Heathenry
4
The ‘Saint’ Who Chopped Down Thor’s Sacred Tree
The ‘Saint’ Who Chopped Down Thor’s Sacred Tree
Source: http://www.hinduhumanrights.info/the.../#!prettyPhoto
Jove’s Oak ( Donar’s Oak and therefore sometimes referred to as Thor’s Oak) was a sacred tree of the Germanic pagans located in the region of Hesse, Germany.
The Oak tree that once stood at the town of Geismar in central Germany was sacred to the pagan god Thor. We know this because the somewhat fanciful account of its destruction was gleefully preserved by the Christian chroniclers of the cultural genocide of Europe’s indigenous culture.
The criminal responsible was St. Boniface, an Anglo-Saxon churchman who spread the new totalitarian doctrine of Christianity throughout Germany. As so often was the case, the Christians then occupied the unique sacred site by building one of their standard-issue church buildings. Wood from the oak was then reportedly used to build the church at the site dedicated to Saint Peter. One of his followers, also an Anglo-Saxon, called Willibald wrote about this event in “The Life of St. Boniface” sometime between 754 and 768:
”Now many of the Hessians who at that time [the year 723] had acknowledged the Catholic faith were confirmed by the grace of the Holy Spirit and received the laying-on of hands. But others, not yet strong in the spirit, refused to accept the pure teachings of the Church in their entirety. Moreover, some continued secretly, others openly, to offer sacrifices to trees and springs, to inspect the entrails of victims; some practiced divination, legerdemain and incantations; some turned their attention to auguries, auspices and other sacrificial rites; whilst others, of a more reasonable character, forsook all the profane practices of heathenism and committed none of these crimes.
With the counsel and advice of the latter persons, Boniface in their presence attempted to cut down, at a place called Gaesmere, a certain oak of extraordinary size called by the pagans of olden times the Oak of Donar. Taking his courage in his hands (for a great crowd of pagans stood by watching and bitterly cursing in their hearts the enemy of the gods), he cut the first notch.
But when he had made a superficial cut, suddenly the oak’s vast bulk, shaken by a mighty blast of wind from above, crashed to the ground shivering its topmost branches into fragments in its fall. As if by the express will of God (for the brethren present had done nothing to cause it) the oak burst asunder into four parts, each part having a trunk of equal length. At the sight of this extraordinary spectacle the heathens who had been cursing ceased to revile and began, on the contrary, to believe and bless the Lord.
Thereupon the holy bishop took counsel with the brethren, built an oratory from the timber of the oak and dedicated it to St. Peter the Apostle” From “The Life of St. Boniface”
The above account is the typical sugar coated myth of a psychopath running around with an axe, only to be later be canonized into sainthood. But his karma with the blessings of Thor did eventually catch up with him in 754/5 AD, when he landed in Friesland (Holland) with a large group of over thirty-seven missionaries. Savagely set upon by the Friesian Pagans, where he and most of his companions were ‘martyred’. He had lifted a Bible towards his attackers but it had no effect when he was killed by a thrust of a sword (or an axe). That’s why he’s often represented by a pierced bible .
It is a pity and supreme irony that the pagans he converted at Geismar after chopping down their sacred Thor tree as a show of his ‘god’s’ power over their gods did not get a chance to witness a similar incident where his ‘God’ failed to protect him and his holy book, in that fatal chop that snuffed out his career destroying Europe’s soul and heritage or otherwise they would have returned back to their old Gods and beliefs.
‘Veneration of sacred groves and sacred trees is found throughout the history of the Germanic peoples and were targeted for destruction by Christian missionaries during the Christianization of the Germanic peoples. Ken Dowden notes that behind this great oak dedicated to Donar, the Irminsul (also felled by Christian missionaries in the 8th century), and the Sacred tree at Uppsala (described by Adam of Bremen in the 11th century), stands a mythic prototype of an immense world tree, described in the Norse religion as Yggdrasil.’
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Loki
Alba | Scotland
Bookmarks