ABSTRACT
In the history of religions, ever since the discipline was founded in the middle of the nineteenth century, it has been customary to distinguish between two kinds of religions, which have been seen to be so different that they could hardly be studied by the same persons. Primary religions were those that had no written records, and they were mostly studied by anthropologists and ethnographers, whereas secondary religions were those of antiquity and modern so-called universal religions, and they were mostly studied by philologists and theologians. The consequences, then, from this simple comparison is that we can be rather certain that, as part of the theogonic discourse, this idea of a primordial being originating in the earth and the relationship to human families was very widespread among the Germanic tribes at the time of Tacitus. Models of religion must thus by necessity be based on knowledge of cultures that for various reasons can be seen as comparable to pre-Christian Scandinavian.
