This beautifully crafted Irminsul pendant comes on your choice of fine silver (.999%), copper or brass and rests on a 25″ adjustable black deer leather or cotton cord. 

MEASUREMENTS:

✥ 27mm x 35mm
✥ Rests on a 25″ adjustable black cotton cord

The Irminsul (Irmin means as much as ‘great’, ‘tall’ or ‘noble’, Sul is linked to the German word ‘Säule’ for ‘pole’) was erected among several Germanic tribes for religious rituals.

The Benedictine monk from the 9th century, Rudolf of Fulda, who worked at the Fulda Abbey in the present-day German state of Hesse, wrote that the Saxons used a truncum digni, a tall tree trunk in order for it to represent pagan ideas regarding world axis that holds earth and sky together (Gerald Krutzler, 2011, p. 134).

The question here is (and remains somewhat unresolved even today) if Irminsul served for cultic and ritualistic purposes. The German academic folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt wrote in 1875 that the Irminsul might be a survival of an archaic worship of trees (he termed it ‘Baumkult’).

Indeed, the idea that the world and the sky is held together by a pole and if the pole crumbles apart, the world itself might come to an end is an old myth that can be found in northern Europe and beyond. The Austrian scholar Rudolf Simek suspects that this idea and the notion of a world-axis represented by a tree or wooden pole is much older than the Iron or the Viking Age, dating the origins back to at least the early Bronze Age.

(Simek, 2006, p.217). Simek R. (2006). Lexikon der germanischen mythologie (3. völlig überarbeitete Aufl). Alfred Kröner. Mannhardt W. & Heuschkel W. (1877). Wald- und feldkulte. Borntraeger. Krutzler, G. (2011). Kult und Tabu: Wahrnehmungen der Germania bei Bonifatius. Austria: Lit.