IT IS AN UNWELCOME FACT to have to face, that studies of pre-Christian religion amongst the Germanic-speaking peoples have recently shown little sign of progressing in a very coherent manner, and indeed in the course of the past quarter-century or so have been moving away from rather than towards any consensus even over the proper critical methodology to be brought to this topic. Specialization in the disciplines relevant to some particular source of evidence can lead to powerful convictions in favour of certain views, perhaps nowhere more clearly exemplified than in Anatoly Liberman's etymologically embedded reconstruction of a prehistoric Germanic religion dominated by the terror of chthonic spirit leaders and hordes (work of many years collected and revised in Liberman 2016). Different only in mode is the imposition of perceived analogies or even just casual assumptions upon material phenomena such as the burial of the dead with grave goods, or potential cases of graphic or numerical symbolism (e.g. Andrén 2014; review Hines 2015a; further, infra). It is quite possible for suggestions made through such diverse approaches to this aspect of the distant past to be historically correct – and perhaps they are even more likely to be partially correct – but they will still be essentially flawed if they are conclusions drawn for the wrong reasons. I stand resolutely by the contention that it is utterly fundamental to the study of religion that the phenomenon itself be adequately characterized at a general level to enable us to identify with defensible credibility where religion may be inherent in what are essentially very different material, linguistic or textual phenomena (Hines 1997; 2015b). Studies of ancient and historical religion are otherwise no more than a series of variously lucky or wild guesses which discredit both the object of study and the scholarly attempt to engage with it.

This critique is based upon a view that posits that religion is essentially immaterial, residing at its very heart in a common human sense of numinism: a field of cognition which in a truly Kantian sense ‘transcends’ the material and social substrates of the culture within which this consciousness exists and to which it must necessarily also relate; perhaps not (to develop the Kantian analogy further) as an a priori category of understanding but certainly as an autonomous element of the culture's ideology.