Gold Pendant Found in Denmark Depicts Norse God Odin, and May Have Been a Sacrifice to Avert the Disastrous Weather of 536 AD

Ancient Origins

Odin, the high god of Norse mythology, rode his eight-legged horse Sleipnir through the nine worlds dispensing ecstasy to all those who invoked him. Now an image of a man with a horse depicted on a gold pendant from the 6th century AD has been found by an amateur with a metal detector on a Danish island. Experts speculate it depicts Odin in part because it has the text “The High One,” one of Odin’s titles.

While the horse on the pendant does not have eight legs, the man’s head is hovering above it. The horse’s head appears to have antlers or horns. The pendant is believed to date to 536 AD, a year that was plagued by severed weather conditions.

Also depicted on the gold pendant is a swastika, which was not then a symbol of racism or white “supremacy.” The Nazis of pre-World War II and World War II Europe and later neo-nazis co-opted the symbol. It has been known for millennia in various places around the world, including among people of color, as a cosmic sign and one of good luck.

The gold and silver pieces found by a man with a metal detector on a Danish island may have been part of sacrificial offerings in 536 AD to the god Odin to avert harsh, cold weather. (Museum Lolland-Falster image)

The metal-detecting amateur, Carsten Helm, and his sons turned up the gold pendant and some other gold and silver pieces nearby on the island of Lolland. The Museum Lolland-Falster says Odin’s image has been found on many artifacts across Northern Europe, some with the words The High One, so they assume this is the same deity. Odin was and still is considered by neo-pagans or Asatruar the high god of the Aesir, one of two main families of Norse gods. The other are the Vanir, with whom the Aesir had some contact and intermarriage.

Odin in blue as the Wanderer, with Mime (Wikimedia Commons/Arthur Rackham painting)


“It is a really exciting discovery," says Marie Brinch, curator at the Museum Lolland-Falster. “Although it is a known type, it is a rare and exciting find—over time there have been only three found on Lolland, the latest in 1906—and from all over northern Europe we are aware of only around 1,000 pieces, most of which are from Denmark and the Nordic region.”

She said the pendant is so exciting because it is among the earliest depictions of Norse religion. This charm appears to show Odin as a shaman, she said. Shamans in ancient religions and still today make contact with the world of spirits in ecstatic union. As a god, it is possible Odin was in contact with shamans invoking him.

The museum says another interpretation of Odin’s image on the pendant is that he was a known as a healer of horses. The press release from the museum doesn’t mention this, but Odin’s vehicle or mount was a magical eight-legged horse, Sleipnir.

Norse-Mytology.org has a section on Sleipnir that states: “The eight-legged horse as a means of transportation used by shamans in their ecstatic travels throughout the cosmos is a motif that can be found in a staggering number of indigenous traditions from all over the world. Sleipnir is ‘the shamanic horse par excellence,’ just as Odin is the shamanic god par excellence.”

Odin on his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir (public domain)

Another theory about the gold and silver jewelry is that it was part of a sacrifice, possibly including of humans, to avert the very cold winters of the 6th century AD. Ms. Binch explained:

“It is possibly linked to a major natural disaster that took place in 536. Written sources from both the Roman Empire, Europe, the Middle East and even China tell of a year when the sun was not shining and there was frost in summer. We do not know exactly what happened, but there are indications that a violent volcanic eruption or a meteor strike threw ash or dust in the atmosphere and thus caused a prolonged period of reduced sunlight. Such an event certainly made people afraid. The harvest failed, and neither humans nor animals were able to get enough to eat. In such desperate times it was natural to call upon the gods for help by sacrificing … and the more precious things, the better. The event has been traumatic for the survivors, perhaps we can find traces of the idea of Ragnarok – the end of the world. It is an interesting thought that the beginning of [the epic] Völuspá just mentions that the sun disappears, and then follows Fimbul Winter - three winters without summer between. … The correlation is striking. It was not just wealth, sacrifices were made, but magical amulets and symbols. And maybe it was hoped that the shiny gold could help bring the shining sun back?”

Top image: Odin Riding Forth on the Cover of "Legends and Lore" (Cory Funk / flickr)

By Mark Miller

Religion in ancient Rome: what did they believe?

History Extra

Vulcan caught Venus and Mars in a net and shows them to the laughing Gods. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

“We Romans,” claimed the great orator Cicero in a public speech, “are not superior to the Spanish in population, nor do we best the Gauls in strength, nor Carthaginians in acumen, nor the Greeks in technical skills, nor can we compete with the natural connection of the Italians and Latins to their own people and land; we Romans, however, outstrip every people and nation in our piety, sense of religious scruple and our awareness that everything is controlled by the power of the gods.”
Cicero is hardly the only politician – ancient or modern – to have asserted that his people have a special relationship with the divine, but it is certainly striking that the evidence from Rome in his time (this speech was delivered in 56 BC) does reveal an incredible intensity and diversity of religious activity. The Romans lived in a world crowded with divinities, and they communicated with them almost constantly. Indeed, the following snapshots from Rome in the age of Cicero can show us just how the gods and their worship were woven into almost every part of the social fabric in the booming imperial capital…

Triumph in September

In late September 61 BC, the Roman general Pompey returned to Rome following conquests in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East to celebrate his third and – although he did not yet know it – final triumph.
Rich treasures and a very large number of captives were paraded through the packed streets of the city; the general himself wore the cloak of Alexander the Great. It was, according to the later historian Appian, a dazzling celebration.
The culmination of this pageant was a sacrifice of white bulls to Jupiter Optimus Maximus – roughly ‘Jupiter the best and greatest’ [the god of sky and thunder and the chief deity of Roman state religion] – at his temple on the Capitoline Hill in the heart of the city.
In making this sacrifice, Pompey thanked the god for his support of Rome and demonstrated the supposed connection between the gods and the military success of Rome.

Watching the heavens

In ancient Rome, religion could divide as well as unite. This next snapshot dates from two years later: 59 BC, the year in which Julius Caesar – Pompey’s rival and eventual vanquisher – first held the supreme political office of consul.
Even at this early point in his career, Caesar was a polarising figure. The conservative Marcus Bibulus, who was his fellow chief magistrate for the year, used every tactic available to oppose Caesar’s agenda. Having exhausted conventional measures to block legislation, Bibulus shut himself in his house and used the traditional religious prerogative of the consul to declare that ill-omens forbade any public business.

_{Julius Caesar as dictator of Rome wearing a crown of laurel and holding a symbol of office. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}
Supporters of Caesar claimed that Bibulus was misusing the ritual – they said the declaration could not be made from home; only in public. Caesar ignored the bar on public business and proceeded to pass key laws.
Some modern historians have argued that this episode demonstrates that the Romans manipulated religion for political ends and did not really take it seriously. In fact, I would say the row, which was still being discussed years later, shows that the correct, ritual observance of omens was considered so important that it could become the very centre of political dispute.

Trendy Serapis

Our third snapshot comes from the same decade as the snapshot previous. In one of his poems (Poem 10), the trendy young writer Catullus tells a revealing anecdote about himself and a couple of friends. Catullus was just back from a rich, Greek-speaking province in the east, where he had been a very junior member of the governor’s entourage. Keen to make out that he’d done well in the provinces, he lied that he had managed to bring back a sedan chair and also the slaves to carry it.
The girlfriend of one of his friends saw through the lie, however, and decided to set a trap for Catullus – she asked if she could borrow the chair to go over to the Temple of Serapis. Caught in the fib, Catullus had to admit that the sedan chair really belonged to another friend, and complained that she wasn’t being “cool”.
The woman’s destination is no incidental detail – the poet mentions it to give us an idea about her ‘type’. Serapis was not an old, respectable Roman god, but a controversial one recently ‘imported’ from Egypt. We might compare the attraction of the cult to the fashionable adoption of yoga and Buddhism in the contemporary west. By connecting her with this Egyptian deity, Catullus casts his tormentor as a trendy seeker of the exotic.

_{Marcus Tullius Cicero, who in 56 BC delivered a public speech about Romans' relationship with the divine. (Photo by ullstein bild/ullstein bild via Getty Images)}

Family matters

Without modern medicine to rely upon, Romans turned to the divine in times of need: for example, a stone inscribed in c50–60 BC records the gratitude of a woman called Sulpicia to Juno Lucina, one of the Roman goddesses of childbirth. Sulpicia explains that her thanks to the goddess are on behalf of her daughter, Paulla Cassia.
It is safe to assume that Sulpicia had prayed to Juno while her daughter, Paulla, was in labour – perhaps a difficult one – with a grandchild.

 

A letter to the underworld

This next snapshot takes us beyond the walls of the city and out to the graveyards north of Rome. A woman scratches prayers on lead sheets at night, begging the underworld gods – Pluto, Proserpina and the three-headed dog Cerberus – to dismember her enemies: Plotius, Avonia, Vesonia, Secunda and Aquillia.
If the gods fulfil her wishes, she promises them a sacrifice of dates, figs and a black pig. To seal the prayer, she drives a nail through the lead sheets and buries them in a tomb – the conduit to the gods of the dead.
This appeal to the gods to harm enemies was a curse. Cicero was not thinking of this sort of thing when he proclaimed the piety of the Romans in 56 BC, but the principles underlying these prayers to the underworld are the same as those in the stories of Pompey and Sulpicia: the Romans communicated with the gods in prayer and sacrifice to maintain their favour and to seek advantage.

The gods of Rome

At the centre of Roman religion were the gods themselves. For us, this is one of the hardest things to understand about religion in ancient Rome. After all, few people believe in Roman gods, and we live in societies where scriptural monotheism [the belief in a single, all-powerful god] or atheism are the most common understandings of the divine.
For the Romans, though, there were many gods and little fixed doctrine. Although the Roman state focused on a few important gods, like Jupiter, Juno, Mars and Apollo, for individuals there were countless possibilities, including exotic gods like Serapis [a Graeco-Egyptian god] and Isis [the patroness of nature and magic, first worshipped in ancient Egyptian religion]; and more homely deities like Mater Matuta [an indigenous Latin goddess] and Silvanus [a Roman deity of woods and fields]. The absence of scripture or a church orthodoxy allowed for a certain flexibility in how Romans thought about these gods.
Mythological stories about the gods, which mostly originated in Greece or in the old cultures of the Middle East, were very popular in Rome, and offered people the means to think through the nature of divine power. The stories did not always make the gods look good, but provided them with personalities and confirmed the possibility of their intervention in human affairs.
The Romans also conceived of the gods in visual terms, and worship focused on the anthropomorphic [human-like] images of the gods in temples and shrines. This had an impact: when the Romans thought about the god of commerce, Mercury, for example, they imagined him as a young man holding a bag of coins.

_{Depiction of Isis with crown supported by uraeus. (Photo by Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)}
For an educated few, the gods were also subject to philosophical speculation. Sceptics maintained that the gods were unknowable but that cult should be maintained anyway. Epicureans denied that gods worth the name would be amenable to human sacrifice and prayer, but accepted that they did exist, while Stoics insisted that the world itself was divine and that the many gods were a manifestation of that ‘world spirit’. It is, however, very difficult to find Roman sources that demonstrate atheism or strict monotheism.
We can imagine that a Gaul or Greek or Carthaginian, let alone a Jew or an Indian, might protest Cicero’s claim that the Romans were the most religious of ancient peoples. Nevertheless, the Rome of Cicero’s time was truly a place where the gods were a common and meaningful presence in the lives of people – ordinary, like Sulpicia and the curser in the graveyard, and extraordinary, like Cicero himself and Julius Caesar.
Duncan MacRae is a historian and assistant professor in the department of classics at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio. His work focuses on the history of the Roman Republic and early empire, particularly the history of religion and intellectual history.
To find out more, visit www.duncanmacrae.org.