Quote of the Day

Thor is called, in Scandinavia, The Defender of the World, and amulet miniatures of his hammer have for centuries been worn to afford protection. At Stockholm, the museum holds one of amber from a late paleolithic date; and from the early metal ages fifty or more tiny T-shaped hammers of silver and gold have been collected. In fact, even to the present -- or, at least, to the first years of the present century -- Manx fishermen have been accustomed to wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep to protect them from the sea; and in German slaughterhouses workers have been seen with the same bone suspended from their necks.

An unforeseen, somewhat startling overtone is added by this observation to the T-motif that has already been discussed in connection with the Celtic Christian Tunc-page (which is of a date when the Celtic and Viking spheres of influence were in many ways interlaced); and, of course, then vice versa: the apparently merely grotesque fishing episode acquires a new range of possible significance when the T of the Celtic page is identified with Thor's hammer as well as with Christ's cross. We might, in fact, even ask whether in Manx and German folklore the T-shaped bone of the sheep -- the sacrificial lamb -- may not have been consciously identified with the world-redeeming cross of the man-god Christ, as well as with the world-defending hammer of the native, far more ancient, even possibly paleolithic, man-god Thor.

Joseph Campbell
Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, vol. 3

Jim's comments: And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you make a conspiracy theory. 1) Find some random and unrelated factoids. 2) Divorce them from the theories in which you encountered them. 3) Construct a theory about how these factoids really are related, ignoring all the evidence that puts them in the theories you just divorced them from. 4) Portray your contrived theory as the norm, and suggest all deviations from it are what's really contrived -- an excellent example of a pre-emptive tu quoque.

The first paragraph ends with a footnote referencing two works: A.C. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism (1906), pp. 39-40, which you can read here; and B. Phillpotts, "German Heathenism," in The Cambridge Medieval History, volume 2 (1913), pp. 481-82, which you can read here. Phillpotts just references Haddon's work. Haddon reports that another person, Mr. E. Lovett, points to the sheep tongue bones worn "by Whitby, and probably by other Yorkshire fisherman" as good luck charms to protect them from drowning. Basically, some people in a small village wore them and Haddon thinks it probable that the practice extends beyond that village, although no reason for this extension is given. There is also no reference given for E. Lovett, although perhaps there's a bibliography which I can't access. Lovett further suggests that this t-shaped bone might be meant to represent Thor's hammer. Might. Later, Haddon says another person, Professor Boyd Dawkins, told him that Manx fisherman (from the Isle of Man) wore something similar. Haddon then informed yet another person, Herr E. Friedel, of this practice, and Friedel said some Berlin slaughter yard workers also wore something similar. There seems to be a parenthetical reference here. Friedel then discovered that representations of Thor's hammer were worn in the early Iron Age in Denmark, and suggests that they devolved from a fetish to a lucky charm. How this connection from an early Iron Age practice in a different country led to the use of sheep tongue bones in England millennia later is unexplained. Also unexplained is how these amulets could be said to represent Thor's hammer, since there is a significant gap between the early Iron Age (around 1000 BC) and the first references to Thor. Moreover, a t-shape is a pretty simple form, after all. It's just two perpendicular lines. And what about all the fishermen from other areas who use different good luck charms? What about all the non-fishermen's charms? I'd like more evidence than some people speculating about a possible connection referencing each other.

Perhaps I'm being overly critical. Perhaps there is a connection. But Joseph Campbell shifts the whole thing from first gear into sixth. He finds some title of Thor (Defender of the World) that sounds vaguely like some titles of God in the Judeo-Christian traditions. He then adds further that a t-shape is pretty similar to a cross, which is obviously a major symbol of Christianity. And to tie it all off with a bow, he suggests the use of a bone from a sheep sounds like the Christian idea of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb. Dude. Do I really have to explain how ridiculously contrived this is? You could find connections between anything with this kind of reasoning. Maybe using rabbits feet as lucky charms devolved from an earlier practice of lamb's feet, which was symbolic of Jesus. I mean, you can say anything about anything.

That's Campbell's methodology. Find a myth wholly unrelated to Christianity, check. Find some element of that myth that can be implied to be similar to an element of Christianity when both are divorced from their larger contexts, check. Repeat ad nauseum.