything else into that one ‘soul-basket’. Here is how Ælfric described the soul:
Soul is called many names in books, according to its functions. Its name is anima, this is sawul, and this name is fitting to its life. And spiritus, gast, appertains to its contemplation. It is sensus, that is andgit or felnyss, when it perceives. It is animus, that is mod, when it knows. It is mens, that is mod, when it understands. It is memoria, that is gemynd, when it remembers. It is ratio, that is gescead, when it reasons. It is voluntas, that is wylla, when it wills something. But nevertheless, all these names are for sawul. (Inciuraite, p. 38; she is quoting Harbus p. 35.)
Inciuraite describes this as the Sawul becoming superordinate (the one on top of everything), and all the other soul-related words becoming hyponyms (‘under-names’) of Sawul (p. 37). In this passage, Ælfric followed the example of earlier Christian church fathers, themselves much influenced by Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and took all of a human’s souls / soul-like attributes, and put them under the single umbrella of the Sawul, amazingly, even the Spirit / Gast. Ælfric’s view of the soul now falls squarely within the ‘psychological theory of the soul’ that I discuss in Definition and Overview of Heathen Souls, and moves away from the ‘existential theory of souls’ on which I base my own analysis. If one takes the psychological approach, as is common in our culture today, then Ælfric’s system is helpful for understanding Old English terms relating to the functions of ‘the soul’.
From my own perspective, though, this version of the Saiwalo is unrecognizable when compared to the earlier understandings that I have discussed here and in previous articles. The new ‘soul’ gradually absorbed many of the older soul-words, and they dropped out of the Germanic languages entirely. Other soul-words remained, but altered their meanings and became less important, less influential within the human ‘soular system.’ Gradually, the ancient Heathen meanings of the soul-words disappeared, and with them went the old Heathen understanding of what souls really are.
Summary
During life, Saiwalo / Dwimor is shadowy and detached, not heavily involved in our Midgard activities. Dwimor is busy absorbing images from Midgard, and transmitting images from Saiwalo into Midgard. It is gathering its ‘sawol-hoard’: a word used for ‘life’ in Anglo-Saxon, and a word I like to use to describe what Dwimor is doing during our life in Midgard: gathering its soul-hoard of image-treasures.
I discussed the polar differences between our Ferah-soul which confers life, and our Saiwalo-soul which comes into its own only after death, and the Heathen understanding that you cannot mix these two together. ‘Life’ is a substance, flows of energies and powers, the presence of life-souls, and Saiwalo doesn’t have access to these things after death; they are part of the Midgard-environment. I think that the Christians chose to elect the Heathen Saiwalo, out of all the possible Germanic soul choices, as the ‘one and only soul’ of human beings because Saiwalo was already known to go to Hel after death, and also known to be little involved in Midgard life. This suited the Christian focus on the afterworlds, on ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’, as opposed to the Heathen focus on Midgard life, the domain of all the souls working together.
‘Ghost / Spirit’ and ‘Soul’ are not the same entity in old Heathen thought. Ghosts were considered to be wights or other beings with physical characteristics, residing in Midgard or at least able to travel back and forth between Midgard and whichever otherworlds they stemmed from. They possess the breath of life, and are capable of being killed. The Grendel-monster in Beowulf is an example of a gast or ghost. The Soul / Saiwalo / Seola, on the other hand, has no breath of life. It cannot be killed because, if it is not in the flesh, then it is already dead. Saiwalo is a shadowy entity on the fringes of Midgard life, and comes into its own nature only after the death of the body, the separation of all the souls, and Saiwalo’s descent to its natural dwelling-place, Heathen Hel.
Old Heathen Ghosts were seen as powerful entities, difficult to overcome when their desires conflicted with those of living humans. Saiwalos, on the other hand, if they appeared on their own in Midgard at all, appeared only as fleeting phantoms, ‘poor souls’, whose only real power in Midgard, if any, lay in their ability to cause fear in the living. The Christian ‘Holy Ghost’ has never been called the ‘Holy Soul’, showing a clear difference between the two. The Holy Ghost is an entity with great spiritual power, is able to travel between Midgard and ‘Heaven’, and confers the breath of life. A Saiwalo / Soul entity would not have these powers.
Saiwalo is vague and otherworldly, in many ways a tabula rasa, a clean slate, upon which Christians could draw their own picture of ‘what a soul is’, as opposed to the stubborn and well-known characteristics of the more Midgard-oriented Heathen souls, such as Mod and Hugr, which would be difficult to re-interpret. However, this re-interpretation did gradually occur over longer periods of time. Saiwalo absorbed Ferah, the life-giving soul; it absorbed Mod, Hugr and Sefa, with all their qualities and abilities that enable us to thrive in Midgard. Aldr and Hama dropped out of consideration as souls, at least in formal religious contexts, though Hama (and Hugr) continued to show up in folklore contexts. Ahma / Ghost / Athom / Önd still retain their nature as ‘spirit and divine breath.’
Now our Saiwalo-based ‘soul’ is considered our comprehensive Inner Self, including thought, emotions, will, memory, reason, and all the rest. The psychological approach to understanding what a soul is, comes to the fore, and the existential theory of souls as individual beings taking part in a ‘soular system’, becomes lost in the mists of time. My work, and my hope, is to bring it back into the foreground of Heathen thought and awareness, to support a rich, vigorous, dynamic spiritual life for Heathens, in Midgard and in the other Worlds, as well.
*******
Here are the Latin and the corresponding Old Saxon verses that I referred to earlier:
Si morietur ad tempus………thoh ina eldibarn erthu bithekkian
Propter mortem carnis………that flesk is bifolhen
Non morietur in aeternum…….nis he dod thiu mer
Propter vitam spiritus……that ferah is gihaldan
Et immortalitam resurrectionis……..is thiu seola gisund.
(Becker p. 40; Heliand lines 4057-4060. The Latin comes from the Diatesseron of Tatian, a conflation of the four canonical gospels that was much used by early Germanic Christians.)
A general note on sources: Although there is a great deal of learned writing in Anglo-Saxon / Old English that goes into detail about ‘what the soul is,’ most of this is, in my view, so heavily influenced by both Christian and Classical Philosophical thought, that I don’t find it of much use in trying to understand ancient Heathen concepts. One of many indications of this is the very tidy, rational and systematic categorization of soul-like faculties offered by early Christian writers such as Ælfric in his Catholic Homilies. One might as well be reading Aristotle or St. Augustine of Hippo, translated into Anglo-Saxon! Far more useful, I find, are the passionate and beautiful poems, such as the Old Saxon Heliand, that are addressed to and intended for laypeople, often still Heathen or only recently converted. King Ælfred’s translation of the Psalms, Beowulf, and many other poetic works are more helpful than scholarly works. In these poems, terms relating to the souls are used as the common people would understand them. They are not intricate philosophical concepts, stacked into castles of towering logic. They are ancient words rooted in Heathen consciousness and understanding, used as they would be used in everyday life. The same can be said for folklore sources. I find that this more poetic approach guides us on a less tidy and logical, but more genuine and deep-rooted pathway into Heathen thought about the souls.
For more about Saiwalo, Dwimor and Hel, see Hel-Dweller; The Soul and the Sea; and The Alchemy of Hel Parts I through VI.
Bookhoard
Ælfric’s Catholic Homilies, ed. Malcolm Godden. The Second Series, Text. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Becker, Gertraud. Geist und Seele im Altsächsischen und im Althochdeutschen: Der Sinnbereich des Seelischen und die Wörter gest-geist und seola-sela in den Denkmälern bis zum 11.Jahrhundert. Heidelberg, Germany: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1964.
Berr, Samuel. An Etymological Glossary to the Old Saxon Heliand. Berne, Switzerland: Herbert Lang & Co., 1971.
Chickering, Howell D. Jr., transl. Beowulf. New York, NY: Doubleday,1977. (Dual language.)
Claus, David B. Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of ‘psyche’ before Plato. New London CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
Diatessaron (Tatian’s Harmony, four Gospels merged into one.) http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/diatessaron.html
De Vries, Jan. Altnordisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Band I. Leiden, Holland: E.J. Brill, 1961.
Eggers, Hans. “Altgermanische Seelenvorstellungen in Lichte des Heliand.” Jahrbuch des Vereins für Niederdeutsche Sprachforschung. 1957 / 80. Neumünster, Germany: Karl Wachholtz Verlag.
Hall, J.R. Clark, with supplement by Herbert D. Merritt. A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 4th Edition. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1960.
Harbus, A. The Life of the Mind in Old English Poetry. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002.
Heliand: http://www.hieronymus.us.com/latinweb/Mediaevum/Heliand.htm
Inčiuraitė, Lina. “The Meaning of Soul in Ælfric’s ‘Catholic Homilies’.” Vilnius University Institute of Foreign Languages. Verbum. Vilnius : Vilniaus universiteto leidykla. 2010, t. 1, p. 37-45. ISSN 2029-6223.
Koene, J.R., transl. Heliand, oder das Lied vom Leben Jesu. Münster, Germany: Druck und Verlag der Theissing’schen Buchhandlung, 1855. (Dual language, Old Saxon and German).
Mahlendorf, Ursula R. “OS Gest, OHG Geist.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. LIX, No.3, July 1960. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
O’Neill, Patrick, ed. King Alfred’s Old English Prose Translation of the first 50 Psalms. Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 2001.
Russell, James C. The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity: A Sociohistorical Approach to Religious Transformation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
First published here, April 2021; revised June 2021.