To some an ancient Germanic sun-sanctuary, to others a Christian place of pilgrimage – the Externsteine in the Teutoburg Forest are above all a giant screen for projection. A sober look at the evidence resolves the quarrel surprisingly clearly.
The Externsteine near Horn-Bad Meinberg in Lippe are a natural row of tall sandstone rocks – shaped by nature, not raised by human hands. That Christians were active here in the Middle Ages is well attested. Everything beyond that is a story of interpretation, wishful thinking and hard ideology.
The rocks were demonstrably used in the High Middle Ages: there is a grotto (chapel) cut into the stone, stairs, a summit chamber and the famous relief. A continuous „pagan cult site“ with a temple or sacrifices, by contrast, is not attested archaeologically – tempting as the image may be.
The great rock relief shows the Deposition of Christ – it is a Christian work, made around 1170, and one of the largest of its kind north of the Alps. Beneath the figure of Nicodemus, who lowers Christ from the cross, he stands on a strangely bent object. It is precisely this detail that set off the whole myth-making.
In the 1920s the völkisch amateur researcher Wilhelm Teudt read this bent object as the toppled Irminsul – the Saxon sanctuary said to have been destroyed by Charlemagne. From this he built the thesis that the Externsteine had been the site of the Irminsul. Scholars, however, regard the bent object rather as a footstool or a toppled tree (palm) within the Christian image. Teudt’s reading is a back-projection, not a finding.
Under National Socialism this became policy: Himmler’s Ahnenerbe investigated the stones, there were solstice celebrations and propaganda of a „Germanic sanctuary“. The upright, s-shaped „Irminsul“ seen today on stickers and in esoteric circles goes straight back to Teudt’s model – a 20th-century symbol, not a handed-down Germanic sign.
The medieval Christian use is certain. Whether the rocks played a role in pre-Christian times is possible but unproven; an astronomical alignment of the summit chamber is discussed but disputed. In short: the Externsteine are a fascinating real place – just not the Germanic temple the 20th century wished to make of them.
Kolovrat or Black Sun? · Donar’s Oak.
Wilhelm Teudt, Germanische Heiligtümer (1929, historical, as evidence for the history of interpretation). Scholarship/overview: Uta Halle, „Die Externsteine sind bis auf weiteres germanisch!“ (2002); wissenschaft.de & taz on the „Externsteine myth“. On the Irminsul: Frankish royal annals (772).