Germanien 1933 Issue 2

1933 | February / Hornung | Issue 2

Monthly Journal for Prehistory for the Understanding of German Essence

1933 | February / Hornung | Issue 2

Meaningful and Symbolic

By Dr. J. O. Plassmann

Principles of Prehistoric Research Methodology

A spiritual-historical period dating back thousands of years, whose life and inner experiences can only be read from a few, inadequate and difficult-to-interpret monuments, will always present us with many riddles, as the number of clear monuments decreases the further we travel back into prehistoric darkness. However, due to the rarity, the individual monument gains value; and this value increases even more if we can identify a consistency among the various monuments that, under the circumstances, cannot be attributed to chance.

If we are already less inclined to attribute a significant and meaningful correspondence of two phenomena to mere chance among the confusing abundance of impressions surrounding us today, this applies even more so to phenomena that date back centuries and millennia; where not only the significant and meaningful similarity, but also the consistent preservation would be attributed to chance. All the more, as the preservation through many centuries is indeed a result of the importance of the work itself, which was considered valuable only because of the inherent sense of preservation and transmission to later generations — or, in times of changed thinking, not the conscious preservation, but the conscious transformation, change in relationship, or even destruction was provoked.

This consideration plays an important role in the evaluation of the "accidental" or "spontaneous" origin of prehistoric material formations, as we want to call this type of transmission. A line is only subject to its direction by will or chance; but if we find another line running exactly parallel to it, neither the mathematician nor the layman will speak of chance anymore, but of purposeful action. Similarly, any symbol, the transfer of a form concept into a permanent material, as long as it is spontaneous and not determined by the shaping sense, may only be considered as such as long as it stands as a sole transmission.

If it repeats elsewhere, and under circumstances that already in themselves represent a similar relationship to the material and to the form, it must be assumed that both creators wanted to express something specific with their form language that goes beyond the concrete, natural sense of the shaped; that is, the purely instinctive, emerging from spontaneous joy of activity, becomes purposeful, regulated, and guided by an idea.

This applies even more, the more the expression of the created moves away from the immediate, rationalistic reproduction of the represented; the more it abstracts. To abstract means: to remove the foliage or flesh from the concrete (covered) tree or body, to make the structure, the meaningful construction of the whole visible and comprehensible. Abstract symbolism is therefore not something "primitive," but something much more developed than the naturalistic "faithfulness to nature" — contrary to the common belief of some laypeople and scholars.

The will of forms, that is, the actual meaning of a tree, is better recognized from its defoliated winter form than from its lush summer fullness. A child draws the person according to its outer contours; only the artist makes the shaping idea clear, the organic structure, which brings the essence to expression. When Goethe was enchanted by the changing expression of the living human face, he remained in the sensual sphere of the receptive poet; he came closer to the creative idea when he examined the human skull in the serious charnel house, when he discovered the intermaxillary bone, and precisely in what is the sign of death for the "primitive," he recognized with delight the magnificent laws of the highest creative and shaping spirit.

I preface this not to show that the ability to recognize speeches even in their highest intensity may be the highest hallmark of the Nordic spirit — the point where Goethe perhaps touched Schiller most intimately — but to point to a fundamental question that is generally too little presented and answered in prehistoric research.

With all objections that are usually made against a "prehistory" — not to mention the passionate attacks — it is mainly argued that the interpreters of ancient thoughts were guided by their "fantasy" and interpreted things into the old monuments that only stem from their own thinking or rather their unbridled fantasy. Against some unrestrained and unbridled interpretations, this is certainly correct; but a fundamental rejection of any intellectual monument interpretation is as absurd as a fundamental rejection of astronomy simply because there is also astrology. If one places Schiller's skull next to that of an Australian native, it will never be possible to prove exactly that one skull once contained something more valuable than the other. In the material aspect, this can never be proven at all. An interpretation of the — viewed with the material eye — purely material form structure is always a spiritual construction, or rather a reconstruction. However, this reconstruction also presupposes a corresponding subjective structure, in other words: The interpreter must be of one spirit with the spirit that once shaped those skull bones, that once depicted them as a purely abstract image of its form and life will in the indifferent material of lime and phosphorus. To the "primitive," this skull, whether from Schiller or an Australian native, is nothing more than a screaming image of death and decay. To the materialist, it is a mixture, and at best a zoological fact. To Goethe, it was more, it was something fundamentally different: it was to him only a particularly hard-to-grasp and only for initiates readable, but all the more compelling rune of the highest, eternal life.

Was Goethe a fantasist because he read what others found illegible, indecipherable, indeed annoying and repellent? Even today, there will be many heads of this kind who accuse Goethe of fantasizing because there were also unrestrained, wild phrenologists who interpreted wildly. And to this head, which clings forever to the shallow evidence, the hope will certainly never die, because the worms it digs up will always appear to it as the real treasures. I will not talk about these here.

The question is rather: where is the boundary in prehistoric research between fantasy — that this exists, we are the last to deny — and intuitive, intellectual reconstruction of the idea content, which once expressed its significant and meaningful intellectual signs with material ("primitive"!) means?

Fantasy builds a subjective, only seemingly spiritual, but in reality, determined by the most colorful sensual perception, image of a past humanity; an image that therefore never comes to complete rounding, because there are no boundaries set to the associations of sensual fantasy. Characteristic of this kind is the passionate preference for a colorful pantheon, for all kinds of mysterious cultic things, and for a wild-growing symbolism that never exhausts its possibilities because it ultimately relates everything to everything. It behaves to real Germanic culture like a certain direction of Romanticism to Gothic style, which it further developed into a false, fantastic ornamental art or believed it had to "interpret" it correctly. This has nothing to do with the idea of Gothic; this is much truer and more genuine in some abstract iron construction of our modern times…..

……wild, mythomaniac, intoxicated by fantasy — no matter how "Nordic" it may behave.

The rise of man began with the ability to elevate himself above the sphere of sensory perception to abstract thinking, that is, not to let himself be passively overwhelmed by the effects of the environment, but to reflect on the acting itself, independent of its effect on the subject; and thus to recognize the principle of action itself. This is not a peaceful and self-evident "higher development" of the naive to the spiritual man, but the intrusion of something absolutely new. It is the absolute separation of subject and object, a complete distancing of personal "interest" from the object, which is thus no longer an object of expectation of joyful or painful nature, but only an object of knowledge.

Without this abstraction from the sensually perceived heaviness, subjectively grasped in the sensation of closeness, there would never have been a Germanic hall building, nor a Gothic cathedral, nor even a floating iron bridge. And so all occupation with the thought world of earlier millennia remains backward-looking Romanticism without relation to the present and future, if it is capable of nothing but to reconstruct or rather invent a bygone wonder world with the help of fantasy. It becomes fruitful only when research advances to the interpretation of the inner structure of a type of humanity that, as a whole, encompasses the succession of generations over the period of several millennia. It no longer merely passively registers the effects that this type of humanity exerted on stone walls three thousand years ago, and today on drawn and rolled iron: it understands both as expressions of the same form and action will, just as it understands the roots and branches of a tree as expressions of the same form and action will — transformed only by the outer sphere in which this will unfolds.

Is it justified or not to ask the question: If the modern man, living in the nearer and wider environment of the North and Baltic Sea regions, develops through his ability to abstract (that is, the ability to recognize laws) an influence over the entire earth that has never been seen before — is this influence rooted in his inner nature, in his organic structure, and can this inner nature be traced back to his manifestations in earlier times of his existence? Can we therefore assume his ability to abstract, and is this ability thus a fundamental starting point for his understanding of phenomena, for his "worldview"?

Here, what has generally been considered the origin of the myth — a sensually conceived nature mysticism with "cloud cows," "sun lions," and similar — fundamentally differs from what, among others, Hermann Wirth introduces into research as the origin of the myth, specifically the "proto-Atlantic" myth: the linear abstraction of the universe as a primary element, followed by the secondary search for the structural or abstract within the concrete individual phenomena.

This opposition is of the utmost importance for the roots of human intellectual history in general, and that is why the dispute over Herman Wirth's research is well understandable — only that the dispute dissolves into tactical skirmishes over subordinate questions of methodology, instead of addressing the grand strategic fundamental line. Popular mythology says, for example: to the primitive man, the large and distant appears in the image of the small and familiar; thus, the earth appears below and the sky above in the image of the tree: the roots stand in the earth, the branches reach into space, and the stars are the leaves and the fruits. This image is further painted by familiar phenomena of real life: three women water the roots of the tree, the sea surrounding the earth appears under the image of the giant serpent, etc.

Wirth opposes this thesis: these images did not spontaneously arise from "primitive" thinking; they have a long developmental sequence behind them. The structure of these ideas, originally abstract, was only later surrounded by sensible flesh and blood; the creative origin is the abstract-symbolic, linear representation of the yearly cycle in a specific latitude, and the figurative significance derived from the division and abstract meaning of the constellations. The division and significance of the annual horizon, however, result from the key points of the annual solar cycle, which, with its rise to the northern height of summer and its descent to the southern depth of the winter night, not only determines the division of time but also represents a symbol of the emerging, ascending, and sinking life in general. The linear connections between the axis of the yearly cycle and its highest and deepest sections result in the abstract symbol of the tree; the structure, the formative principle, the creative idea reappears in the concrete tree, whose life moves up and down according to the yearly cycle between the high crown of summer and the deep root of winter. The cycle that the sun, abstractly conceived, describes in the winter night under the horizon is translated into the tangible as the serpent of the depths and the southern sea. And similarly, it is with the other images, the three roots and the three "mothers," who are considered guardians of the depths, in which the sun, the symbol of life, is reborn in the holy winter night.

Without question, the former, popular reinterpretation is more readily accepted by the imagination accustomed to sensible thinking, simply because it provides easier and more convenient nourishment for the imagination. It is, so to speak, tangible when one says: the bull is worshiped as a god because it represents the procreative, life-giving force; or when one interprets the menhir as a phallus. Modern psychoanalysis has indeed connected with this convenient and intuitive way of thinking with great skill and success. It represents the extreme opposite of the abstract-symbolic worldview — to such an extent that a bridge between the two views is altogether impossible; they are simply two fundamentally different attitudes of the knowing and interpreting subject. Its laws apply within the sphere of the sensible, but only there; for it can never and never break through the sphere of the sensible, as this is precisely its most consistent, thoroughly thought-out expression. A catchphrase of this direction is "sublimation," the supposed "development" from the vegetative-instinctive to the "higher thinking"; the latter is supposed to differ from the former only gradually, by degree, but not essentially.

From here to the phallic interpretation of the Gothic tower is only a short step. Intellectual ability, brain formation, and skull shape are merely a secondary effect of the primary sex. This explains the fanatic consistency with which the psychoanalytic theory tries to force everything into its system. It has an easy task: the material it can provide in overwhelming abundance from all human eras can be easily interpreted sensibly, for this is the easiest for sensually receptive thinking to grasp. The defender of the abstract-symbolic original meaning, however, requires a reconstruction, a detour of thought, which not only he himself must go, but he must also lead everyone else who wants to understand him. These fundamental thoughts arise when one tries to deduce from the language of forms the meaning of what is expressed. Especially when we believe we can conclude an abstract view from the corresponding language of forms of two monuments that are temporally and spatially quite far apart, which is common to the creators of both monuments.

Such a parallelism seems to me to exist between the language of forms of two Germanic monuments; it arouses our special interest because one of these monuments is our Externsteine. If the correspondence were only in a single piece, it would not be very striking. However, there is a correspondence of a whole series of forms, and so at least the suspicion arises that it is also a correspondence of an essential series of thoughts.

Our Figure 1 (a-d) shows the four-sided sculpture of the old baptismal stone from Gelde, Amt Viborg in Jutland, which belongs to the early 13th century. Figure 1a shows a runic inscription; this side is thus marked as the beginning of the series of symbols and thoughts. The inscription reads: "Gudlif made (it), purity finds, who wants into the baptismal stone." (Fünte is a term still used today in the Münsterland region for the baptismal stone - Latin "fons.")

Hermann Wirth (Origin of Humanity, p. 449, picture supplement XV B) gives the following interpretation of the series of forms: The semicircle on Figure 1a, which clearly represents the ornament and encloses an empty space, is the "Ur"-arch, a widespread symbol of the first arc of the solar path of the year at the winter solstice. It is a symbol of the underworld space in which the sun resides during this time, in the "sleep of death" or the "night of the year," from which it then begins its new ascent. The ornament would thus be a sign of entry into the underworld, from which the new ascent to new life begins — for the sun, as for man, the "image of God," who appears in the ascending and returning annual cycle and finds his abstract expression in the sun-like annual division of the year.

The next representation (1b) depicts the first phase of this ascent in an abstract-symbolic manner. Initially, the depiction space is deliberately open at the top, whereas it is explicitly closed in the first representation. However, the ornament itself attracts our special attention. It is the symbolic representation of a developing small tree, originally conceived as linear-abstract, but already somewhat "translated" into the concrete — apparently for ornamental reasons. The abstract original form is likely the "Triskele," whose side branches have not yet fully aligned, as it is still in development.

The third figure (1c) shows the final phase of the development: the linear arc division has developed into a full circle, whose "rays," executed ornamentally, also form the symbol of the sun in its full power, the rounded annual cycle. As an emphasis or indication of this meaning, the two Triskele symbols stand on both sides; the side branches are almost entirely directed upwards, as a sign of the completed ascent. Here, too, the depiction space is open at the top: it is the "open" time of the high summer, in which the arm pair of the "Son of God," who carries the sun, opens upwards. Therefore, the fulfilled annual cycle, as it appears here ornamentally, is given the two Triskele symbols as "determinative signs," which according to ancient symbolism (whose transitions can still be traced in the pre-dynastic Egyptian linear script) mean the linear symbols of the outward-facing hands. As such, they also appear, among others, on the rock carvings of Brastad.

The last representation (1d) again shows the closed circle or semicircle at the top; and here the ornamental execution of the tree symbol is particularly clear: it is the life or annual tree, a symbol of the last quarter of the year, which is leaning towards its end, the return to the "Ur"-arc. The correspondence with the developing tree in 1b is also evident in the fact that the halves of the tree are divided into four parts in both representations, which may go back to the eightfold divided arc. So far, the interpretation according to Herman Wirth.

What concerns us particularly here is first the "tree of life" or annual tree in 1b. It will already have been noticed that this tree shows a striking similarity in form and outline with the peculiar structure that serves as a "throne seat" for Joseph of Arimathea in the large cross image at the Externsteine, on which he sits. This "throne seat" has been erected and explained as the original image of the "Irminsul" (see Teudt, Germanische Heiligtümer, 2nd ed., p. 47ff.); Eugen Weiß, B. Werner, et al. have pointed out the ornamental correspondence of this tree with a similar structure that appears on column capitals in Pavia, Müstair, and Hammersleben (see Fig. cbb. p. 53). I do not doubt that we have here an offshoot of this representation, which is much closer to the Nordic original. It is especially important that our representation is not distorted in the decorative manner, as in Pavia, etc.; the transition from the abstract original form to the sculptural stylization can still be clearly recognized. Even the "Irminsul" is already somewhat more developed in this respect, yet the structural idea's correspondence can still be clearly recognized.

The Externstein image represents a somewhat earlier stage of the "development": the "branches" are still almost entirely curled; the curling is also particularly emphasized by the horn-like volutes that the side branches form upwards. On the representation from Selje, on the other hand, the blooming, the development in the truest sense of the word, is somewhat more advanced, but the curled form still corresponds clearly to that. Furthermore, a shoot strives upwards from the middle of the trunk: this may be a sign of the more advanced development, but it could also be an original component of the original form, which has been omitted in the "Irminsul" for ornamental reasons.

This correspondence raises a whole series of considerations. It is an expressed symbol of spring, of the spring of the year as well as the spring of life, which therefore adorns the baptismal stone, in which the "water of life" (Revelation 21:6) is contained. If Teudt's assumption is correct that the "Irminsul" once formed a Germanic sanctuary at the Externsteine, then his further assumption gains the greatest probability, that it was an expressly spring sanctuary oriented towards the spring point. This alone is an important result.

But there is much more here that gives us pause for thought! The fully developed wheel of the year in 1c is indeed not preserved with us, but the two Triskeles that are given as determinative signs are — only that they are found in reversed position and therefore reversed meaning in the lower grotto of the Externsteine! They formally and ornamentally match exactly with the "ideogram" or the rune (Fig. 5), which was uncovered in January 1929 and has already been identified by Herman Wirth (Germanien 1, 1) as an ancient ideogram of the lowered pair of arms (I will soon demonstrate this pair of arms as a magical symbol also from magical literature). If it signifies the raised hands of the Son of God on the baptismal stone, it signifies in the Extern grotto the lowered pair of arms of the winter god. In any case, this form language was as familiar to the creator of the ideogram as it presumably was to the Nordic stonemason much later — a brilliant example of how from the agreement of the symbolic one can infer the agreement of the sense, but also the long-lasting transmission, the spiritual continuity of this sense over very long periods.

But the correspondence goes further. If we look at figure 1a, it is initially striking that the semicircle is completely unfilled, so that the symbolic thought underlying the ornament considers the "Ur-arch" itself as the essential element of this representation. The front of the stone with the slanted upper edges and the strong base that bears the inscription forms an ornamental whole. It vividly recalls the so-called "rock sarcophagus" on the north side of the Externsteine; it is the similarly shaped Ur-arch (Fig. 2) on the front of the slightly slanted, free-standing stone; under the semicircular arch, however, is the curious depression that just provides space for an adult human.

Is this a coincidence, or are we, on a remarkable detour, getting closer to the original meaning of this stone, which stands uniquely among all our monuments? Considered in isolation, the comparison might not be convincing; but in connection with the other correspondences, it gains a completely different weight. Here, a formal developmental series corresponds to a symbolic train of thought: what is symmetrically placed next to each other on the baptismal stone at Selde would, transferred to the Externstein, reflect an actual process of religious life. At the bottom on the north side, the stone with the Ur-arch; above on the east wall, the old depiction of the developing tree of the year as a symbol of spring; high above, the sacellum facing northeast, and below in the grotto again the linear symbol of the downward-facing pair of arms, whose reversed counterpart may once have been set up in the sacellum as a sign of high summer. In any case, the ideogram is closer to the linear original tradition than the already strongly stylized "Irminsul," but the fundamental features' correspondence is undeniable.

In this context, the fact that the Nordic master's symbolism (or was it a German?) is found precisely on a baptismal stone gains special significance. The master undoubtedly wanted to express that the series of thoughts represented in the images has a connection with the baptismal rite of earlier and Christian times (for immersion in water or pouring is an ancient pre-Christian custom). We are particularly struck by the depression inside the grotto (see Fig. in Teudt, op. cit., p. 35), which has always been interpreted as a baptismal basin, although it differs entirely in form from the Christian ones. The legend of the baptism of the newly instructed Saxons at the Externsteine is also significant in this context. If the symbolism of the early Christian Nordic baptismal stone matches so conspicuously with that at the Externsteine, then the thought of a pre-Christian baptismal rite associated with this place is very close.

We cautiously feel our way back into the darkness of what, despite being torn from us, still fills our thinking as a violently interrupted tradition. If we succeed in deducing the symbolic from the meaningful and from this again the ancient sense, then the most important step towards an ancient intellectual history is taken. And if it is the task of every true science to deduce the shaping spirit from the formed, then this will gradually progress here as well, through the dead material to the knowledge of the eternally living.

The Willows Stone at Arnau By Wilhelm Teudt

In the foremost ranks of the exclusive stone monuments belongs the Elsterfrebniger image, which I presented and discussed in issue 2 of the fourth series (1932) of "Germanien" and which is reproduced here again for clarity (Fig. 1). Well-preserved and artistically appealing, it can be considered one of the most beautiful artworks of the early Middle Ages. Of great significance are the insights we were able to gain from it with unmistakable clarity about the religious conditions at the time of its creation. We learned:

1. That the creator of this artwork viewed the Germanic god and the Christian god not as something different, but as one and the same supernatural power to be revered;

2. That before this one god, the leading expressions of the two confessions, the Christian cross and the Irminsul (lily), could be erected as equally legitimate;

3. That their believers could approach him in their own way and be assured of his blessing;

4. That there was a time when Christian builders and priests allowed such a picture preaching tolerance to be installed in a Christian church;

5. Various insights into the different religious concepts, symbols, and practices of both sides at that time.

A stage of the acceptance of Christianity into Germanic folk life with high probability can be attributed to the peaceful, conciliatory work of the Irish-Scottish missionaries, of whom Columbanus is known to us as a main representative. It likely existed everywhere that the Irish-Scottish missionaries operated, even before 776 in the old Saxon lands.

However, the stage of tolerance did not last long; it had to give way to the violent conversion methods approved by Rome and introduced into Germany by Boniface and the West Frankish king Carl, whose origins resonate with the prohibitions and punishments directed against popular beliefs and customs. Wherever the Frankish power reached, images like the Elsterfrebniger were soon no longer possible in Christian churches.

But before the claims of absolute control over faith demanded by Rome were fully implemented in Germany, there was another intermediate stage, likely only in the more remote eastern parts of the country, where Frankish power did not reach as far.

We gain an unmistakable understanding of such a logically consistent development of religious conditions from another stone monument, the so-called Heidenstein in Arnau in northern Bohemia, not far from the Saxon border. The Arnauer Heidenstein no longer speaks of the equality of the Irminsul with the Christian cross before God and demands the subordination of all under the cross, but still under the tolerance of long-established forms.

The two photographs of the Heidenstein - front side and back side (see Figures 2 and 3) - along with the associated literature, were kindly sent to me by Mr. E. Thiel in Gablonz. It concerns a stone that had already received significantly more attention before the uncovering of the front side in 1926 than the gable field of Elsterfrebniger. The perhaps unique significance of the monument was not missed, even if the astonishing attempts were made, in light of the usual reluctance to recognize anything Germanic as Germanic, to interpret the god image as a "Christian" image. Here, my report must suffice, that it was explained by some as a representation of the Last Judgment, by others as a representation of the ceremony at the laying of the foundation stone of the Christian chapel! The stone has always been called "Heidenstein," at least a testimony to the fact that it conveyed something entirely different to unbiased observers than being a depiction of a Christian event.

The attempt, fundamentally flawed in its argument, to reinterpret the image as a celebration of a Christian foundation laying, ends with an admission of the name's coercion: "This Heidenstein, which we would probably more correctly call 'Christenstein' in a particularly emphasized sense, ..."! (See I. Kern, Der Heidenstein in Arnau i. B. Jahrbuch des deutschen Riesengebirgsvereins 1922, p. 6-16; L. Feyerabend and J. Kern on the same monument op. cit. 1924). After the uncovering of the front side a few years ago, our explanation is already firmly prepared. We read in a myth article in the same yearbook of the Riesengebirgsverein: "This bas-relief shows, no matter how one may explain its representation, a mixture of Germanic and Christian motifs, which for the 13th century in a Bohemian church seems quite primitive."

The doubt also resonates here whether the creation can be attributed to the 13th century. For both sides of the stone show unmistakable external features of the technique and style of representation, as was common centuries earlier (the human figures with large heads and protruding ears), as well as a worldview that can only be explained in an older time span. There is doubt about the violent tendency for later dating, which attributes a greater "scientific" authority to itself, that is, time specifications supported by misdating of older authorities and entrenched in the prejudice against the thinking and actions of older human generations.

The Arnauer Heidenstein, like the Elsterfrebniger image now in the Dresden Museum, was a gable field (tympanum). The damaged areas and the marks tell us that the front cross image was originally somewhat larger in the upper half and that some of the figures themselves were lost due to intentional or unintentional damage. The pagan god image on the back, however, was adjusted to the size of the already damaged stone. From this, with all certainty, one can conclude the later creation of the god image on the back, to which, as we will see, internal reasons also contribute.

The originally older front image (Fig. 2) is the well-executed, aesthetically appealing work of a sensitive artist who excellently solved the difficult task of space distribution in a gable field. The god image on the back (Fig. 3), however, reveals throughout an unskilled hand, working without a coherent plan, that initially got the proportions wrong. He then crammed the figures, which he had to bring to twelve in number, into free spaces and corners; also in the individual figures, especially the animal figures, and in the placement of symbols, the lack of artistic eye and skill is evident everywhere. It should be noted that the scale of the two images is not quite the same, as the photographic apparatus had to be set up at slightly different distances.

The history of the stone sheds a peculiar light on the appreciation and tolerance of the front cross image: it is something very unusual that a depiction of the crucified not only gained recognition but also served as a source of irritation. It was to be removed from the view of the congregation, was covered with foliage, and replaced by a depiction of the pagan god heavens on the back, as can also be found in old churches with devil figures, grotesques, and animal figures associated with the old belief.

Above the ancient south portal of the St. Kilian's Church in Landge (built in 786 by Carl) I noticed, as the only decoration in the free area of about 20 cm, the depiction of the sun god as a faun with donkey ears and a hanging tongue (Fig. 4). E. Jung points out ornaments, especially on columns, with quite unchristian animal motifs, whereby old Germanic myths are often depicted in an impeccable context. But all these appearances are far surpassed by the extensive, coherent, and strikingly eye-catching god image of the pagan stone.

The covering of the front side probably took centuries until during renovation work on the church, the image was uncovered.

The first insight gained from the comparison of both sides is that the images on the front and back sides originate from approximately the same time, as the technique and the highly characteristic human depiction are exactly the same. After being convinced of this important fact, we consider the details, primarily on the crucifixion image.

A very special role is played by the posture of the arms and hands. Their emphasized difference between the two figures under the cross beam, both of which we must consider as male (?), cannot be overlooked. On the right (from the viewer's perspective) we have an unmistakably Christian prayer posture: the hands are placed on top of each other, against each other, or interlocked. On the left, an entirely impossible gesture for Christians: one hand on the chest, the other on the belly! Why is this difference, which is so conspicuously presented to us, made?

Another strange, perhaps explainable distinction of the two figures on the tympanum is that the symbol of the fish, taken over from Germanic to Christian culture, appears on the right side as a single fish, but on the other side as two fish. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that beside the contemplative figure on the left side, the tree of life is located under the cross beam, thus here on earth, while the fruits and leaves of the tree of life on the right side have found their place above the cross beam, thus in heaven.

The two large coat of arms shields undoubtedly belong to the church-affiliated noble families, on the left probably the family Berka von Dauba, who today has the crossed double hooks in almost the same design as in our image, and on the right perhaps the family von Hafenburg with the ship and the boar. The two helmets above the coat of arms show only the difference that the helmet decoration on the right is missing.

If we are allowed to cautiously connect one or the other hypothesis to these features, it seems to us that the above question about the significance of the distinctly emphasized prayer postures of the two men leads to an important decision in the interpretation of the images, because through it, the clear internal connection of the man on the left under the cross with the Germanic-pagan god and belief world depicted on the other side of the stone is established!

Just as on the crucifixion image, the faces of the many figures crammed into the free field on the god image tell us nothing or almost nothing. In these rigid figures, we also search almost in vain for an expression of what the figure thinks, feels, or wants. Only one vivid sign of inner involvement, which acts almost as a hallmark of belonging to this unified assembly, catches the eye in all those who show themselves to us unaltered: that is the posture of the arms and hands.

In total, there are twelve figures, corresponding to the number of Æsir, as we have been taught. In six of the eight unaltered figures, we see the hands separated from each other, either at the same height on the chest or one hand lower – as with the man under the left cross beam, sharply distinguished from the Christian usage.

In the remaining two figures, a local examination might decide whether it is correct that they lay their hands crossed over their shoulders, as seems to be shown by one of the hands.

In any case, the posture of the arms and hands signifies an intentional characterization, from which the affiliation of the similarly characterized man under the cross to this society must be concluded! This confirms the correctness of our solution to the riddle of the pagan stone: The otherwise flawless and time-appropriate beautiful crucifixion image of the pagan stone originated towards the end of the Irish-Scottish influences, i.e., probably in the 9th, but at the latest in the 10th century, considering the location. For it still contains the conspicuously preached doctrine that one could seek and be accepted for salvation under the cross of Christ while retaining old pious faith habits. This tolerance later contradicted most strongly the doctrine that came to dominate in the church, which stated that the piety and morals stemming from the old faith were nothing but devil's work, from which one must turn away to be saved.

This was the decisive reason why one of the successors of the tolerant priest removed the image and had another one carved on the back of the same stone, which perhaps was damaged and became slightly smaller during removal, by a skilled craftsman of his community. It should clearly express that the improper posture of the arms was indeed a habit of the heathens, from which a Christian had renounced or must renounce.

The artist gave the heathen assembly various attributes for their characterization besides the posture of the arms: dragons and evil-looking creatures, an axe, a sun wheel, stars, and not to forget a horse, which was still considered an animal associated with divine worship due to the popular sacrificial meals – all this disordered and confused, as it was present in the mind of the craftsman. The inadequacy and unintended caricature certainly did not harm the intended purpose. The image probably had its effect on the community; it did not take long before the priest could observe to his satisfaction that no churchgoer held their hands separated on chest and belly anymore. This sequence of events seems timely and psychologically correct when we consider the external and internal adjustments that must have taken place during the conversion era.

It would be a rather unrewarding attempt to distinguish the individual Æsir and make a mythological harvest. We seem to be able to recognize Freya in the smallest of the three main figures due to her slightly longer clothing – all figures must be considered clothed – and her head and hair ornament. According to Bern-Leitmeritz1), a diadem can be recognized on the original, with a kind of royal crown over it in the style of the 9th century. This dating aligns with our view of the creation time, as well as all other features: technique, art, and lifestyle, and above all, the signs of religious history.

If the figure next to the dragon is not (as one of the old interpreters, who turned the dragon into a cow, claims) a bishop, but rather Freya, the predecessor of Mary (also = Ostera), then the two other figures next to her could be considered Wodan and Donar. The peculiar instrument in one of their hands is not an axe. We find this instead in the giant weapon, which stands tall on the left. It is a type of weapon also presented by Herman Wirth (Urschicht der Menschheit, plate 325, figures 10, 15, and 17) as a cultic form. Similarly, the arch is highlighted by Wirth as a cultic symbol of the celestial arch; what the beam inside it means, we do not know. Peculiar are the fish and bird heads placed here and there, one of which could also be a swearing hand with the thumb tucked in; furthermore, the radiant crown that might belong to a head, and the folds in the background.

In his final word, Bern, the most recent interpreter of the pagan stone, admits: "The content of the image, at least in its pagan part, is taken from Germanic paganism. Now one must assume that this artwork had to be understandable to the believers for whom it was intended as an effective and both encouraging and deterring educational tool. Consequently, one must also assume that this population previously held the same belief in these gods."

Unlike Bern, who did not yet know the support offered by the altered Christ image to an interpreter, we do not find in the pagan image any hand from the Christian world of ideas; but it is correct that the deterrent effect of this image should apply to the whole: away from the old faith in every respect! Through the image, those who were not yet fully committed were to be taught what they had not previously known at all: that they and their ancestors had made and worshipped men as gods. If the Arnauer people had indeed had images of gods in late Germanic times, which we do not know for all Germanic tribes, then even the less foolish would have at most meant it in reverse: they imagined divine powers and beings as people – just as there are images of angels, and great artists have even made images of God the Father, and as every representation of the figure of Christ is an act corresponding to the doctrine – not to mention the images of saints.

If someone with an eloquent tongue relentlessly and persistently accuses another of a guilt, then the person eventually believes it themselves, if they have a docile and obedient spirit!

Aside from violence and pressure, this educational tool, where the risk of intentional degradation of the old and exaggerated glorification of the new was hardly avoidable, was still tolerable compared to other persuasive arts of the time, which included the dissolution of faith in the miraculous power of holy relics. What concerns the religious field can only be recognized by us in one teaching method. It must limit itself, as the Irish-Scottish did, to adding what is truly or supposedly more valuable in a positive way and thus letting the old faith fade away naturally.

When new truths are added to old truths, liberating, uplifting, or promoting, and unite with them to form an internal unity, such a process is seen as progress and a blessing in all areas of knowledge and life. This process is also recognized and praised by the Christian church in the religious field, as long as it concerns the progress from the old testament of the Jewish people to the new testament. But it has become a disaster that, above all, the Roman church, in the interest of its external power and unity, has denounced such an addition to what is given as syncretism (religious mixing) and has pursued it with all means, provided that the addition was not to the old testament of the Jewish people but to the old testament of other peoples, especially the Germanic people.

It is not our task, but that of Christian theology, to draw lessons for the present and future from the historical errors of the church and thus prepare a way that offers liberation from once-established religious distress and an ascent to high goals of truth. It remains, of course, of significant importance that on the Germanic side there are no old coherent writings in which religious truths from the earliest times of humanity are preserved; for the oldest documents can and must be attributed a high value within reasonable limits. It is the value of immediacy, because they can be seen more than in later times as a component of an essentially (not culturally) emerged idea heritage. The lack on the Germanic side is contrasted by the presence of the oldest biblical scriptures, in which such an idea heritage can be researched. The traces discovered can only lead to where the primal sources of the human spirit are, whose existence is hard to doubt.

Our task relates to our ancestors, to the question of the paths in which the primal stream of the spirit has flowed through the vast timeframes within Germanic culture until the historical age. Every smallest ray of light is beneficial, coming to us from any side about the nature and development of the Germanic faith.

The Arnauer pagan stone brings contributions to the recognition of Germanic spirit and faith. It is not a small, nor a worthless realization, what we learn about the external gestures of reverence and the value placed on such distinctions during the conversion period. Far more important is the knowledge previously conveyed to us only through church history, now fortunately brought to us through several stone images – Elstertrebnitz and Arnau – of religious intermediate stages in the conversion era, which, although local, limited, and very short in time, their pleasing nature shows an "element" in the Germanic god belief, which provided the basis for a common monotheism in those times. This "element" might be the jewel, after which we seek in the final line, the most valuable gain from the work for the rediscovery of Germanic spirit and god belief.

Indo-Aryan Influences in German Landscape Art By University Professor Dr. Joseph Strzygowski, Vienna

The German landscape shows traces in nature and art that have hardly been investigated in context until now because we, captivated by the Mediterranean belief, have neglected such characteristic landmarks of the North. These are not large constructions or monuments executed in stone, but purely symbolic images chosen or executed as intangible testimonies of inner experiences, without any external display. Therefore, history (and art history in particular) has not found them worthy of attention. We Northerners have been born and raised blind for centuries, even ridiculing the individual salvation messages that want to remove our blindness with the historians of Mediterranean power and the philologists, if possible. Here are briefly placed some samples side by side. They will be discussed in more detail (with the necessary illustrations) in my work "Europe's Visual Arts within the Framework of the Earth's Circles" or a precursor "Traces of Indo-European Belief in Visual Art".

The art researcher, for example, gains the impression before the metal mirrors of Shofoin (Fig. 1) in the Japanese Nara that there must have been a Buddhist symbolic idea that spread with the Mahayana, i.e., from Iran to East Asia: the idea of four sacred mountains around a central one (Meru), all formed as rocks with the tree peaks surrounding the border, as curiously used by C. D. Friedrich in his Tetschener Altar in 1808 as a symbol of faith. Similarly, from Italian soil, that Iranian mosaic artist who decorated the cross-shaped mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna and depicted the good shepherd in a sacred landscape (Fig. 3) above the entrance inside. This is elaborated in the same way as Böcklin's "Isle of the Dead", which, according to his own statement, wanted to express solemnity. The fact is that the landscape (like writing) was originally sacred, not in the Mediterranean circle, of course, where power manifests itself understandably through the human figure, but in the North. From there, it can be traced back to the high European North.

A trace from the time of the Indo-European migrations has been preserved in a Kurgan of the Kuban, the one from Maikop, on a silver bowl (Fig. 2), which is dated to the 3rd millennium B.C. The landscape is upright and unfolded, forming at first glance a comprehensible image (without human figures). The "landscape" has no baseline, shows a strip of peaked mountains at the top, zigzagging one above the other, alternating with two prominent heights, from which "rivers" emanate and gather at a basin below; it also animates the spaces in between with animals: nothing is missing that belongs to the essence of what we call "landscape".

One occasionally examines the two preserved vessels as a whole from several perspectives. First, on both vessels, the animals walking one behind the other on the band stand out; then one notices on one vessel, at the top of the neck, the landscape itself and, upon closer inspection, discovers the two rivers, which, broadening from top to bottom, flow into the basin at the bottom of the vessel under a second row of smaller animals indicated as water by hatching. The animals stand everywhere in the air, also a bear and two fir trees that appear at the top between the mountains. You can find illustrations in my Asian works and elsewhere, e.g., in the writing "What does H. Wirth mean for Science?"1) Remarkably, the heavy gait of the animals with high insteps, their selection and arrangement: above around the vessel, lion, wild horse, and cattle march one behind the other to the left, while a second cattle turns towards the other to the right. Below, the four animals, this time lion, cattle (?), ibex, and pig, are lined up one behind the other without reversal to the left. Besides the bear between the fir trees, it is also characteristic that above the lion, a bird appears with a twig behind it, a popular, later Mazdaist symbol that has migrated from Iran to Italy and East Asia, as well as to India. As the Maikop bowl suggests, this motif with the landscape itself is probably of northern origin, i.e., already brought by the Indo-Aryans to Iran.

Above all, one thing is Indo-Aryan about these landscape designs of the Maikop vases: that they are explicitly "sacred". Just think of the significance of the animals walking one behind the other. They perform the "circumambulation", a custom still standing in awe in folk tradition when it comes to taking possession of something, such as a house or a field. The origin of this process may be sought in various ways; the art researcher seems to consider that interpretation essential, which seeks the starting point of such forms of worship in the high North. More on this later.

The alternating peaks and elevated mountains have been preserved in ancient Chinese art on clay vessels and bronze incense burners up to the time around the birth of Christ, and the mirrors mentioned above are only a late imitation. The connection with the circle is always noticeable, whether it is the ancient silver bowls of Maikop, the vessels of the Han dynasty, or the mirrors of the Tang dynasty. Such concepts migrate from Iran to Italy with the mosaics of the semi-domed apses, as long as they are filled with landscapes. In Germany, circular enclosures (closed fence, thorn or rose hedge) appear repeatedly in art of all kinds, similarly indicating paradise, as it appears in the Book of Hours of Chantilly. The idea of this circular paradise, combined with the fountain of life and the tree of life, traces back to the Indo-Aryan group of peoples and their neighbors, as even very cautious representatives of ethnology like Geramb admit today (e.g., Ber, f. Volkskunde in Berlin 1928, p.176). It may remain questionable whether the transformation depicted on the round bowls of Maikop, which seems to designate the landscape as sacred, has anything to do with the ancient Nordic concept of paradise.

I come back to the landscape with the four sacred mountains (Fig. 1), which often appear around a fifth one at the ends of an axis cross. One may interpret them individually as one wishes; in any case, this round type of landscape is also sacred and likely traces back to similar Indo-Aryan introductions in Asia or the high North. It is notable that traces of such concepts can still be found in German lands today. I provide only a single, previously overlooked fact as an example from Carinthia (Austria). There, in the area around St. Veit (north of Klagenfurt), four mountains lie on the axes around a rock (today Castle Hohenstein) in the center. On the evening before the second holiday after Easter, pilgrims from all over Carinthia gather in front of the church on the Helenenberg (Helen's Mountain) to perform the "Vierbergelauf" (Four Mountain Run). After the midnight mass, they proceed with torches first to the Ulrichsberg, then to the Gößeberg, which they ascend in the afternoon. In the evening, they continue to the Laurenziberg, covering a total of about 40 km. For more details on the customs observed individually, see I. Graber, Die Vierberger, Carinthia I, 1912.

H. Wirth has most thoroughly dealt with these questions in his two main works1); one can read there what can be said today about the interpretation.

For the art researcher, it is important that in such mountainous landscapes in visual art, the rock always plays the decisive role, the rock that symbolizes the North (cf. Schwieger in my "The North in the Visual Art of Western Europe"). A rock (often ending below with a jagged shore in a toothed pattern towards a water strip) repeatedly plays a crucial role in all landscape painting originating from Iran. It is originally the world mountain, on which paradise is thought to lie. Such rock landscapes play a decisive role in Indian paintings, early Christian mosaics, and then in Italian and early Netherlandish art. Even in Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks and in the German master of 1442 in Donaueschingen (Visit of Anthony to Paul), the jagged shore is transformed into a water basin enclosed by rocks, as already in the Evangelist mosaics of S. Vitale in Ravenna.

Let us first remain with the circle, in whose axes around a central rock four rocks rise, and with the transformation. The single mountain, crowned by a mighty structure, the world mountain with paradise, to which an overarching building also belongs, plays a significant role not only in the sacred writings of the Iranians and Indians.

In old German literature, such a mountain stands at the center of the imagination, the Mont Salvatge. We can now locate it with the Parsifal and the other Grail legends in Iran at the border between Persia and Afghanistan at the outlet of the Helmand River into Lake Hamun. Today the place is called Kuh-i-Khwaja, and since I first brought it into the realm of scientific research in my Armenian work in 1918, it has been the subject of serious investigations (see also my Asian work and my work on Asian miniature painting). It is likely to become a focal point for future research into the North and their religious concepts. For Iran and all of Asia, it was a major pilgrimage site. I do not have this holy mountain in mind here as it is still preserved today, but only in its legendary transformation, in which it fills the entire medieval literature. A temple structure plays a decisive role in this, which might be used to clarify the concept of transformation.

The art researcher is compelled to make an assumption about origins, which is plausible because he must apply it to a previously scarcely acknowledged and certainly not resolved question: the question of the meaning and origin of what German art historians, led by Dehio, like to call "central buildings"—those radial spatial arrangements so strikingly opposed to the directional architecture of the basilica, the leading form in Christian art history. It seems originally neither a house of God nor a meeting place, but rather the site of transformation: a dome, supported by pillars, marks the open center, which is circumambulated around the pillars. For example, one could read Sulpice Boisserée's attempt from a hundred years ago to recreate the description of the younger Titurel's Grail temple in an image; he faced justified opposition, although we only now know the circular layout from which one must start when attempting a reconstruction: not from the Gothic, as Boisserée assumed, but from ancient Armenian church architecture or even better from the Iranian fire temple. Compare also the description of the octagonal hall in Dechertalen, made of wood with eight pillars, as described in the Edda, and finally the countless building descriptions as found in Greek novels, but also in the Vedas and the Avesta of the structure worshipping the world mountain in paradise. I cannot go into all that here. It always involves, more or less misunderstood, a domed building with inserted pillars, best known to art historians from Italy, there always as a foreign body, thus in connection with G. Costanza near Rome, G. Vitale in Ravenna, or G. Lorenzo in Milan, to name only the most important of these peculiar early Christian domed buildings, which only now become understandable from Iran and Armenia, especially their original purpose, which was transformation. This transformation, together with the circle and the vertically striving rock and its buildings (cf. the newly discovered mosaics in the great mosque of Damascus), gives rise to considerations that can only be understood from the high North. Already the significance of the dawn in the Vedas, where it is not the usual known time of day but a thirty-day period, points this way. Only beyond the 66th parallel can such concepts have arisen broadly, where one longs for the first traces of light and warmth during the arctic winter and then experiences only one summer after the month of dawn, in which the sun does not rise at a point to traverse a semicircle to another point on the horizon, but rather circumnavigates the edge of the horizon.

This phenomenon, in my opinion, forms the starting point for all concepts in which the circle and transformation create an indispensable, thus ever-recurring basic form of building and decorating. The dome is crucial, where, as in the hall of Dechertalen, a Hvarenah landscape is depicted, then the pillars that surround the central space and separate it from the circumambulation path. Whether such buildings are round, octagonal, or square in pillar placement or independently enclosed on the outside does not matter.

The North, all of Eastern Europe, Armenia, and Iran, thus the area of what I call the Indo-Germanic main axis, are filled with such buildings, whether they be Norwegian stave churches of the Middle Ages or early Christian churches in Armenia or Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe, Slavic temples, or fire temples, stupas, or shrines. In any case, the radial buildings, which originally seem to have arisen from the purpose of transformation, prevail along the direction of Indo-Aryan migration, similarly persistent as in Western Europe, originating from the Mediterranean circle, the basilica, whose directional axis was originally probably no less related to the sun's course than the circle and transformation. However, this elongated form originated south of the 66th parallel.

In an issue of the journal "Mannus" in 1932, I pointed out traces in the burial mounds of Beven near Bremen, which suggest that such domed buildings with inserted pillars must have existed in wood during the time of the Indo-Aryan migrations in the North.

More frequently than the aforementioned four-mountain groups, there are locations with two mountains, which played a role in Nordic beliefs, flanking a valley or a bay. I first became aware of this landscape among the West Slavs; everywhere in their territory (see my "West Slavic Art") there are such dual-mountain faith sites, with one mountain representing good and the other representing evil. The same selection was then found very frequently in the Iranian landscape and finally also among the Germanic peoples. This kind of landscape duality is already announced in the Maikop landscape, firstly in the two elevated mountains amidst the pointed peaks, and secondly in the way one row of animals circles the mountains above, while the other circles the water below. Also, in the mosaic with the Good Shepherd in the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Ravenna (Fig. 3), the landscape is formed by two small mountains. Above all, this way of thinking about dual axes in construction persisted into the Middle Ages as a Nordic tradition, which Einhart examined more closely. It may originally be related to the concept of the world pillar, which played a decisive role in folk building and continually reappears in the symbolic ideas of the North (world axis).

Wherever Nordic influences can be presumed, height must be decisive; the world mountain, the world pillar, and similar concepts are characteristically marked from the outset – even in the representational art of later periods and especially in landscape. We have entirely forgotten to pay attention to such things, despite all Gothic influence, because we always approach contemplation from the perspective of antiquity and Italian art. The Northern viewpoint still appears to science as "Darwinist." Art historians never tire of extolling the great achievement of the Italians in "inventing" the depiction of space in its depth, until they ultimately conceived the so-called perspective as the final solution. Meanwhile, it remains unnoticed that the concept of depth, like the directional axis of the basilica, is only one way of perceiving space, while the other builds upwards. If so much of the art of ancient Asia and original Europe had not been lost, we would perceive the overlapping of elements, as it reigns in all landscapes from Maikop to Leonardo, as distinctly Nordic. Ultimately, one might think of the opposition of life attitudes in a vertical and horizontal sense.

If no one else does it, the art researcher must begin to systematically consider the landscape given by nature from various viewpoints in connection. China has provided the first decisive inspirations for this, where architecture and landscape are so intimately connected into a meaningful unity that the sense for such questions has been awakened from East Asia. Above all, it is the oldest symbolic and later representational or nature-derived independent landscape painting that increasingly brings such ideas to light.

Treasure of the Soil

Reverence and Research. From an "Instruction for the Leaders and Workers in the Examination of Ancient Burial Mounds and Fortified Graves," published almost two generations ago by the esteemed Colonel a. D. v. Cohausen, we take the following sentences:

"Burial mounds and hillforts are the oldest monuments of German antiquity that we possess; therefore, they should be kept sacred against any destruction. Where this cannot be avoided or where their examination can achieve a significant scientific result and make this immediately usable for the common good and the memory of ancient times through publication in writing and drawing, this purpose must at least be genuinely achieved.

It is sinful and unworthy to recklessly rummage through a burial mound, which has been sanctified for millennia and in a way entrusted to us, as the aim of a casual country outing, and thus spoil it. The examination of a burial mound is not such an entertaining activity to be completed on a fine summer's day, with the sound of laughter, and a few workers. Attention and perseverance are required from the one who leads it, as well as the ability to draw and measure, and the willingness to demand the publication of the results. For his briefcase or to satisfy the curiosity of a cheerful group of companions, the matter is too sacred." Mr. v. Cohausen then gives a detailed and careful instruction for the examination of ancient burial mounds and continues:

"But if someone cannot measure and draw as required here, we would like to ask them: 'Let the dead rest!'"

"Always keep in mind that one does not disturb the peace of the dead for oneself, not to satisfy one's own curiosity, indeed, one destroys a document, but it is done with the intention and means to make the knowledge and material for the understanding of ancient times accessible to a larger audience through the publication of the facts."

An Early Bronze Age Burial Mound near Boitzen, District of Zeven. By Hans Müller-Brauel, Zeven. (Excerpt from Journal 1, p. 24.) Accordingly, approximately 5 centimeters are to be considered for the plowing of this mound. (This suggests that the humus layer, including the grass turf, must have been very thin, which again matches observations I have made, indicating that the mounds were preferably built in areas where no forestation made construction difficult.)

The bedding of the corpse or the log coffin on particularly applied soft sand, or as here on natural soft sand, has become for me a determining indicator of the affiliation of certain graves to the people of the Corded Ware culture. Many urn graves from the later Bronze Age and the subsequent Germanic Iron Age are always arranged so that the bottom of the urn stands on the soft sand base, or that the empty space within the urn is filled with white sand, or that within the urn, the bones are surrounded with white sand. All such arranged graves belong, as far as my findings go, to this people of the Corded Ware culture or their descendants.

The indentation for the log coffin grave was clearly recognizable in the ground, measuring exactly 2 meters in length, 1 meter in width. Downward, the burial pit was rounded. Within the pit, a clear discoloration of about 1.80 meters in length by 70 centimeters in width was visible, clearly indicating a completely decomposed log coffin used for the burial. Below this dark gray discoloration zone, about 15 centimeters of pure soft sand was found, followed by gravelly sand with many small stones.

In the west of the grave site stood a single upright stone about 35 centimeters high, a grave stele. I have often observed such steles in graves of this type, particularly notable and characteristic in the completely similar grave field of Avensen-Everstor, Harburg/C. In more recent times, a strong wooden stake up to 20 centimeters thick, which also always stands in the west, takes the place of the stone stele.

The finds in the grave. The examination of the grave revealed two grave goods. Not quite in the center of the grave (if one were to lie down, precisely in the belt area) was a small bronze spiral ring of 3-4 millimeters thick. The simplest description is: a bronze wire wrapped twice around the thumb. At the east end of the grave, at the foot end, was a beautifully crafted knife made of light gray flint, 7.3 centimeters long with a maximum blade width of 3 centimeters. (Close to the outermost northern boundary of the grave, a 4-centimeter-long fragment of such a knife was also found. It was not in the grave, but 40 centimeters deeper than the original ground level... thus it is a piece that was accidentally lost during the burial.)

Spiral rings like this one have so far been considered hair rings. Here it was definitely located in the belt area, and so at the meeting of the Association for Northwest German Antiquity Research in Cuxhaven (Easter 1932), I expressed the suspicion that it might have been a belt holder of some kind. We might imagine a leather strap for securing it. It was countered that the position in the belt area does not rule out that it was a hair holder; we have cases where the severed head of the buried corpse was placed in the pit for unknown reasons, which could also be the case here. – I cannot agree with such views; the observation of the smallest details increasingly shows the respectful treatment of the old graves. Approximately in the middle between the stone slab and the west end of the grave, the investigator found a number of decorated pottery shards at two spots about 1 meter apart. They show the yellow-red hue of the Late Stone Age or Early Bronze Age. In my opinion, they belong to two or three different vessels, most fragments are old. As far as I can see, no shards from these vessels fit with any others... so we can regard these shards as a so-called shard offering, as often observed in Corded Ware burial mounds. The fact that these shards were placed in the west, behind the head of the buried individual, suggests a shard offering. In the same manner of layering, I found similar shards in graves of the same age in Wangersen, District of Stade, Theestorf, District of Zeven, and in the Leistuper Forest near Detmold.

The height of the mound above the grave was exactly 1.15 meters. The profile was as follows: measured from top to bottom, first the 35-centimeter-thick dark upper layer, which all our burial mounds have, then a hard layer of charcoal or blackened soil 5-7 centimeters thick, followed by a layer of stones 30 centimeters thick, and from there to the bottom of the mound loose, soft, yellow-grayish-white sand.

The Funeral Pyre. When the investigation of the actual grave was already completed, the mound still brought a surprise: just in front of the east end of the grave, Küds had left a part of the mound untouched during the excavation. When we finally removed this section, we found (starting 30 centimeters below the surface) a well-constructed stone setting about 1 meter in diameter and approximately 40 centimeters high. It was carefully covered on top with mostly thin flat stones, while upright stones stood on the sides or were stacked in two layers, forming a well-like shaft.

After exposing the entire structure, I expected to find an urn here, as is commonly found in many Corded Ware burial mounds as an additional burial (and as far as my observations go, only in burial mounds of the Corded Ware culture or in mounds built by their successors). But instead of an urn, this stone setting contained only charcoal. Clearly visible were long logs of oak wood, 70-80 centimeters long and 10-15 centimeters wide. The careful arrangement of these logs was clearly discernible.

What was this? It is the charcoal remains of a funeral pyre that once burned here during the funeral ceremonies, a "sacred" fire, whose remains were respected enough to be stored in such a careful manner. Thus, funeral pyres must have played a significant role in the burial rituals of our ancestors.

For this is not the first such find that I have been able to make in mounds associated with the Corded Ware settlers who came to us from Thuringia. The very important grave field of Theestorf showed such a carefully enclosed charcoal deposit at the outer edge of the actual inner mound, surrounded by a circle of wooden stakes. At the oak masters at Heeslingen in the district of Zeven, a much larger charcoal deposit was enclosed by a specially made wooden fence at the edge of the mound. In the "BrunnenBarg" at Heeslingen, in a mound at Wangersen, in burial mounds at Steddorf, Badenstedt, and Hepstedt (district of Zeven), as well as in the already mentioned mounds of Avensen-Everstor, such undoubtedly intentionally deposited, though not particularly buried, charcoal deposits were found. However, the most valuable observation in this regard was made by stud. rer. nat. Versten-Stade, who, on behalf of the Kiel Museum, excavated a large burial mound at Grunthal Tesperhude near Hamburg on the Elbe riverbank. The mound contained several graves dating from about 1800 to 1500 B.C. The oldest grave, whose bronze grave goods date to around 1800 B.C., covered an area of approximately 50 square meters. This large stone setting grave contained two log coffin graves, probably a mother with a child. It was overlain by vast amounts of burnt wood, often in recognizable double layers. Around the grave, there were 12 well-like stone settings, each about one meter high, in which strong fires had evidently once burned.

The investigation revealed that in these shafts, large wooden barrels were once placed during the burial, filled with birchwood tar or similar combustible materials, so that towering flames burned around the grave. Such a structure has never been found before. It is documented in the Kiel Museum with masterful photographic records. Here, the size and costliness of the entire setup provide a glimpse into the significant role that funeral pyres played in the early Bronze Age. These fires were not for the cremation of the body but were ceremonial fires, burned in a solemn manner to honor the deceased. The careful placement and particularly the covering of the remaining wood charcoal from the funeral pyre in the mound described here is the most meticulous I have ever encountered.

Chronologically, the burial mound dates to 2000-1900 B.C. and is probably to be regarded as a woman's grave.

Stone Chambers in the Wadden Sea. The "Flensburger Nachrichten" reports that the Sylter farmer Jens Wilungard from Reitum, near the long-known Middelmarschhoog, a chamber tomb of considerable dimensions, discovered a new small stone chamber under the erosion edge. The supporting stones are still in their original positions, as is a capstone. Sand and silt still fill the chamber, but a superficial excavation has already brought pottery fragments to light. Additionally, a previously unknown stone grave was found far out in the Wadden Sea. Although the capstones are considerably displaced, likely due to ice, the structure of the burial chamber is still clearly recognizable. Unfortunately, the site is visible for only about an hour at low tide.

The Book Scale

Pehler, Wilhelm, The Homeland Museum in the German-speaking Area as a Mirror of German Culture. Wünsdorf:

F. Lehmann's Verlag, 1927. (158 pages, 94 illustrations, 51 plates.) 80. Linen, 14 RM.

"Homeland is the ground on which we have grown up and where our dead rest; homeland is the air that we and our children breathe; homeland is the house in which we were born and the church in which we were baptized. Homeland is the community of people among whom we live; homeland is the history of our ancestors with their work and struggles; and just as much, homeland is the future of the people to whom we belong and to whom we are called to serve. Therefore, to have a homeland means not only knowledge but also duty and action; hence, to have a homeland means not only to praise its beauty and significance but also to love it and live for its beauty and significance."

This passage from the introduction clearly shows the task set for the homeland museum: to maintain and awaken the connection with the soil, this connectedness that has been destroyed by the mechanistic civilization of the big city. The refocusing of our people on their own essence and its value is fortunately increasing more and more, and with that, the strengthening of homeland museums is also growing. A survey of the "List of Homeland Museums in the German-speaking Area" shows that many new foundations have already been established. These apprentices and journeymen need a master, and this master has been given to them with the work of the deserving director of the Patriotic Museum of the City of Hanover. It first deals with the goal and task of the homeland museums, the duties of the various authorities, the participation of the population, and the main forms of the homeland museum. Then follow the two practically most significant main sections, "Collecting" (p. 33/79) and "Exhibition in the Museum". What should be collected, how it should be done, is particularly important to know, but what good are treasures if one cannot enjoy them? The exhibition should be purposeful, impressive, and enjoyable. The visit to a modern museum is no longer a strenuous educational obligation; it brings joy and motivation. How peacefully can one view the collections today in the former Katharinenkloster in Stralsund, what beautiful compilations the Patriotic Museum in Hanover and the corresponding department of the Hallesche Landes-Anstalt have, which has also particularly distinguished itself by reviving old customs anew, "to prepare an understanding for the city dwellers for the imperishably rich treasure of still living customs and traditions". The remaining sections deal with the promotion of popular education through the homeland museum, the homeland museum in the service of science, museum and monument preservation, revival of local traditions, cooperation of several museums. The aforementioned list covers 32 pages. The picture plates are pleasantly diverse and beautifully printed. Prehistory is also well represented in them. We hope that the book will have a lasting effect.

To one of the very youngest homeland museums, the one in Horn i. L., whose rooms in the castle were inaugurated last autumn, the Association of Friends of German Prehistory has presented Pehler's book as a godparent gift.

Suffert. Wirth, Herman, The Sacred Origin of Humanity. Issue 7, Text pp. 289-336, Notes pp. 33-48, Plates 271-302. Large 4to. Verlag Rochler & Ume- Iang, Leipzig 1932. (Excerpt from issue 1.) A hymn to the ancient Sumerian god Enlil, whose attributes were later partly adopted by the Babylonian Shamash, has been preserved in Sumerian and Assyrian versions from the 1st and 3rd (!) millennium B.C.; it says: "You move the gates of heaven, you draw the bolt of heaven. You cut through the closure of heaven, you lift out the lock of heaven." A still used Advent song in both Christian denominations today reads in my version: "O Savior, tear open the heavens; come down, come down from heaven; tear open the door and gate of heaven; tear off the lock and bolt!" Another bilingual hymn, adapted to the Babylonian conception, reads similarly: "Great hero, when you emerge from the midst of the shining heavens, Mighty hero Shamash, when you emerge from the midst of the shining heavens, When you place the key post in the lock of the shining heavens, When you draw the bolt of the radiant heavens, When you open the great door of the shining heavens, You move aside the noble gate of the shining heavens, Then Anu and Bel pay homage to you" (Wirth, p. 322).

The spiritually extraordinary aspect of these connections is not so much the fact that a hymn that was alive in the Near East five thousand years ago continues to live on in the North without any recognizable traditional connection, but rather the following: a religious idea that originated in the North wanders to the East and is brought back to life in its Nordic place of origin, long after its founding race has vanished and decayed, and after the written tradition, buried under desert sand, has only been rescued from oblivion by the re-conquering and exploring northern peoples. And very appropriately, the song originally formed for the annual advent, reinterpreted in the Orient to the course of the day, has been related back to the annual advent in the North: and only through the Nordic origin can it be explained that we find our ancient winter experience expressed in these songs in a religiously satisfying way. The savior reborn from the earth, the "mannus terra editus" mentioned by Tacitus, appears in the same song: "O earth, break out, break out, O earth, so that mountain and valley may become green; O earth, bring forth this little flower, the Savior springs from the earth (terra editus!)"; the further verses clearly refer back to the notion of the sun rising again after the night of the year: "O come, O come from heaven's hall (when you come forth from the midst of the shining heavens)... O sun, rise up! without your light there will be darkness without end." Thus, in the Indian tradition, "Mother Earth" is the "birthplace of Agni," the "son of God and light of the world," of whom it is said in the Rigveda (X, 18): "Open up, earth... As a mother wraps her son with the robe, so cover him, Earth." (Wirth, p. 379.)

Some additional notes may supplement Wirth's explanations. The ram that appears in the Nordic stave calendar at the "midsummer pole," whose fleece is carried on a cross-shaped T-pole by the Circassians on Elias Day, has its counterpart in the Lombard custom reported by Paulus: a goat's hide was hung on a pole, and the riders rushing by aimed to strike the hide and pole with a backward-thrown lance. It seems that the combination with the spear might bring out the formulaic connection of the midsummer pole suggested by Wirth (ibid.). Caesarius of Heisterbach also reports a summer celebration in which a garlanded ram plays the main role (12th century). The boar that kills the sun in the mountains or forest is part of the ancient symbolism of the sun sinking between the mountains; mythologized in the ancient story of Adonis, who is killed by a boar during a hunt in the forest, and in the remarkably similar Siegfried saga; here, however, the death by the boar is only preserved in the form of a preceding nightmare of Kriemhild, while the murder in the "Odenwald" at the "spring" shows very old mythical features.

Regarding the motif of the closing mountains (Plazomenoi, Huitberg), reference should be made to the legend of the smith in the enchanted mountain, who has his heel chopped off when he leaves the mountain (Wirth, p. 326). This motif reappears in the Algonquin myth of the culture hero, who must fetch the water of life through a narrow passage guarded by two enormous dogs. (Wirth, p. 331f.) Similarly, in Grimm's fairy tale of the "Water of Life," the hero passes through a gate guarded by two lions (the oriental form of the dog).

Eremita. Wirth, Herman, The Sacred Origin of Humanity. Issue 8: Text pp. 337-400, Text illustrations 59-69, Plates 303 to 334. Leipzig: Koehler & Amelang 1932. Large 4to.

The 12th main section (continuing from Issue 7) brings another important motif, the "Heavenly Ladder." The spread and history of this motif once again demonstrate with extraordinary clarity the age of religious imagery that we have adopted and passed on as seemingly incomprehensible. The motif of the Heavenly Ladder, known to us biblically from Jacob's dream, can be traced conceptually and linguistically in the symbolism of the "stave calendar" (Wirth, p. 333f.). If "tam" or "tim" according to Wirth's assumption is connected with "column," "pillar," but also "frame," alongside "ram" (with reference to the carrying beam in "frames"), then this "frame" may semantically correspond with the "wheel" or the "circle," which we have already identified as symbols of the completed yearly cycle and thus the winter solstice. Is the "ram" as a beam the central part of this "frame," rising from the point of "completion" at the winter solstice to the point of the year's midpoint at the summer solstice? This would lead to surprising, though initially hypothetical, linguistic equations. For then, the "ram" as the winter solstice or wintertime would correspond to "rim"... "frost" as the manifestation of this wintertime, with "rim" being an old variant form of "rime," meaning winter frost.

Whether a linguistic and conceptual bridge can be established from "Reif" in the other meaning as "hoarfrost" or "frost," remains to be seen; it should be noted, however, that the vowel here is different from there (old "ai" instead of "i"). Wirth's assumption is acceptable that the oldest stave was the tree trunk provided with notches or branches, the climbing tree, which Wirth vividly demonstrates with a linguistic series ranging from the Greek "stoicheion" (sundial rod), "path of the shadow of the gnomon," "sequence of letters," to the Old High German "stega," and the English "score."

I would like to add that in the wheel clock, the "escape wheel" is that wheel which directly engages with the escapement; originally, it undoubtedly meant the "wheel provided with notches," the archetype of the gear: here, the regularly divided circle, the "stoicheion," still appears directly. In Samoyed cults, the world tree provided with notches, a birch trunk with dense foliage, is still in use; it has 9 or 7 notches, and the sky god is therefore called the "seven-notched" (Wirth, p. 334f.). Here, mythology has preserved an ancient image with wonderful clarity; in the works of Hadewijch (ed. by Platmann, Hanover 1923, pp. 75f.), the seer comes to the middle of seven trees, "which had their roots upwards and the top directed downwards." This is the sacred tree altar with the seventh tree in the middle; this corresponds to the "world tree," which is subject to the law of inversion; in the middle of this "circle" also sits the "Deus sex arbores"; but the "angel" says to the seer, "Master, you who take this tree from the beginning to the end to the deep root of the incomprehensible God, understand how this is the path of the beginners to the perseverance of the perfected." The ancient annual mystery is here revived as the mystery of the inner life on a purely biological basis.

The same idea is preserved in the Egyptian tradition of the "hbpw-t," the "ladder trees of Amon-Ra" (Wirth, p. 338), in connection with the solar mystery: "N. N. descends by the hbpw-t after ascending the ladder" (ibid.). The ladder is found in medieval devotional books as an allegorical image for the ascent in virtues, about which I will report elsewhere. Incidentally, the lion-headed Egyptian "way-opener" (Wirth, p. 339) exactly corresponds to the dog-headed Hecate as the "goddess of paths (ephodos)" in the Orphic hymn.

Once again, in Christian tradition, we find the symbolism of the heavenly ladder and related diagrams typically transferred to the Christian God: it concerns the ancient cross mysticism, which here can be traced back to the annual cross (|) and related forms. The old hymn "Crux ave benedicta" contains several of these images, transferred to the cross of Christ, which in early Christianity in Germany was also intertwined with ancient "pagan" ideas of the world tree. In the German version of the song of the "most holy cross," it says: "You are the true ladder, on which we rise to God, the true life" - ... nothing else than what lay at the foundation of the entangled shamanic cult of the Samoyeds with the "seven-notched" God as a bright primordial figure. Another verse reads: "You are the strong bridge (A A?), which will save everyone from the dangers of the abyss"; also, the very old anchor symbol as a variation of the annual cycle symbolism reappears: "You are the mighty anchor (t), on which we never trust in vain in the storm of life." One must concede to Wirth at least this one thing: he has made extraordinarily tangible and perceptible for the first time what indestructible life dwells in what was once a primordial religious experience; and why we, in these images of an old religion handed down to us from outside, still feel the primordial kinship, and he has made this feeling a "recognition."

The 13th main chapter deals extensively with the development history of the winter solstice, particularly the midnight snake; a conceptual realm that reaches into our own mythological world as the dragon myth.

The Dragon Stone and the Dragon Cave as winter solstice cult sites are still before our eyes at the Externsteine; their cosmic archetype, the world ocean, the water cave of the annual night, is thoroughly investigated. It is the apsu of the oriental, the abyssos of the Greek tradition, and the abyss of mystical syncretism. The god who splits the rock and slays the dragon can be traced from Indra to Thor and into our hero sagas. We must limit ourselves here to the indication and what has been previously said in connection with the "Wurm sage" and the Trojan games. The serpent, originally the embodiment of the winter annual arc, finally becomes the "soul animal" itself, as the toad or, in later tradition, the wheel.

The wolf, too, the underworld animal, might have originally undergone this transformation as the werewolf. Thus, the human in the dragon's maw is a widespread image motif: Jason, who emerges from the dragon's maw on an Attic vase, stands next to the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, who holds a child in its mouth (p. 374); it should be noted that this motif reappears in medieval sculptures (Freising Column, etc.) and perhaps passed into the hero saga from here, though it may just as well be original. Specifically, the Zagreus born from the egg (Wirth, p. 381) is to be placed alongside the Protogonos of the Orphic hymn, who also emerged from the egg, the world egg (C). The "seal of life," which according to Sumerian tradition (Wirth, p. 384) the god holds before his face to defeat the great serpent, seems to be the symbol of the year or world -X or -O; for according to the Orphic hymn, Apollo Helios holds the world-forming seal, and in an old Russian hymn, Elias (Ilja!) has the great world seal in custody. Can one see in this a distant memory of the Stone Age when the stamp (seal) imprinted the sign of "life" or "world" into the vessel of life water to free the dead from the serpent's entanglement? As an important cultic device, this "seal" may have easily gained mythological significance.

The 14th main chapter deals with the fish, a curious counterpart to the serpent, which has become particularly well-known and enduring through its adoption into early Christian symbolism. Wirth explains the transition from the "serpent" to the "fish" with the intermediate link of the "serpent-fish" (Naga); to the mythological reasoning given there (p. 390), it should be added that in Grimm's fairy tale, the king eats the white serpent to gain foresight; in the tale of "The Fisherman and His Wife," it is the fish itself that has the gift of prophecy and transformation. Accordingly, the two annual serpents have their counterparts in the two annual fishes, as such preserved in the cult cave of La Pileta (in the star sign still today); also, Proteus, who transforms into a fish to prophesy, belongs here. The main chapter on the fish extends over two pages into the 9th issue. We will continue to report. Eremita.

Journal Review

On the Origin and Development of the Germans

Otto Rede, The Original Population of Northern Germany. "Die Sonne," Armanenverlag, Leipzig, 9th year, issue 10. Based on the investigation of skeletal remains from the Priepert Lake (Mark Brandenburg), whose affiliation to the early Middle Neolithic period is confirmed by the findings, as well as further skeletal finds from Silesia and the Rhineland, it is shown that the Nordic race was already predominant in northern Central Europe at that time, and there is no reason to assume a different original population. The population of southern Germany, on the other hand, appears to have arisen from a mixture of the Nordic race with a smaller, round-headed race that immigrated via the Danube, presumably of Eastern origin, as the Ofnet finds already indicate.

Paul Kretschmer, The Prehistory of the Germans and the Germanic Sound Shift. Wiener Prähistorische Zeitschrift, 19th year, 1932. The Germanic sound shift has been partially attributed by research to the influences of a different original population that the Germans supposedly encountered upon their immigration into Central and Northern Europe. The author demonstrates that these explanations are entirely misguided, and that instead, the sound shifts are internal linguistic phenomena that can also be observed elsewhere, and that precisely the "non-originality" of Germanic proves its great antiquity and its indigenous nature.

W. Peisker, The Jutish Single Grave Culture, Mannus 24, 1-3. The Jutish Single Grave Culture, which is just as significant for the emergence of the Germans as the Megalithic Culture, is occasionally derived from the Thuringian Corded Ware culture. Opposing this is the fact that the oldest forms of the Jutish weapons and ceramics can likely be traced back to Central Germany, while on the other hand, the local development from the Funnelbeaker culture offers itself naturally and logically. There must have been a great similarity between the Megalithic people and the single grave population; after all, single graves with megalithic content occur just as the single grave culture is sometimes found in megalithic graves. A common origin is therefore not to be dismissed, rather, they are closely related peoples, one of which adopted the megalithic grave concept, while the other remained with the ancient tradition of the single grave. In economic terms as well, the same tendency towards conservatism on the one hand and progress on the other is evident.

Hermann Schroeder, The Nordic Culture in Its Relations to the Linear Pottery Culture. Nachrichten aus Niedersachsens Urgeschichte, No. 6, 1932. Based on an in-depth study of the Linear Pottery groups of Southeast Europe, the author shows that the first Nordic culture, with which the Neolithic Linear Pottery people in Central Europe had to contend, is to be found in the Central German Tiefstichkultur. He then attempts to demonstrate that the cultural center for Neolithic development in northern Central Europe lay here.

Germanic Migration Routes and Tribal Cultures

Martin Jahn, The Migration Route of the Cimbri, Teutons, and Vandals. Mannus 24, 1-3. Contrary to the previous common opinion that the Cimbri and Teutons took their route by land through Schleswig-Holstein and up the Elbe, significant reasons arise from the population history of these regions. Much more, due to the seafaring character of these tribes, it is much more appropriate that they left their old homeland in northern Jutland by sea. Recent research has meanwhile proven that the Vandals reached their southeastern Germanic empire by sea through the Oder estuary and then upstream. The greatest cultural conformity between Lower Silesia and the surrounding areas and northern Jutland’s Vendsyssel has made the origin of the Vandals from northern Jutland a certainty. Already in this homeland, the Cimbri, Teutons, and Vandals are closely linked; thus, the migration of the Cimbri and Teutons appears as the vanguard of this tribal movement. They were defeated by the Bojers and moved on to the south in their heroic downfall. The broad front of the Vandals, however, drove out the Bojers, and the migration came to a halt as they found enough land in the Oder region to meet their needs. Here the Vandal kingdom arose, only to face a similar fate 500 years later as their tribal kin from the Nordic homeland.

Ernst Petersen, On the Earliest Migrations of the Western Germans. Mannus 24, 1-3. Cultural finds testify that as early as the 2nd century B.C., Western Germans were also involved in the Germanic expansion into Southeastern Europe. Their origin, based on the character of the finds, can be traced to northern Brandenburg and the adjoining parts of Pomerania.

W. Rönig, Jutland, Zerbst-West Prussia. Ibid. The excavation of a dwelling site on the Alapperberg near Zerbst revealed, alongside other finds indicating close relations to the Vandal-Burgundian culture at the Vistula bend, a vessel fragment with a ship drawing and runes that spell the word "Stit." This suggests that not only the place name Zerbst (Serewis-Stirewis), but also the cultural findings and the inscription indicate that Stirans had settled here.

Heinz Amberger, On the Origin and Spread of the Rhine Mixed Culture of the Iron Age, Mannus 24, 1-3. Tradition reports that the Treveri were a people with Celtic culture and language, but of Germanic descent. Archaeological investigation of the Rhine area shows that at the end of the Bronze Age, Germans lived north of the Lippe, while Celts were sparsely settled to the south. This Celtic population increased during the early Hallstatt period, in the 7th century B.C., but a significant Germanic migration began, resulting in a Celtic-Germanic mixed population. Under the pressure of the Germans, they pushed further south to the Middle Rhine, where they came entirely under Celtic cultural influence during the La Tène period. The dual character of these tribes is thus based less on Germanic blood loss and more on complete cultural assimilation.

On Settlement Research

Hermann Strunk, Place Names and Prehistory. Mitpreußische Forschungen, Verlag Gräfe & Unzer, Königsberg i. Pr., 9th year, 1932. The author shows the frequent coincidence of peculiar old place names and prehistoric sites and points out that this source of tradition can also be made useful as a guide for archaeological research.

F. Rütiner and A. Steeges, Studies on the Settlement History of the Lower Rhine Lowlands. Rheinische Vierteljahrsblätter, Verlag Röhrscheid-Bonn, year 2, issue 4. The investigation shows that the "heim" names in the Lower Rhine area go back to Frankish single farms. The choice of settlement sites indicates that both arable farming and livestock breeding were the basis of the economy, while completely different considerations can be observed in the earlier Roman settlements.

Walter Schmid-Graz, Noreia. Mannus 24, 1-3. During the excavation of Noreia (St. Margarethen near Neumarkt in Styria), besides very imposing fortifications and numerous settlement sites, the royal house and a sanctuary (a round building with an altar, sacrificial pit, and cult post) could be uncovered. Not far from Noreia, the traces of the Cimbri camp were also excavated.

Erich Gierach, Laugaricio. Wiener prähistorische Zeitschrift, 19th year, 1932. At the outskirts of Trenčín on the road to Teplice, there is a Roman inscription from the Marcomannic Wars "Victoriae Augustorum exercitus, qui Laugaricione sedit." Thus, it contains the oldest and only Germanic place name in situ. The name Laugaricio is traceable to the personal name Laugarid.

Bruno Schild, Elbing, Benkenstein, and Meislatein. A New Contribution to Truso Research. Mannus 24, 1-3. What Haithabu means for the Northwest and Vineta for Pomerania, Truso signifies for the Northeast of Germany, the rich trading place that the Viking Wulfstan reported. Numerous cultural finds and factual considerations suggest that the old trading place, which was easily accessible by ship, is much more likely to be located in the city area of Elbing rather than further inland.

Hertha Schemmel.

Association News

Meeting in Pyrmont. There has been a change in the schedule of events: the tours of the Externsteine and in Osterholz will not take place after the meeting, as was previously announced in the January issue, but beforehand, specifically on the Tuesday after Pentecost (June 6), starting at 8:30 AM. Subsequently, the second and third day will be in Pyrmont (Stellenberg, Pyrmonter Sprudel, Heilingsburg, Kilianskirche Lügde, Altencieder). Participation ticket 4 RM (Single day 1.50). Registrations should be made as early as possible to Lieutenant Colonel a. D. Play, Detmold, Bandelstr. 7 (Postcode Hannover 65278). The exact daily schedule will be announced in the March issue.

Sure, here is the translation:

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The Bremen local group (Contact: C. Ritter, Stresemannstr. 10) of the Friends of German Prehistory reports that the lectures held so far (see "Germanien," issue 1) have been very well received. Interest in these lectures is growing in ever wider circles, and the promotion of the association and the journal is progressing successfully. The discussions following the lectures are lively, and the Bremen major press provides noteworthy reports. The well-known events at the "Böttcherstraße" (Consul General Dr. Roselius) support the efforts of the local group with understanding. For the summer period, monthly museum visits and scientific excursions are planned.

The Essen local group of the Friends of German Prehistory reports on the founding meeting on December 10, 1932:

On December 10, 1932, Mr. Studienrat Kiden invited a circle of friends of our cause to the "Vereinshaus" at the main train station in Essen for the founding of the local group already announced in issue 1, 1933. The attendance met expectations. At the unanimous request of the attendees, a local association of the "Friends of German Prehistory" was formed under the leadership of Mr. Studienrat Paul Kiden, Kortumstr. 35. The office of secretary was taken over by Mr. Rector Otto Kleinmann, Weststr. 3, and the office of speaker by Mr. Teacher Otto Domann, Bismarckstr. 65. It was decided to levy a small annual contribution and to facilitate access to the journal for those who cannot afford it alone. To this end, small groups of 2 to 6 members will be formed, in which the journal will circulate. Meetings with lectures will be held on the third Thursday of odd-numbered months. The location of these regular meetings will be announced shortly. The establishment of a library is planned.

For the next meeting, Mr. Studienrat Dr. Schuhmacher, Essen, has promised a lecture: "Plains of Germanic Prehistory," impressions from an inspection under the guidance of Director Teudt and his collaborators.

On February 11 at 8 PM, Director Teudt will speak at the "Vereinshaus" hotel (directly at the main train station) about: "Images from Germanic Prehistory." The lecture will take into account listeners who are not yet familiar with the Teudt observations but will offer substantially new content compared to what Teudt presented two years ago at the "Historical Society for City and Diocese of Essen." We invite all friends from Essen and the Ruhr area to attend the lecture, which will be supported by rich visual material. For information, contact Studienrat Kiden, Essen, Kortumstr. 35. Otto Kleinmann.

The Hagen local group of the Friends of German Prehistory will hold its next meeting on Saturday, February 4, at 5:30 PM at the Hagener Hof (Hugo Preuß-Str. 14). Pastor Prein (Hohenlimburg) will speak about "Historical Field Names in the Light of Westphalian Legends," and Teacher Pielhau (Linderhausen) will speak about "Observations on Field Names and Ancient Iron Smelting in Linderhausen." Followed by a discussion. Out-of-town visitors should consider cheap return tickets for Sunday! (Inquiries to Engineer Fr. Rottmann, Hagen, Eppenhauser Str. 31).

The local group Osnabrück of the Friends of German Prehistory was very active last year. Particularly impressive was the third hike of the year, dedicated to the monuments in the parish of Belm, under the leadership of teacher Mesterfeld from Haltern (well-remembered by many friends for his lecture at the Osnabrück meeting!). First, the Catholic church in Belm and the Spellbrink near the Bollerbe homestead Dreyer in Vehrte were visited (see "Germanien," 3rd series, pp. 3345). In the magnificent beech forests of the Klein-Haltern area, the extensive walls made of boulders attracted attention. According to one tradition, the many blocks were dragged together by eight blind stallions; according to another, it was only three blind horses guided by a one-eyed driver. The hike continued from the Vollerbe Wehrpohl into the moor, which gave its name to the Vollerbe homesteads Mehrpohl in Haltern, Rittmann in Vehrte (1540 Ritmer, 1687 Ritmar: "reed") and the Meerwelle at the Brörmann homestead in Klein-Haltern. Into this once quite impassable moor extends a peninsula-like area, where, according to local place names (e.g., Stiepeltamy, probably from Stapelgerichtssäule), the entire public life of the Haltern community likely took place during pagan times. The forest of the Königshügel, where according to folklore the devil once split the "sacrificial stone" with a bread knife, served the cultic activities. Until the land division (1830), a tenacious memory of the old sacrificial meal persisted: an annual festival took place there in the open air, for which the manor house Astrup had to provide a ham of 9 pounds and a black bread of 24 pounds, and the farmer Michaus in Haltern a barrel of beer and every 12 years an additional one as a wine purchase. Despite the unfriendly weather, about 100 participants gathered for the hike. This extraordinarily high participation is a gratifying proof of how the number of responsible men and women who are united in their commitment to illuminating German heritage and its history is growing, reaching far into the present times for the good!

As we learned just before the editorial deadline, a lecture by museum director Dr. Karl Rademacher from Cologne is planned for February 4: "Burial Customs of a Germanic Queen (Oseberg find) and Early Germanic Art." (Inquiries to Dr. Aringel, Osnabrück, Herrenteichstr. 1.)

Society for Germanic Prehistory and Early History (formerly Herman Wirth Society, Berlin). After the highly acclaimed lectures by Wilhelm Teudt on "Images from Germanic Prehistory" and Wolfgang Schöningh on "Proto-Norse Cultic Traditions in Germanic Catholicism," Dr. J. v. Leers spoke on January 24 about "The Proto-Norse Belief according to Herman Wirth." The following lectures will follow:

February 9: Prof. Dr. von Massow (Pergamon Museum) "Germania and Rome in the Moselle Region." (With slides.)

February 20: University Professor Dr. Ernst Bergmann, Leipzig, "German-Nordic Religiosity in Its Historical Development."

March 2: Irma Strunz-Bahrgehr, Münden, "Gods and Heroes Poems from the Edda."

March 15: Prof. Dr. Alfred Baeumler, Dresden, "Art and Prehistory."

March 28: Dr. Siegfried Radner, "Prehistory and Cultural Consciousness of the Present." (With slides.)

April 6: Prof. Dr. Adolf Helbig, "The Scientific Value of German Folk Customs."

The lectures will take place in the large conference hall of the Higher Administrative Court in Berlin-Charlottenburg, Hardenbergstr. 31, at 8 PM.

All local group leaders are urgently requested to regularly and promptly send reports and notices about past or upcoming events to "Germanien, Berlin Editorial Office, Berlin-Südwest, Uhlandstr. 1611" so that our issues can provide a comprehensive picture of local group activities throughout the Reich, and ensure that all local group members are continuously and thoroughly informed about local group work through our issues. As our issues are published at the beginning of the month, it is desired that related manuscripts be submitted to the editorial office by the 10th of the preceding month at the latest.