But this duality did not enter into the belief of our heathen fathers. Nor is it of such a kind that a man, having conceived a life hereafter, in this connection necessarily must conceive the soul as the simple, indissoluble spiritual factor of human nature. The division into two parts, _lif ok sála_, _líkamr ok sála_, body and soul, came with Christianity, and there is every reason for assuming, so far as the Scandinavian peoples are concerned, that the very word soul, _sála_, _sál_, is, like the idea it represents, an imported word. In Old Norse literature the word occurs for the first time in Olaf Trygveson's contemporary Halfred, after he had been converted to Christianity. Still the word is of Teutonic root. Ulfilas translates the New Testament _psyche_ with _saiwala_, but this he does with his mind on the Platonic New Testament view of man as consisting of _three_ factors: spirit (_pneuma_), soul (_psyche_), and body (_soma_). Spirit (_pneuma_) Ulfilas translates with _ahma_.
Another assumption, likewise incorrect in estimating the anthropological-eschatological belief of the Teutons, is that they are supposed to have distinguished between matter and mind, which is a result reached by the philosophers of the Occident in their abstract studies. It is, on the contrary, certain that such a distinction never entered the system of heathen Teutonic views. In it all things were _material_, an _efni_ of course or fine grain, tangible or intangible, visible or invisible. The imperishable factors of man were, like the perishable, _material_, and a force could not be conceived which was not bound to matter, or expressed itself in matter, or _was_ matter.
The heathen Teutonic conception of human nature, and of the factors composing it, is most like the Aryan-Asiatic as we find the latter preserved in the traditions of Buddhism, which assume more than three factors in a human being, and deny the existence of a soul, if this is to mean that all that is not corporal in man consists of a single simple, and therefore indissoluble, element, the soul.
The anthropological conception presented in Völuspa is as follows: Man consists of six elements, namely, to begin with the lower and coarser and to end with the highest and noblest: