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Widely attested in Indic, Greek, and Celtic literature, mythic accounts of a fraught encounter between a hero together with a group of human “brothers” and the shape-shifting genius loci of a sylvan lucus—either a body of placid water or a forest grove—have two principal variants. When that dæmon is male, he tests the humans with riddles that they are required to answer at the peril of their lives. When the dæmon is female, she is often cast as the sister or surrogate of the male genius loci. Overcome by the cunning, force, beauty or goodness of the hero, she betrays her brother and gives herself up, often sexually, to the hero. This latter variant frequently overlaps with Indo-European myths concerning the winning of female Sovereignty, embodied in a goddess who first appears to the hero in a horrific form and threatens his life. The former variant, in which the genius loci is male, may be reflective of an ancient ritual complex involving riddles posed by a dæmon to humans trespassing its lucus, or, as in the case of the Greco-Roman world, questions posed by humans to a dæmon oracle.

Five medieval Sanskrit-language accounts of a fabulous technique for extracting mercury from the “wells” in which it naturally resides are shown to be remarkably similar to accounts preserved in Chinese and Syriac alchemical works, as well as to a rich body of Western medieval literature bringing together the human trespasser of a lucus, the dæmon of that lucus, and one or more horses. In every case, when the (equestrian) trespasser violates the dæmon’s sacred precincts, the dæmon, embodied as an igneous, caustic or superheated fluid possessed of free will, pursues him (or her), often resulting in the trespasser’s disfigurement or death, the flooding of the surrounding region, or the dæmon’s neutralization through channels or catchment basins. These narratives draw upon a far more ancient Indo-European mythic complex involving a deity named the “Descendant of the Waters” (Apām Napāt, in Vedic and Avestan) as attested in Sanskrit, Old Iranian, Roman, Irish, and ancient Greek sources. All of these witnesses attest to a body of archaic lore relative to geothermal phenomena: living waters, sulfur springs, petroleum and “naphtha” springs, mud volcanoes, and earthquakes.

According an argument by Georges Dumézil, Ideological use of the mythology may go back to Indo-European times, and it certainly goes back to Viking and medieval Scandinavia, where a “ruler ideology” can be discerned within it. In early modern Denmark and Sweden, the mythology served to create great national pasts, and later it served the needs of national romanticism in Scandinavia and Germany. Later still it was appropriated and twisted by Nazi ideology and that of white supremacy. After WWII, leading fiction writers produced works inspired by it, such as Villy Sørensen (Ragnarøk, 1988) and A. S. Byatt (Ragnarök: The End of the Gods, 2011), who related eschatological themes to the world in which we live, and Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) pits the old gods against the new “gods” of technology. Within pop culture the mythology reflects dominant social notions, and even the wonderful Danish cartoon series Valhalla (1979-2009) may be seen as exemplifying Danish values.

The third chapter discusses H. Usener’s (1834–1905) theory of Augenblicks- and Sondergötter. This theory, which may be seen as the contrasting pole to the theory of universal gods, provided a subversive account of the origins and development of Indo-European polytheisms, based on a comparative study of Greek, Roman, and Lithuanian deities. Emphasis is placed on the contemporary religious implications of Usener’s views and, especially, on his criticism of Catholic beliefs and practices.