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The article discusses Old Norse sacrifical rituals and their practice in Scandinavia. The scarcity of research material in this special field raises methodological problems: how to interpret and understand rituals that are no longer practiced, which belonged to a culture long gone?The article analyses the three main source texts that contain coherent narratives of sacrificial narratives: Snorri's Heimskringla, the Eyrbyggjasaga and the Kjalnesingasaga. While these narratives cannot be regarded as precise depictions of how such rituals were performed in ancient times they should however not be entirely dismissed as literary fiction. In these narratives, traditional elements are intervowen with early Chrisitan influences and coloured by the cultural context in which they were created.

The eschatological beliefs current in Scandinavia during the Viking and early Medieval periods can be grouped into two main traditions, denoted by the concepts of Ragnarok and Doomsday. The former has its roots in the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia, the latter was brought to the north in the process of christianization. Although different in origin the two traditions did not, in the age with which we are concerned, necessarily reflect a strict division between adherents of the old faith and Christians. Syncretic versions of the Ragnarok concept were in circulation, one of which was presented by Snorri in his Edda. The common people, although officially christianized, apparently continued to transmit beliefs connected with the Ragnarok tradition. Scholarly research has tended to treat the two traditions separately. In fact they coexisted for centuries, leaving room for confrontation and mutual influences.

In this paper we shall present some observations on the role played by ecstasy in the activity of the seer, as he emerges in ancient Jewish and Iranian texts. In the Jewish religious literature of the Hellenistic-Roman period, visions are described on almost every page, and visions were the most important means of divine revelation. Specific techniques for inducing the ecstatic state are not recorded in the Jewish sources. Some elements in the pattern leading up to the vision may be interpreted as parts of a method for inducing the final ecstasy; i.e. fasting and prayer. The Iranian material shows clearly the importance of ecstasy in the activity of the seer. The ecstatic seeing also means that the visionary shares with Ahura Mazda a divine quality, the "wisdom of omniscience". The granting of the "wisdom of omniscience" appears as a temporary and it conveys to the visionary a supernatural seeing. There is evidence to suggest that chanting was an important method of inducing ecstasy within the early Zoroastrian community. We do not find in the Jewish material a clear correspondence to the Iranian notion of "omniscient wisdom".

It is a well-known fact that Judaism and Zoroastrianism, being prophetic religions with a monotheistic character, present many affinities. One point of similarity is a clear tendency towards aniconic representation of the Divine, which, from the beginning, was the mark of Judaism as well as Zoroastrianism, being religions with a nomadic background. As a result of the confrontation with the agricultural and urban civilisations of the ancient Near East, attempts were made to introduce iconic representations of the Divine to be used in the cult. Many groups within Judaism, and most probably also within Zoroastrianism, levelled a vigorous resistance to these attempts. As a consequence, there arose in both religions a strong movement to prohibit cult-images, which in Judaism also tended to develop into a prohibition of figurative art in general. This movement became victorious in the end and its aniconic conception of the Divine has ever since remained the normative attitude of both Jews and Zoroastrians. What were the reasons for these attitudes in Judaism and in Zoroastrianism? And were there theological ideas that could function as a substitute to cult-images of the Divine?