My special
friend Heidi convinced me to go along with her spiritual group De Kleine Herderstas to the borderland
of the German states of Sachsen-Anhalt and Thüringen. So we went. In my case,
unprepared.
Our
residence was in the village Wickerode, near the town of Stolberg and bordering
the village of Questenberg. On the latter’s hilltop, we saw the giant wreath on
a pole, which is replaced once a year on Pentecost Day in a big ritual. It
illustrated nicely how Heathenism had survived for centuries by taking a
Christian guise.
Friedrich Barbarossa
The first
place where we stopped to visit, was the fortress built by Holy Roman Emperor
Friedrich I, whom his rebellious Italian subjects called Barbarossa, “redbeard” (r.1151-90). It is on a hilltop in Kyffhaüser, from kaifen, “fight”, hence a “military house” or “fortress”. An
excellent guide showed us around the place, which I had never thought of nor
realized that it even existed. He reigned over a united empire, including my
own dukedom of Brabant, and his rule was fondly remembered by the people as a
time without pestilence or famines and limited warfare. He died during the
third crusade, drowning while crossing the … river in Southeastern Anatolia.
(His grandson and successor Friedrich II would conclude a peace treaty with the
Muslim ruler of Jerusalem securing the safe passage for Christian pilgrims that
had been the object of the Crusades to begin with.)
Half of his
army went back home, thinking his death was a bad omen. The other half
continued but failed to conquer Jerusalem. Friedrich Barbarossa’s corpse, meant
to be buried in Jerusalem, was lost. But the people didn’t believe he had
really died. According to a legend traceable to 1519, he is only sleeping, waiting
in a cave for the occasion to rescue his people when the need is really high.
Every hundred years, a dwarf comes out of the cave to see if the ravens are
still circling overhead. When they finally don’t, time will be ripe for his
return. Otherwise, another hundred years of slumber follows. It is believed
that in 1990, exactly 800 years after his death, he had a big hand in reuniting
the two Germanys.
A giant and
really beautiful statue adorns the fort. It shows a sitting Barbarossa in his
slumber, with one eye half-open, waiting for the sign to wake up and save us.
On top of it, another, less inspiring giant statue was built: on horseback,
Kaiser Wilhelm I, fresh from his victory over France and the founding of the
Second Empire in 1871, overlooks the surroundings. Former army men had it built
ca. 1890 because they thought this at last was the salvation the German people
had longed for.
Anyway,
skeptics say that the legend of a king sleeping underground and biding his time
to save his people is an old one, told among others of king Arthur, and also of
Barbarossa’s successor Friedrich II. It was reapplied to Barbarossa when he was
remembered after his death as a good ruler, and especially during the
Napoleonic wars when the Romantically animated Germans longed for national
unity. Barbarossa, the once and future Emperor!
Thomas Müntzer
We also
paid a visit to the Panorama museum in Bad Frankenhausen, built by the
erstwhile German Democratic Republic. It houses a giant circular painting by Werner
Tübke, commissioned in 1976 to depict the peasant revolt of the 1520s. After a
long preparation, he painted it in 1983-87. The Museum was purposely constructed
to house this one painting, 14 meters in height and 123 meters around. It
opened its doors on 24 September 1989, less than two months before the Berlin
Wall fell. The GDR thereby honoured the memory of the peasant revolt led by
Thomas Müntzer.
In Marxist
historiography, peasant revolts were a regular and necessary feature of
premodern society, but invariably ended in failure: mostly they were defeated,
or if they succeeded, the leaders simply took their place in the existing power
structure, changing its personnel but not its basic oppressive features. These
revolts could only be turned into a successful and enduring revolution when
they disposed of a scientific theory and method, viz. Marxism itself. This way,
the “early bourgeois” revolt against the power of the Church and the nobility
was a meritorious attempt at creating a more just society, but the conditions
were not yet ripe for its completion.
What
happened was that in 1524-25, the peasant revolt which had briefly been in
control of a large tract of central Germany, was defeated . Its military and
ideological leaders, Heinrich Pfeiffer and Thomas Müntzer, were beheaded on 27
May 1525.
Müntzer was
a young priest who had followed Martin Luther in his Reform of Christianity. He
left the Catholic priesthood and married, but remained very active as a
preacher. Like the contemporary Anabaptists in Western Germany and Frisia (and
like the followers of the Zoroastrian rebel Mazdak in Iran a thousand years
earlier), Müntzer was a bit of a millenniarist
and utopianist. He expected the Second Coming of Jesus, and his utopian society
was based on the selection of a specific part of the Christian message: the
glorification of poverty and the need of justice to the poor.
As depicted
by Tübke, the troops mobilized by the nobility for the final battle were far
better equipped and trained, and the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Jesus
did not descend to help his faithful, and the utopian society was postponed sine die.
Another
good thing which the GDR admittedly did, was to erect a statue for Müntzer in
the historical centre of his birthplace Stolberg. His birthhouse burnt down in
the 19th century, but pieces that could be saved from the fire were
included in this tasteful structure. The sculpture was inaugurated in 1989, 500
years after his birth, and in the nick of time before the Wende.
The mythology road
In the town
of Thale, we walked down the Mythology Road. Twelve statues and an additional
number of sculptures and sculpted benches adorn the city park (around the
statue “to the victims of fascism”) and the surrounding streets ending in the Karl Marxstrasse. They were all taken
from Germanic mythology, featuring Wotan, the world tree Yggdrasil, the goddess
Freia and the god Balder (not yet finished), the god Aegir, the ring Draufnir,
the dragon Nidhogg etc.
It is quite
a statement that this German town, very marked by its GDR heritage, now chooses
to attract tourists (in a bid to offset the region’s job losses) by building a
path devoted to the Germanic gods. Apparently the nearby hilltop called Hexentanzplatz (“witches’
dancing-place”) had already given the region a Heathen association, so they
exploited it further. They don’t even hide behind the “Scandinavian” origin of
the book the Edda which describes
these gods, where Christianization took place centuries later and the Heathen
heritage was preserved better. Instead, they boldly name the supreme god Wotan, the German form, rather than Odin in the Scandinavian epic. It seems
the Germans are shaking off the Leftist stranglehold which demonized the entire
German history including their ancient religion.
By
contrast, in the West, at the Externsteine,
a natural formation of standing rocks, which we revisited on the way home,
political conformity still reigns supreme. On the rocks, there is a 12th-century
sculpture depicting the victory of Christianity over Heathenism, with a Jesus
taken off the cross in the upper half, and the Irminsul (“great pillar”, symbol of Heathenism) being broken
underfoot, with the dragon at the foot of the Heathen world-tree down below. In
the museum, this significant sculpture is hardly mentioned, and the Irminsul, easily recognizable as such,
is turned into just a palm-tree. This fits in with the strongly highlighted
fact that the Nazis organized archeological diggings at the site, hoping to find
traces of Germanic use, but found nothing. This again fits the Christian
attempt to downplay the Heathen prehistory everywhere (e.g. to turn Hindu
beliefs into Christian influences in disguise) and to deny the Christian
destruction of Paganism.
But there
is, in spite of the Nazis, no need for a specifically Germanic prehistory. The
Indo-Europeans including their Germanic component may have entered the region
fairly late, say 2000 BC, which is long after it was inhabited by humans. The
place was, according to archeologists, used in the Stone Age, and for millennia
it lay near a much-used trade road. Given the mentality of the age, it would be
strange if such a remarkable feature of nature were not a cultic place. The rocks themselves have a hole where the rising
sun shines through on Solstice day, a characteristic of numerous cultic places.
It also has an altar stone, predictably Christianized. So the site is one of
the thousands of Pagan cultic sites that were purposely turned into chapels or
on which churches were built. This was in tune with Pope Gregory’s instructions
to let the Pagan population continue to gather at its Pagan sites, but for a
Christian service, so that they could gradually adapt to the new religion. Till
today, this policy is applied by the missionaries as a matter of
“inculturation”.
That the Irminsul stood at or near the Externsteine was a Romantic belief but
need not be true. It was a general symbol of Heathenism, upheld by the Saxons
in their resistance against the Christian emperor Charlemagne. He is reported
to have ordered it broken down, but no details are available on its whereabouts.
He also had thousands of recalcitrant Saxons killed, earning him the nickname
“slaughterer of the Saxons”. That sealed the Christianization of the area.
Still, we were surprised to see how much of the pre-Christian religion survived
a millennium of Christian supremacy.
Goseck
We had been
in Goseck (though not in the museum) and in Nebra before, but now we really
took the time to understand the sites and what was discovered there. Built
nearly 5000 years BC, Goseck is one of the oldest solar observatories in the
world, to my knowledge the oldest one identified as such, preceding Stonehenge
by more than two thousand years. Unlike the later generation of stone circles, such
as the later phases of the repeatedly redesigned construction at Stonehenge, it
does not yet contain a reference to the 18-year cycle of the Lunar Nodes, the
two points of intersection between the Lunar and the Solar cycle, i.e. the
points where eclipses occur. But it does make the year cycle visible, with the
extremes of the Solstices.
The most
important festival for the builders of this woodhenge was clearly the Winter
Solstice or Yuletide. Gates mark the places where the sunrays fall at sunrise
and sunset on the Solstice day. The second
most important one was not the Spring Equinox (or Ostara, Easter). Nor was
it the Summer solstice, a paradoxical day on which the sun culminates at its
northernmost point, but also starts its descent to the south. It was May Day or
the Walpurgis night (30 April, 1 May), nearly at the midpoint of spring. This
is when the sun is already very high and still rising, a more optimistic time
than the Summer Solstice. The sunrise and sunset on this day are marked by a
smaller opening in the wooden fence.
This
confirms the modern Pagan use of the “eight year festivals”: both the points
defining the seasons, viz. the Solstices and Equinoxes, and the seasonal
midpoints. The former probably received a higher emphasis among the Germanic
tribes, the latter among the Celts, which is why they are mostly known by their
Celtic names: mid-spring or Beltane, mid-summer of Lughnasad, mid-autumn or
Samhain, and mid-winter or Imbolc. Both types of festival were already in
evidence 7000 years ago in Goseck.
Nebra
The village
of Nebra has built an archeo-astronomy museum around one small artifact found less
than fifteen years ago: the disk of Nebra. In about 1600 BC, the transition
point between the early and late bronze age, the disk was made out of copper,
with golden images of celestial bodies. It shows the crescent moon and 32 stars
in total, of which only the “Seven Sisters” or Pleiades form a recognizable
asterism. According to Nebra researchers, it shows the lunar phase (three days
after New Moon) at the time of conjunction with the Pleiades, and marks the
time when an extra thirteenth lunar month had to be inserted so that the lunar
year could keep pace with the solar year. I am not sure I am convinced by this
explanation, but it makes sense.
Later, two
sidebars were added marking the distance between the sunrise points at Winter
Solstice and Summer Solstice. After a few generations, when the disk’s original
usage had been forgotten, it was thrown in a grave together with a host of
weapons and utensils.
Here again,
the village of Nebra shows the will of the Germans in the former GDR to endow
itself with a new identity. If the disk, or the woodhenge at Goseck, had been
discovered in the age of German nationalism, a cult would have grown up around
them extolling them as national heritage. Now this is completely absent. The approach
is purely scientific.
Effectively,
when the disk was made, the area may already have been Indo-Europeanized, but
just as likely Celticized as Germanicized. The Germanic languages had their
first known focus in northern Germany, whence they gradually expanded. The
Celtic languages were at that time dominant in Central Europe, and even
non-Celtic tribes adopted Celtic nomenclature because it conferred prestige.
Other branches of Indo-European which have later disappeared may also have been
involved. When the stellar observatory at Goseck was built, the region was
probably not yet Indo-European-speaking at all, let alone Germanic-speaking.
Conclusion
This trip
convinced us that Heathenism is doing well, thank you. With the decline of
Christianity there is more openness towards the pre-Christian heritage. It is
also more relaxed than in the Romantic and nationalist periods, when this
tradition was distorted by contemporary ideological fashions.
We cannot hope to get a fully satisfying
spirituality out of our ancestral traditions. Probably our forebears had not
more than the ritual traditions and the mythology we vaguely know. Or if they
did have some kind of yogic practice, it has at any rate been lost
irretrievably. So to an extent, we have to borrow from the Orient or develop
new insights and techniques. However, a tradition which has been murdered by
Christianity has a right to resume its life. In that sense, we should be glad
to see the ongoing revival of Heathenism. Read more!
