Re: [tied] Re: the New Age Irmin

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From: x99lynx@...

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, May 17, 2002 7:05 PM

Subject: [tied] Re: the New Age Irmin

> Based on what I could find on the web, the word "irminsul" from early on consistently refered to a pillar or column with an image on top, when it is described in detail at all. This makes it a dead ringer for a Roman/Greek herma.

 

The word <su:l> meant 'post, stake, pillar', so, literally, <irmin-su:l> was perhaps no more than 'huge post'. There is no _consistent_ reference to images on top. The Germani had no better word for things like 'column', so they employed <irminsu:l> to render Latin <columna>, including e.g. that of Simon the Stylite. They also used the word for other tall structures like <pyramides> and <colossi>, and surely for some kinds of <hermae>; incidentally, a herma was originally any kind of boundary mark, milestone or signpost, even a heap of stones, though square blocks of stone supporting a bust of Hermes were a particularly popular form of Athenian hermae.

 

> There's really no reason to think that the word referred to anything else, except among members of the Mystic Order of the The Magnanimous Tree.  The fact that is was wood would be no surprise to any archaeologists, since the Saxons (despite their name) were not building with much stone at the time.

 

I understand you are expressing the opinion of the Hermetic Hermandad of Hermundurian Hermae ;-).

> Rudolf's description does not contradict that.  <universalis> in any of the annals is rarely if ever a reference to the Universe or Cosmos or other mysterious stuff. It most often means accessible or belonging to everyone - just like "catholic" - being opposite of <singuli> or <proprius> ("nihil... proprium aut universale").  "quasi sustinens omnia" can be read as nothing more than "as if providing for all people" (e.g.,"si qua spes reliqua est, quae fortium civium mentes cogitationesque sustentet", "conscientia sustentor", "Caesaris summa in omnis,... nunc eius adflictis fortunis universa sustinet.")

 

Here's what Rudolf writes: <Truncum quoque ligni non parvae magnitudinis in altum erectum sub divo colebant, patria eum lingua Irminsul appellantes, quod Latine dicitur universalis columna, quasi sustinens omnia.> Translatio: "They also worshipped the trunk of a tree of no small size, set upright under the open sky, calling it in their country's language the Irminsul, which translates into Latin as 'universal pillar', as if supporting everything." Note, Steve, that <quasi sustinens omnia> _can't_ be read "providing for all people", since "all people" would be <omnes> in Latin -- a small but significant nuance.

> Of course, pillars that support the sky are a dime a dozen in mythology (that is what the "pillars of Hercules" are sometimes, but most times herculae are just one form of hermae. But perhaps Nut the Egyptian god and Irmin/Wodan's world tree and Atlas and his pillars are all just "representations" of the pillar that must have misfunctioned in Atlantis?).

 

Personally, I don't worship trees, not even big ones. However, as you know very well, some ancient peoples had their mythical "world-trees". No need to go to Atlantis for inspiration; the world-tree motif was certainly present in Germanic mythology.

 

> Rudolf's folk etymology here, aside from creating some kind of "para-god" in later minds, simply confused the herma/Hermes/erma pillar word with the (H)ermo:n-/irmin/erma concept word - "unbounded, with free-access, not-closed-out."  Rudolf, unlike most other commentators, probably did not have known that hermaes were pillars.

 

Rudolf of Fulda was one of the most distinguished scholars of his time, a student of Rhabanus Maurus and a younger colleague of Eginhard (Charlemagne's biographer), as well as Eginhard's successor as editor of the Annales Fuldenses. He was also in charge of the school at Fulda after Rhabanus, and later became the chaplain and a personal friend of Ludwig the Pious -- a position he owed to his extraordinary learning. Rudolf was a much greater erudite and a far more accomplished scholar than Widukind of Corvey. He wrote his description of the Saxon Irminsul in the 860s, just a few decades after Charlemagne's Saxon campaigns, when some first-hand informants were still available -- he himself was probably in his sixties at that time. (Widukind wrote his Res Gestae Saxonicae more than a century later.) The Translatio Sancti Alexandri, from which the Irminsul passage comes, was begun at the request of Waltbraht, whose grandfather was Widukind -- the Saxon rebel, not the historian. As regards folk-etymologising and getting confused, it seems to me, Steve, that thou behold'st a mote in Rudolf's eye but considerest not an irminsul in thine own ;-).

 

Piotr

 

PS One of Rudolf's students was Ermenric, abbot of Elwangen, another example of "ermenonymy".