THE BARBARIAN WORLD 45 They are said to discuss important private matters and affairs of state at their drunken feasts, "because they think that at no other time is the mind more open to fair judg- ment or more inflamed to mighty deeds. . . . On the day following the matter is reconsidered and a particular advan- tage is secured on each occasion. They take counsel when they are unable to practice deception; they decide when they cannot be misled." 1 One suspects, however, that Caesar and Tacitus have put these reasons into the mouths of the Germans, and in any case they are incorrect explana- tions of the customs in question. From the later literature of the Germans themselves it has been inferred that they were shrewd and somewhat skeptical, and of a philosophical, moralizing, and epigrammatic turn of mind. We know little of the religious beliefs and practices of the Germans before their conversion to Christianity. Caesar says that they worship only those gods whom they can see; namely, such forces in nature as the sun, moon, and fire. Tacitus in one passage tells of their carrying into battle " images and standards taken from their sacred groves"; elsewhere he states that they make no images of their gods, whom they worship not in temples made by hands but in sacred groves. He applies the Roman names Mercury, Hercules, and Mars to the German gods Woden, Thor, and Tiu, whom they faintly suggest. He tells us that the Germans sometimes practiced human sacrifice, and that they were addicted to many forms of divination, by bits of wood, by sacred horses, and by birds. From other sources we learn that they burned their dead and believed in a future life. They worshiped their ancestors, and indi- cations of fetish worship are seen in their sacred trees, whence are derived our Maypoles and Christmas trees. Their early religion was also marked by much magic ritual. Woden was their teacher in mystic writing, incantations, and the performance of marvels. For legends of their gods and heroes somewhat similar to Greek mythology, we have 1 There is a similar passage in the Greek historian Herodotus about the Persians.
