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October 15th, 2020 
Awake Goy By Goblet d’Alviella
From The Migration of Symbols [1894]
1. The column, which represents the common element of monuments of this kind, and which may date back, as M. Rahlenbeek thinks, to the Germanic tribes settled in western Belgium.—Tacitus bears witness to the presence of sacred columns amongst the Frisians who occupied the valley of the Lower Rhine, nor far, consequently, from the Meuse; he even calls them Pillars of Hercules; however, he hastens to recall to mind that many things are fathered upon Hercules which do not belong to him. The Saxons, that is to say the inhabitants of the right bank of the Rhine, venerated, on their side, wooden or stone pillars dedicated to the god Irmin; such was the famous Irminsul demolished by the order of Charlemagne. A stone column dug up at Eresburg or Stadtbergen in Westphalia, under Louis the Débonnaire, and placed in the cathedral of Hildesheim, where it still serves as a candelabrum, exhibits a striking resemblance to the ancient representations of the perron of Liege.
Fig. 53. Column of Hildesheim.
(Kratz. Der Dom zu Hildesheim, 2nd part, pl. vii., fig. 2.)
M. Piot, again, has proved that people were sworn on the perron. Now we learn from the Saga of Gudrun that amongst the Scandinavians they swore “by the holy white stone.” 1 Moreover, there have been preserved until our own times, on the tumuli or haugs of the Scandinavian Peninsula, pillars of white stone to which the lower classes accord a certain veneration. One of these stones, now in the Bergen Museum, presents the similitude of a small pillar with an enlarged top three feet high and sixteen inches in diameter.
Were the pillars of the Germanic nations dedicated to the divinities of the sky, or of war? Did they exhibit a simulacrum of Thor, of Odin, or of a god Irmin? Had they a phallic acceptation, as M. Holmboe thinks with respect to the Scandinavian cippi, or did they provide a cosmogonical symbol, as might be inferred from a passage in Adam of Bremen to the effect that, the Saxons venerated in their Irminsul the image of “the universal pillar which supports all things”? All that can be said for the moment is that these pillars had a religious character, and that they had to play a part in the social life, so intimately connected, amongst all barbarians, with the religious life of the people.
2. The Fir-cone.—This is, according to M. Henaux, “the symbol of an existence united but distinct,” and represents the union of the tribes leagued together against the dominion of Rome. We do not find, however, that the Fir-cone admitted of this interpretation in the symbolism of the ancient Germans, or even of the Gauls. To tell the truth, we possess very little information on the particulars of Germanic symbols and even forms of worship. To make up for this, however, we know that, in the Græco-Roman paganism, the fruit of the pine discharged prophylactic, sepulchral, and phallic functions.—Amongst the Etruscans the Fir-cone occurs frequently in tombs and on urns, sometimes alone, sometimes on the top of a pillar. Does it there figure a representation of the flames on an altar, and does it consequently symbolize the persistency of life in death? The pillar, whole or broken, and often adorned with bas-reliefs, was a fairly common monument on Belgo-Roman tombs. But we nowhere find that it supported a Fir-cone, and nothing permits us to suppose that the perrons ever had a sepulchral acceptation.—Moreover, the Thyrsus of Bacchus, composed of a stalk crowned by the fruit of the pine, was a familiar emblem in classic paganism. An emblem of the same kind was borne by Sylvanus Dendrophorus, that old god of the Latin forests, assimilated at a later date, on so many Gallic monuments, to one of the principal divinities of the Celtic pantheon, if not its supreme god—the god with the Mallet:
It may therefore be asked if the addition of the fir-cone to the perron of Liege is not due to the syncretic influence of Gallo-Roman art, which would thus have brought the Germanic column within the limits of classic paganism, as, at a later period, the Church introduced it into Christian society by surmounting it with a Cross. Perhaps also it was thus desired to keep alive in the monument a phallic signification, whilst correcting whatever too great coarseness this symbol might have had in its primitive form.
It is probable that the pyr of Augsburg, that gigantic Fir-cone, depicted, from time immemorial, on the arms, the coins, and the seals of that town, dates from the time of the Roman occupation. It has been found, indeed, at Augsburg itself, on a Roman monument, now in the museum of that town, and known as the altar of the duumviri. The pine-fruit is there sculptured at the top of a pillar ornamented with flower-work, which separates the statues of the two municipal magistrates, exactly as, at Liege, the perron figures between the coats of arms of the two annual burgomasters.
Fig. 54. The Pyr of Augsburg.
It must be observed that the pyr rests on a capital; now, every capital supposes a column, that is to say, that we have here the remains of a veritable perron, which was never baptized by the apposition of a Cross, but was merely shortened by the suppression of the shaft, in order to be more easily introduced into armorial bearings and coins.
I have been assured, but have not been able to verify the fact, that in Rome itself, in front of the church of SS. Nereo et Achilleo, built on the ruins of a temple of Isis, there was still to be seen, some years ago, an antique column surmounted by a Fir-cone with a Cross on the top.
We have likewise the proof that the Fir-cone, placed at the end of a stalk or pillar, figured amongst the objects held in veneration by the Franks, who occupied, in the fifth century, the East of Belgium and the North-east of France.
Fig. 55. Buckle from Envermeu.
(Cochet. La Normandie souterraine, pl. xii., No. 4.)
Fig. 56. Buckle From Eprave.
(A. Bequet. Soc. arch. de Namur, vol. xv., p. 315.)
The Abbe Cochet and M. Alfred Bequet have separately found, the former in the Merovingian cemetery of Envermeu, near Dieppe, the latter in the cemetery of Eprave, not far from Namur, silver belt-buckles adorned with an identical figure, in which I have no hesitation in recognizing a prototype of the perrons. We have there, in the middle of a support or pedestal, which is placed between two peacocks facing one another, a long stalk, capped by a conical object, whose resemblance to the Fir-cone at once struck the Abbe Cochet, though at that moment he was little thinking of the perrons of Belgium (figs. 55, 56).
It is to be remarked that the two birds facing one another are also met with on the sides of the perron on the earliest coin of Liege, on which an attempt is made to represent this monument with the Fir-cone (fig. 52), and also on a seal which Loyens attributes to the year 1348 (fig. 57).
Fig. 57. Seal of Liege ad legata.
(Loyens. Recueil héraldique des bourgmestres, p. 2.)
If the fact be insisted upon, that the stalk engraved in the Frankish image seems to be of wood, I will remark that the symbolical pillars of the ancient Germans were made of wood as well as of stone. This was particularly the case with the Irminsul, which the oldest chronicles define as the trunk of a tree erected in the open air. 1The Hessians of the eighth century, who lived on the Lower Rhine, still venerated, at the time when they were evangelized by St. Boniface, the trunk of a tree, which was to them the simulacrum of the god Thor.
Do not our May-Poles, often a mere stalk surrounded with ribbons, take us back to the time when Lucan sang of our forefathers:
Arte carent, cæsisque extant informia truncis?
Lastly, old chroniclers relate that in the thirteenth century the destruction of the Irminsul by Charlemagne was still commemorated at Hildesheim on the Saturday following the Sunday of the Lætare, by planting in the ground, on the cathedral square, two poles six feet high, each surmounted by a wooden object one foot in height, and shaped like a pyramid or cone. The young people then endeavoured with sticks and stones to overthrow this object. Does not this tradition directly connect the Irminsul, or rather the Irminsuls, with the stake which, surmounted by a Cone, is presented to our view in the Frankish buckle, just as the stone column of the Hildesheim cathedral links them with the perrons of Belgium? The same custom, or rather the same popular sport, existed elsewhere too in Germany, at Halberstadt in particular; here, however, it was the canons who indulged in it on the Sunday of the Lætare itself.
We have, moreover, a more direct proof that the representation of the stalk, surmounted by a Fir-cone, and placed between animals facing one another, figured in Christian imagery from the eighth century of our era. The sculptures in question are taken, one from the parapet of the cathedral of Torcello, near Venice (fig. 58), and the other from a bas-relief on the Athens cathedral (fig. 59). Both of them are reproduced in the remarkable work of M. R. Cattaneo, L’architecture en Italie.
Fig. 58. From the Cathedral of Torcello.
Fig. 59. From the Athens Cathedral.
3. The Cross.—Tradition relates that the Christian missionaries everywhere overthrew, amongst the Belgians, the altars of Thor and of Wodan. But the fate of the column of Hildesheim shows us how monuments of this kind managed to escape destruction by placing themselves, so to speak, under the protection of the new faith. At Hildesheim, they placed a Virgin on the column, transformed into a candelabrum. At Liege, a Cross was placed on the perron, and the oaths which were taken on the “sacred whitestone” continued to be taken on the Cross which sanctified the ancient simulacrum. In Sweden also cippi are found, similar to the one I have mentioned above, on the top of which the Cross has been incised.
The Abbe Cochet thinks that the figures engraved on the Envermeu plate denote a Christian symbol, because we find in the Catacombs, and even in Roman architecture, the symbol of a bunch of grapes between two peacocks facing one another, depicting the soul quenching its thirst at the eternal fountain of life. Nothing, however, entitles us to distinguish a bunch of grapes in the object placed at the end of the stalk; moreover, its resemblance to the ordinary representation of the thyrsus is incontestable. Lastly, we have already seen in the present chapter that the custom of figuring sacred objects between two winged animals facing one another was spread throughout the whole Mediterranean basin long before the birth of Christian art. It is especially on the side of sacred stones and trees that they are met with, as I shall have an opportunity of pointing out in the following chapter. Now, in so far as it was a cosmogonical column, related to the Scandinavian Yggdrasill, the Irminsul is just as much connected with the tradition of the Universal Pillar as with that of the Tree of the World, both of which seem to have received their first plastic expression amongst the Assyro-Chaldæans.
Curiously enough, the Tree of Life between two peacocks facing one another is even found in the symbolism of modern India (fig. 60). It will be observed that here each of the two peacocks holds a serpent in its beak. Now the peacock was held amongst the ancients to kill serpents, and this also may be one of the reasons which brought about its introduction into Christian symbolism.
Fig. 60. Cloth from Masulipatam.
(Sir G. Birdwood. The Industrial Arts of India. 1880.
It is evident that, at least in its outlines, all this iconography takes us backwards, far beyond Christianity, into the very midst of antique symbolism.
Lastly, it is proper to remark that traces of Christianity are entirely wanting in the cemeteries of Envermeu and Eprave, as well as in nearly all the Frankish cemeteries of that period.
Thus, to sum up, the perron of Liege includes in harmonious order the legacies and, so to speak, the witnesses, of all the civilizations which have succeeded one another in this part of Belgium. In this respect it is more than a symbol of municipal liberty; it is the embodiment of the very history of the nation.
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