The Semiotics of "Fate", "Death", and the "Soul" in Germanic Culture: The Christianization in Old Saxon

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German. The ninth century Old Saxon "Heliand" gospel yields a seminal set of words for fate that paints the cultural background into which Christianity was introduced. Ideas about death and the self in Germanic culture are similarly encoded in the "Heliand" through sets of words of pagan origin. The OS "seola" and its cognates stand exclusively for the Christian notion of the immortal soul according to Christian dogma. Through the combination of historical linguistic analysis and semiotic analysis, the development of these fundamental beliefs can be described and a continuity can be established between early Germanic beliefs and modern beliefs. Peirce's semiotic informs the linguistic analysis and promotes the ethnophilosophical description of the formation and evolution of belief. At the same time, the linguistic data inform the cultural analysis and substantiate the different levels of description in the semiotic paradigm. The prevalence of fate in the context of the Gospel unveils a mythological scenario that perpetuates ancient belief in traditional poetic figures. The abundant mythopoetic links in the Heliand characterize the unknown author as a traditional poet and a capable educator. While the belief in fate in its mythological manifestations in the identified modes of expression is irreconcilable with Christian dogma, the semiotic study of the "Heliand" data explains how the belief in fate preserved its distinctive components and survived with varying degrees of transcendental orientation in the modern concepts of fate and destiny. Although the "Heliand" poet had appropriate means of expression for the Christian dogma of salvation through pagan concepts of the metaphysical self, the "Heliand" also contains robust mythopoetic links to an Indo-European eschatology, which was intrinsically conducive to the dogma of the immortal soul. The central Indo-European mythopoetic formula of heroism is distinctly realized in the "Heliand" and serves the synthesis of epic tradition with new dogma. The correspondences identified through the comparative method in linguistics and semiotic analysis facilitate the understanding and description of intellectual history and the evolution of meaning and belief