Continental Germanic Paganism
Education Builds Understanding
Why Start Here
Most people do not start here. Most people find Norse and Germanic paganism through the Eddas, through Scandinavian mythology, through Beowulf. Continental Germanic paganism is where you end up after you have been in this tradition long enough to realize you want to follow the roots further, or after you find yourself pulled specifically toward the pre-Christian religious world of what is now Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland.
This is the most fragmentary of the three main branches. The written sources are thin to the point of being almost nonexistent. The tradition was Christianized largely by armed force, with the deliberate destruction of sacred sites and the massacre of those who resisted. What survived did so in folklore, in place names, in the vestigial traces of practice embedded in folk customs that the church could not fully extinguish.
It is a harder road than the Norse or Anglo-Saxon path. But the tradition is real, the deities are real, and there is serious scholarly and community work being done to reconstruct it honestly.
Historical and Cultural Background
The peoples we group under "Continental Germanic" were a diverse set of tribal cultures occupying central and northwestern Europe from the Iron Age through the early medieval period. The Franks, Saxons, Alemanni, Thuringians, Lombards, Frisians, Marcomanni, and dozens of other tribal groups all practiced related but distinct forms of the broader Germanic religious tradition. They were neither a single people nor a unified religious community.
Tacitus described their religion from the outside in 98 CE, with a Roman's combination of fascination and bias. He documented sacred groves, tribal sacrifices, and a goddess named Nerthus worshipped by several North Sea tribes with a ritual involving a sacred wagon that traveled among the people. His account is useful but limited by his perspective and purpose.
The conversion of Continental Germania to Christianity happened piecemeal over several centuries, but the final act was brutal. The Franks under Clovis converted in 496 CE, and after that, the Frankish kingdom became the engine of Christian expansion eastward. The Saxon Wars (772 to 804 CE) under Charlemagne are the clearest example of what this expansion looked like: systematic military campaigns, the destruction of the Irminsul (the great sacred pillar of the Saxons) in 772 CE, forced mass baptisms, and the Massacre at Verden in 782 CE, in which Charlemagne ordered the execution of 4,500 Saxon prisoners who had refused baptism or relapsed into paganism. The Royal Frankish Annals record the Irminsul's destruction as a deliberate act. The Annals of Lorsch record the massacre.
This is not a comfortable history. It is also the direct explanation for why the source record is so thin. This tradition was not simply neglected into obscurity. In many instances, it was specifically targeted for suppression and erasure.
What survived did so in the margins: in folk medicine, in seasonal customs, in fairy tales, in the grudging references of church penitentials that catalogued the persistent practices they were trying to stamp out.
The Source Landscape
The honest assessment is that Continental Germanic paganism is the most poorly documented of the three main branches, and practitioners need to understand what this means for their engagement with the tradition.
Tacitus's Germania (98 CE) is the earliest and most substantive classical account of the Continental Germanic peoples and their religion. Tacitus describes communal worship, sacred groves, a priestly class, the veneration of specific deities (naming Mercury, Hercules, and Mars in Roman interpretatio — likely cognates of Wotan, Donar, and Tiwaz), and the cult of the goddess Nerthus. He is an external observer writing with explicit political purposes, comparing virtuous Germanic barbarians to decadent Romans. Read him critically, but read him. He preserves information that exists nowhere else.
The Merseburg Incantations are arguably the most significant primary text for Continental Germanic paganism. There are two of them. They are Old High German charms discovered in the cathedral chapter library at Merseburg in 1841, preserved in a 9th-century manuscript. The Second Merseburg Incantation is a healing charm for a horse's injured foot, and it mentions by name Wodan, Frija, Friia (a second female figure), and Sinthgunt (a solar figure), making it the only surviving pre-Christian literary text in the Old High German language. That is the entire indigenous textual evidence. Two short charms. Everything else comes from Roman accounts, Frankish chronicles, church penitentials, and later folklore.
Carolingian capitularies and penitentials are church and royal legal documents that prohibit specific pagan practices and thereby document what people were still doing. Charlemagne's Capitulary on the Saxons prohibits sacrifices at trees, springs, and crossroads, human sacrifice, and a range of other practices. These documents are negative evidence, records of prohibition, but they reveal what the tradition looked like in practice.
The Annales regni Francorum and other Frankish chronicles document the destruction of sacred sites including the Irminsul, the conversion campaigns, and the political context of Christianization.
German folklore and fairy tales preserved by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 19th century contain echoes of the tradition that survived in the rural folk practice of the German-speaking world. Figures like Frau Holle (who shakes out her featherbed to make it snow, who rewards the industrious and punishes the lazy, and who is associated with the dead and with ancestral female spirits) and Berchta/Perchta (a terrifying winter goddess associated with the Twelve Nights between Christmas and Epiphany who disembowels those who break her taboos) are widely understood as survivals of pre-Christian divine figures. The Wild Hunt, the spectral procession of the dead through the winter sky led by a fierce divine figure, is attested across the German-speaking world in folk tradition and almost certainly has pre-Christian roots.
Place names preserve deity names and terms for sacred spaces at a density similar to what appears in England, though the specific linguistic forms differ. Sites named for Wotan, Donar, and other divine figures are documented across Germany and the Netherlands.
The practical consequence of this source situation is that Continental Germanic practitioners rely heavily on comparative methods: working outward from the Merseburg Incantations and the Tacitus material, using comparative evidence from the Anglo-Saxon and Norse traditions for cognate deities and practices, and drawing on the folklore record for evidence of surviving practice. This requires scholarly discipline and humility about the limits of inference.
The Major Deities and Figures
Wotan/Wodan is the Continental cognate of the Norse Odin and Anglo-Saxon Woden. He is named in the Second Merseburg Incantation as a healer, and his name appears preserved in place names across the German-speaking world. Tacitus associates the chief Germanic deity with Mercury, suggesting an identification with a god of wisdom, travel, and communication. Beyond that, the specifics of Wotan's Continental mythology are largely inferred from cognate traditions.
Donar is the Continental cognate of Norse Thor and Anglo-Saxon Thunor. He is associated with thunder, storms, and strength. Saint Boniface's famous act of felling Donar's Oak (also called Thor's Oak) at Geismar in Hesse around 723 CE, and the apparent failure of the god to strike him dead for doing so, was used by early missionaries as a demonstration of Christian power over the old religion. Charlemagne later destroyed the Irminsul, a sacred pillar that may have had associations with the axis mundi or world tree concept.
Frija/Friia appears in the Merseburg Incantation alongside Wotan and Sinthgunt, as a healer attempting to mend Balder's horse. She is the Continental cognate of Norse Frigg and Anglo-Saxon Frig.
Sinthgunt is named in the Second Merseburg Incantation as the sister of the sun maiden Sunna. She does not appear in Norse mythology under any name that is clearly cognate, making her one of the most distinctively Continental figures in the tradition. Her exact nature and role are uncertain.
Nerthus is described by Tacitus as a goddess worshipped by several North Sea Germanic tribes. She is identified as "Mother Earth" and her cult involved a sacred wagon that traveled among the tribes, accompanied by priests, with a ritual ban on weapons and conflict during her passage. After the ceremonial circuit, the wagon, its coverings, and the servants who had bathed them were all drowned in a sacred lake. The name Nerthus is the feminine form of a root that in Old Norse appears in the masculine as Njord. The relationship between the two figures is one of the more interesting scholarly puzzles in Germanic religion.
Zisa is a possibly attested goddess from Augsburg in Bavaria. Some sources suggest the city's name derives from her and that she was associated with the harvest. The evidence is disputed and thin, but she has been embraced by some practitioners of the South German tradition.
Frau Holle and Berchta are folk survival figures, not directly attested as pre-Christian deities in the primary sources, but widely understood by scholars and practitioners as carrying the residue of earlier divine figures. Frau Holle in particular is associated with the dead, with spinning and weaving, with the household, and with ancestral women, characteristics that align with the Dísir of the Norse tradition.
Sacred Practices
What we can reconstruct about Continental Germanic practice comes primarily from the prohibition literature, the Tacitus account, and comparison with related branches.
Sacred groves were central. Tacitus explicitly describes Germanic worship taking place in groves rather than constructed temples, and the Frankish capitularies repeatedly prohibit continued ritual activity at specific trees, groves, and natural sites. The destruction of Donar's Oak and the Irminsul was not incidental: it was a targeted strategy of eliminating the physical foci of the old religion.
The Irminsul deserves particular attention. It was a large wooden column or pillar venerated by the Continental Saxons, described in the Annales regni Francorum as a universal pillar that sustained the vault of heaven. The Carolingians spent three days dismantling it in 772 CE. Whether it was an image of the world tree, an axis mundi representation, or something else entirely is debated by scholars.
Sacrifice and communal feasting appear to have been practiced in forms similar to the broader Germanic tradition. The capitularies prohibit sacrifices at trees and springs, and Saint Columbanus, traveling through Bregenz in the 6th century, reportedly encountered a group of people about to sacrifice beer to Wotan in a wooden vessel. He allegedly destroyed the vessel, unharmed by the furious god.
The seasonal calendar reconstructed for Continental Germanic practice is thinner than for the Norse or Anglo-Saxon branches. The Twelve Nights (the period between Christmas and Epiphany that in folk tradition is associated with the Wild Hunt and with Berchta's procession) almost certainly has pre-Christian roots. The spring and harvest seasons show evidence of older observances embedded in later folk custom.
Cosmology
The cosmological system of Continental Germanic paganism is largely inferred from comparative evidence rather than documented directly. The concept of a sacred world-column or axis mundi, represented by the Irminsul, suggests a cosmological framework that parallels the Norse Yggdrasil, but the details are not preserved. The Tacitan account implies an animist worldview in which nature is inhabited by divine presences, which is consistent with the broader Germanic tradition.
The folk survival of the Wild Hunt across German-speaking Europe is consistent with a cosmology that includes the dead as active presences in the world, led by a divine figure through the night sky, particularly in winter. In German folk tradition, this figure is sometimes Wotan, sometimes a localized figure like the Bernese Chlausjäger.
Modern Practice
The German-speaking world has its own reconstructionist community, largely distinct from the English-language Heathen community centered on the Norse tradition. Eldaring was founded as a partner organization of The Troth and became independent in 2002, explicitly rejecting the völkisch and far-right elements of some German Heathen history. As of 2025, Eldaring has over 600 members and describes itself as committed to democratic values and inclusive practice. Rabenclan (Raven's Clan), founded in 1994, and Nornirs Ætt (Kin of the Norns), founded in 2005, were established specifically to reject the tradition's right-wing entryism.
In the United States, Urglaawe is a form of Heathenry rooted in the Pennsylvania Dutch (German immigrant) folk tradition, which has preserved a remarkable amount of Continental Germanic folk practice embedded in what became a nominally Christian community. Urglaawe practitioners argue that the survival of these folk practices in the Pennsylvania Dutch world gives them a unique and living connection to the Continental tradition, making Urglaawe one of the more interesting bridge cases between full reconstruction and living folk practice.
Practitioners who engage seriously with Continental Germanic paganism typically work in at least reading competency with Old High German or at minimum with secondary scholarly literature on the subject, engage with the Merseburg Incantations and Tacitus directly, and draw carefully on comparative Norse and Anglo-Saxon evidence while clearly marking where they are inferring rather than documenting.
Where to Go Next
Resources:
- The Merseburg Incantations are available online in both Old High German and translation.
- Tacitus's Germania is widely available; the Penguin Classics edition is accessible.
- For the folk survival material, D.L. Ashliman's translations of German folklore are a useful starting point.
- The Eldaring website (eldaring.de) provides resources in German (Your Browser can Translate much of it) for the contemporary Continental practice community.
Page last reviewed: May 2026. For corrections or source questions, contact The Pagan Temple.
