Externsteine- Germanic LocationLocation · Landmark
Also known as: Egesterenstein
Description
Five sandstone pillars rise forty meters from the floor of the Teutoburg Forest, their faces carved with medieval chambers and a monumental Descent from the Cross. Beneath the cross, a bent tree or pillar sags under its weight, an image that recalls the Irminsul Charlemagne destroyed at nearby Eresburg in 772.
Mythology & Lore
The Pillars
Five Cretaceous sandstone columns stand in a row near Horn-Bad Meinberg in the Teutoburg Forest, pushed upright by tectonic forces long before anyone carved them. Stairs and bridges cut into the rock lead to a chapel hollowed from the summit of one pillar, where a circular window catches the summer solstice sunrise. Rock-cut chambers line the lower portions. On the exterior face of one pillar, a monumental twelfth-century relief depicts the Descent from the Cross.
The Bent Tree
The relief is the site's sharpest image. Nicodemus lowers Christ's body from the cross while other figures attend. Below the cross, a tree or pillar bends under its weight, sagging as if broken.
Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul, the great pillar of the Continental Saxons, at nearby Eresburg in 772. The Irminsul held up the sky in Saxon belief, the axis of the world. The bent shape in the relief sits exactly where a defeated Irminsul would belong: beneath the Christian cross, broken, bearing the weight of the new faith. Eresburg is close. The resemblance is there.
A chapel cut into living rock. A window aligned to the solstice. A carved pillar bent under the cross, a few miles from where the real one fell.