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In 1991, a study comparing depression in men and women claimed that men predominantly sought relief in distractions, and so appeared to suffer less, while women favored rumination, turning their troubles over endlessly in their minds, making themselves more miserable as a result. The supposedly emotional sex was found to give more time to thinking than the supposedly rational one. The contribution of women to the limitation of fear has only begun, for rumination does not necessarily lead to gloom, nor to panic, where thoughts go round in circles, stirring up dangers into imminent catastrophes and terror at the prospect of being afraid. Rumination can also hold fear at a distance, and choose what it ruminates about.

The most important discovery of science about fear, however, is that its physical symptoms, in terms of the chemicals produced to defend the body, differ only in degree from those of curiosity. That makes it easier to understand how people racked by fears have been able to escape them or forget them under the influence of curiosity, of a preoccupation with some goal which so absorbs them that they behave as though they were profoundly coureagous.

Yoga, as a system of preventive medicine based on a programme of physical and mental exercises, made it possible to control voluntarily functions which are normally automatic; as part of a spiritual discipline, Hindu or Buddhist, it prepares the way for the extinction of individual self-conciousness. "Fear", said the book, "arises when there is another". So if there is no other person in the world, there can be no fear. Exercises, under the guidance of a guru, taught the disciple that his individuality was an illusion and his soul part of the universal soul. The price of banishing fear, in other words, is to cease to be a person in the normal sense.

Hypochondria diluted fear with hope, and provided an alternative way to Know Thyself. The American woman who got into textbooks for having made 548 visits to 226 physicians and 42 medical students, obtaining 164 different diagnoses, never despaired.

Living in towns, illuminated at night and guarded by police, diminished (for a time) the fear of violence, while prosperity and the welfare state reduced the number of those who feared famine, homelessness, illness, unemployment, old age. Nevertheless, the present generation spends far more money insuring itself against these fears than ever its ancestors paid churches or magicians for protection.

Since the eighteenth century, security has become, almost universally, the official goal for this life, but an unattainable goal, a paradise, ever harder to locate, invisible in a cloud of doubts. The American constitution proclaimed the right to security, which meant the right to have no fears, but in vain. Psychoanalysts declared security to be necessary for the attainment of normality, but few people believe they are entirely normal. Insecurity has become the commonest complaint of our time. Odin the Unpredictable is no longer admired.

Today the world may appear to be more densely populated than it was five centuries ago, but that is to forget the millions of devils, gnomes, goblins, monsters and wicked fairies who used to haunt it.

But civilisations have trained the imagination to transform occasional disaster into a constant nightmare. Knowledge has not extinguished unreasonable fears , because it has also supplied new ideas for possible future catastrophes.

Creating a false impression is the modern nightmare. Reputation is the modern purgatory. The more a society thinks of itself as democratic, the more reputation matters in it and the more fear of other people's criticism, however petty, becomes obsessive: an American survey claims it is the fear which is most troubling of all. It is no accident that advertising and public relations have become the basis of business, politics, entertainment and even religion.

Odin was responsible for the unpredictable.. The Vikings could face all other fears ultimately because, as rebels, they discovered how to turn the natural fear of the unpredictable into a source of inspiration. That is the clue they bequeathed, which nobody noticed.