Zisa, A Swabian Goddess
By Sean Jobst
2nd October 2019
Augsburg. Nestled in the Bavarian part of our cultural region of Schwaben, this is one of the main centers of Swabian heritage and history. A city I want to visit for its historic social housing concept called the Fuggerei, among other sites. This was also the city where my Oma's uncle, Ludwig Schneider, moved to from our ancestral town of Baldern in the Ostalbkreis, so that family memories intertwined with Augsburg.
Now as a Pagan who has been studying our ancient traditions, I have come across a goddess closely associated with Augsburg: Zisa. She is associated with this time of year, her feast day being 28th September, and thus reconstructionist Swabian Pagans could consecrate that day as Zisastag. Although some have denied such a goddess was even revered (Simek, 52; Kohl, 21-39), other scholars have attested to her from surviving medieval texts and folk traditions. She has harvest and fertility connotations, and is also known as consort of the god Ziu, the Sky Father God whose name stemmed from Proto-Germanic *Tiwaz and was known as Týr to the Scandinavians.
Ancient Roots of Augsburg
Zisa is mentioned in at least three medieval manuscripts: Codex Monac and Codex Emmeran from 1135CE, and Suevicarum rerum scriptores by the early 17th-century Swiss jurist Melchior Goldast (Grundy, 85). Her earliest record is the 11th century Latin text Excerptum ex Gallia Historia, a manuscript written by abbots from Ursberg and now held in Wien, wherein its alleged that Augsburg was originally named Cisaris after her. However, another source suggests the original name was Ziusburg, after Ziu who was honored with a special sword dance during which oaths were made (Guerber, 85-86). The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), better known as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik after its author, has this passage:
"And they chose for themselves the goddess Ziza, whom they believed to be Ceres. After the same goddess the city was named Zizaria. Her temple remained there intact until the time of the Romans, when it fell into ruin. And the city bore the name of a mountain that to this day the inhabitants of Augusta [Augsburg] call the Eisenberg. The city was afterwards protected by the Rhaeti and the Vindelici with walls, turrets and other defenses; and it endured much war at the hands of the Romans. These people always loved freedom and therefore held themselves aloof from the Romans. At a later date the Divine Augustus Octavian sent Titus Ennius, the praetor, with the Marcian Legion, and other generals, against them. In this legion Avar Bogudis, the king's son, a youth trained in weapons among the Greeks and Latins, and Varus (Varro), a tribune of the soldiers, became famous. These besieged the city in the late summer with a large force of Romans, and harassed it in many ways. In this storming Avar the Greek was slain, and he was buried in the village of Creichsaueron. The following inscription has been found indicating his origin and his end. 'The praetor also perished together with his Marcian legion so that few survived that battle who could tell what had taken place. And the destroyed legion gave to the region where the defeat occurred the name that now in the middle of the city is called Perleich [Latin perdita legio 'destroyed legion']'. Thus it is written. The hill here indicates by its name the Roman disaster where the Marcian Legion at once utterly perished. Varus (Varro), whom they called Verres, fled over the water, hid himself in the marshes, and gave his name to Lake Vernensee. Afterwards, that consul died miserably." (Folio XCI Verso)
Commentary
This account is not entirely free from the erroneous, as it repeats the common trope - first invented by the Romans and later repeated by the Christianized Franks - of forging a fictitious link with the ancient Trojans rather than appreciating our ancestors; a motif built upon the three motives of a translatio imperii political agenda, idealizing Greco-Roman Classicism as the measure of "civilization", and a Christianized obsession with the Near East rather than honoring our origins within our own forests, river valleys and mountains. The work also seeks to twist Swabian history into a linear Biblical timeline. Given its close parallels to the event, it seems to be a semi-fictionalized version of the Roman defeat in Teutoburger Wald applied to the Augsburg region.
We do know that Augsburg was "officially" founded as Augusta Vindelicorum in 15BCE, in honor of the Roman Emperor Augustus and named after the local Celtic tribe of the Vindelici. This lends credence to the notion of a pre-Roman history of Augsburg, as the Celts definitely had their own towns which were merely added on by the Romans. I personally came across this trend on travels to Thrace and Anatolia, where I saw Roman-era additions to pre-existing ancient settlements, so why not our Celtic-Germanic ancestors? I would tend to agree with at least one Swabian writer who proposes our origins in Germanic Suebi and Alemanni warriors intermarrying with the Celts who previously settled the region and cultivated the land.
Ceres was a Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility - there were multiple ones, as in other pantheons, to accurately describe the multifaceted complexities of nature cycles - so despite the obsession with interpretatio romana, a valid point could be made that Zisa was a localized equivalent of an agriculture/fertility goddess. The Eisenberg or "iron mountain" could have some credence, since the Danubian Celts were indeed known for their advanced iron and bronze works that were esteemed by the Romans. Perhaps "Perleich" survives in the historic Perlachturm and I wonder if, contrary to a Roman link, its not instead related to the goddess Frau Perchta, known "precisely in those Upper German regions where Holda leaves off, in Swabia, in Alsace, in Switzerland, in Bavaria and Austria" (Grimm, 272).
The events in Augsburg seem to have taken place sometime in the 1st century BCE and the Romans were defeated due to the timing: The day before was Zisa's feast day and the Suebi warriors were still gathered for the occasion. "They built a great temple to give to Ziza the goddess that they worshipped according to pagan customs in those days," declares a 13th-century poem cited by the German folklorist Jakob Grimm. "The temple long stood uninjured until in age its fall was decreed and as from age it passed away the mountain received its name where the work (werck) had stood, is still called today Zizenberck."
Etymology
Generally skeptical, a German religious history scholar named Kohl points out how a nearby hill named Cisunberc or Cisenberg was attested from a charter dated 1300. He nevertheless discounts the Zisa-based etymology by pointing out Old German glosses to Latin texts called Augsburg "Agistadium" or "Eistetin", which he suggests derived from the masculine personal name Agi/Egi. There could be some credence to this, if we consider Egi as a common name among Swabian nobility, while Agi seems to be a localized version of the Greek female name Agatha.
Kohl proposed that Zisa/Cisa was invented by the author of the Excerptum - despite being a Christian abbot - as an explanation for the place-name Cisenberg. Rather, he suggests that its origin was Cisaeara, "altar of Cisa" in Latin; or that it derived from "mountain on which siskins [zeisige, a type of finch bird] nest" or "mountain in the form of a breast (zitze)." But this latter explanation would not necessarily discount a goddess named Zisa, as breasts were symbolic of fertility goddesses - certainly within our Swabian region, going back at least to the "Venus of Hohle Fels" figurine 35,000-40,000 years ago, made from mammoth ivory and suggesting the prehistoric roots in "Our Lady of the Mammoth".
"Isis of the Suebi"?
Worldwide, the Earth was traditionally personified as a goddess who nurtured her children and was fertilized by the Sky who was personified as a god. This Earth Goddess was known under different localized names. In Germania, the Roman Cornelius Tacitus alluded to an earth goddess known as "Isis of the Suebi", whose identity is unknown but likely a local goddess with whom he found some common qualities as the Egyptian goddess Isis, as it was the Roman custom to compare deities of different cultures.
Nigel Pennick regards Zisa as a localized Earth Goddess, while Grimm thought Tacitus' "Isis of the Suebi" was actually a reference to Zisa (Grimm, 298-299). A predecessor in this view seemed to be Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), a German humanist and jurist who also served as a senior official in the municipal government of the Imperial City of Augsburg, who earlier proposed the same connection (Pieper, 500).
I discount Grimm's idea that "Isis of the Suebi" was Zisa, as her cult involved a ship and that symbolism does not seem to have been common in the region. It seems most likely to have been the Frisian goddess Nehalennia, whose emblem was the ship. So that was a Northern German figure, perhaps indicative again of Tacitus' erroneous knowledge of the different practices of the Germanic tribes. For unlike the imperial centralized Roman Cult, while there were common deities among all the Germanic or Celtic tribes, there were also many localized deities as seen for example in the various Matronae.
Zisa Remnants Surviving Under Christianization
There were many surviving remnants of Zisa worship, long after Christianization. Grimm mentioned a pagan Swabian Duke named Esenerius, who built a chapel in his castle in Hillomondt (now called Kempten), in the southern region of Schwaben, with a venerated image of Zisa (Pennick, 109). A plaque on a church outside the city walls said: "Impious worship long ago defiled the Gallusberg, and then offered it to you, Ziza" (Wood, 95).
The catholic Church of St. Peter am Perlach was built over Zisa's temple grounds at Zisenburg. The Suebi knew Tuesday as "Zistag" in her honor, a name banned by the Diocese of Augsburg to eradicate our indigenous traditions and renamed it "Aftermontag" (Schreiwer and Eckhart, 72-74), much like it renamed Wednesday "Mittwoch" from "Wotanstag". Nevertheless, the names of our European deities generally survive in days of the week.
Much like various pre-Christian goddesses were identified with the Virgin Mary, so too was Zisa Christianized as "Maria Knotenlöserin" (Mary Untier/Undoer of Knots). Her image as such was portrayed in the Baroque "Mary, Undoer of Knots" (1700) by Augsburg painter Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner (1625-1705). This painting is currently inside St. Peter am Perlach, whose Perlachturm has a weathervane topped with a woman wearing a crown and holding a pinecone; the crown can loosely be Christianized as the "Queen of Heaven" while the pinecone is a common ancient pre-Abrahamic motif as we will see later.
The "knots" imagery is a peculiar one without a Christian basis, but employs native Germanic imagery of individual fate or destiny, called Urlag in Old High German, symbolically "spinning" and "weaving" into the broader Web of Wurt. Etymology provides a fuller meaning of this symbolism: Respectively, Proto-Indo-European *wert- "to turn, rotate" and Germanic *wirþ- "to come to pass, to become, to be due"; and Proto-Germanic *uz- "out" + *laga "situation, law". Thus describing fate in terms of Natural Law, not a fixed "fate" in later Abrahamic notions.
Within this role, Zisa and other goddesses of fate or destiny loosen the "knots and tangles" of troubles, smoothing the way to prosperity and well-being. Zisa undoes Urlag if one's cause is just (Schreiwer and Eckhart, 72-74), much like her husband Ziu is also associated with justice. In our ancient Germanic lore, "weaving" and "spinning" also had shamanic/magical connotations, but this imagery survived the literalist Christians who failed to see the deeper symbolism behind such imagery, which they reduced to actual "weaving" and "spinning" of yarn.
Renaissance as a Pagan Revival
Some of my favorite contemporary thinkers have made a compelling case that the Renaissance was a Pagan revival, with its classical ideas and laying the foundations for the Romantic period when there was a celebration of folk customs and ethnic traditions. This would not necessarily be conscious (as indeed few Renaissance thinkers would have proclaimed themselves Pagan), but rather operating on what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious, which boiled forth through new trends in European societies.
German humanists from the Renaissance associated the images of various women around Augsburg with Zisa, including some in churches and some dug up in the city (Kohl, 21-29). This includes a red-dressed woman in the Augsburg Town Hall's Golden Hall (Pennick, 107-108), which is interesting because Ziu is also associated with red - another expression of the divine marriage of masculine and feminine, especially pertinent here since Ziu being the Sky Father would naturally have an Earth Mother as his consort.
The local humanists tended to extol Greco-Roman mythological figures, so that depictions of Medusa that appeared in Augsburg from this time can be seen as veiled references to the native Zisa, including the Medusenhaupt that was at the evangelisch Ulrichskirche. The humanist and historian Markus Welser (1558-1614) referred to the "great stone Götz, which can be seen to this day above the gate of St. Ulrich's Church." In 1457, the local Benedictine monk Sigmund Meisterlin depicted Zisa in his Chronographie Augustensium, illustrated by the councilman Hektor Mülich (1420-1489).
Pinecone: A Symbol of Abundance, Regeneration, and the Third Eye
Aside from the symbolic knots, Zisa is also associated with the pinecone, particularly the Zirbelnuss or Swiss pinecone, which appears on Augsburg's Coat of Arms, called the Stadtpir. The city's original symbol was a bunch of grapes - Augster being a type of grapes, hence a possible origin of the name. Grapes and pinecones are symbolic of fertility and abundance, fitting in with my view that Zisa is a localized version of the Earth Mother goddess. The pinecone also symbolizes protection, regeneration, and continuity.
The pinecone motif commonly appeared among the Greeks and Romans as the thrysus, an ivy leaf-covered staff topped with a pinecone. The fertility and wine god known as Dionysus to the Greeks and Bacchus to the Romans was shown with a thrysus and, not surprising given his other quality was ecstasy, Dionysian initiates used it for their mystic rituals. Callimachus, a Greek historian of the 3rd century BCE, described an Athenian sculpture of a dancing maenad - as female followers of Dionysus were called - holding a thrysus and dating to the 5th century. The Romans built a massive bronze pinecone sculpture called the pigna that sat atop the Pantheon.
The Myths are allegories of deeper natural and cosmic forces, not to be taken literally, so that in this way the pinecone symbolizes Zisa as a protectoress over the Swabians. This is because the pinecone's multiple layers protect its delicate seeds. Another layer of meaning (pardon the pun) can be seen in the pineal gland, called such due to its resemblance to the pinecone. Producing melatonin, the pineal gland has a direct connection to sleep and waking states. One's level of melatonin is based on the amount of light one is exposed to, which the ancients recognized through the sacredness of the Sun and deities associated with light-bringing and different aspects of brightness.
However, the fact that the pineal gland releases greater amounts of melatonin when dark shows this interplay of darkness and light. The ancients understood the natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth, that life can come from death as can be observed within nature. Hence, the pinecone was also a symbol of regeneration because it releases its seeds after a fire and from those scattered seeds new life grows. No surprise then that the gland named after this symbol would also have esoteric associations with the Third Eye and thus expanded consciousness. As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without.
Sources:
Grimm, Jakob. Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Stallybrass, Vol. 1. London: George Bell and Sons, 1882.
Grundy, Stephan. "Freyja and Frigg," The Concept of the Goddess. Sandra Billington and Miranda Green, eds. New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 56-67.
Guerber, Hélène Adeline. Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas. London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1908.
Kohl, R. "Die Augsburger Cisa - eine germanische Göttin?," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Leipzig, Vol. 33, 1936, pp. 21-39.
Pennick, Nigel. "The Goddess Zisa," TYR, Atlanta: Ultra Press, Vol. 1, 2002, pp. 107-110.
Pieper, Christoph. "Germany's Glory, Past and Present: Konrad Peutinger's Sermones convivales de mirandis Germanie antiquitatibus and Antiquarian Philology," The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Konrad A. Ottenheym, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp. 485-510.
Schnith, Karl. "Mittelalterliche Augsburger Gründungslegenden," Fälschungen im Mittelalter, München, Vol. 1, 1988, pp. 497-517.
Schreiwer, Robert L. and Ammerili Eckhart. A Dictionary of Urglaawe Terminology. Lulu.com, 2012.
Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall. Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2007.
Wood, Christopher S. "Notation of visual information in the earliest archaeological scholarship," Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Vol. 17, 2001, Nos. 1-2, pp. 94-118.
2nd October 2019
Augsburg. Nestled in the Bavarian part of our cultural region of Schwaben, this is one of the main centers of Swabian heritage and history. A city I want to visit for its historic social housing concept called the Fuggerei, among other sites. This was also the city where my Oma's uncle, Ludwig Schneider, moved to from our ancestral town of Baldern in the Ostalbkreis, so that family memories intertwined with Augsburg.
Now as a Pagan who has been studying our ancient traditions, I have come across a goddess closely associated with Augsburg: Zisa. She is associated with this time of year, her feast day being 28th September, and thus reconstructionist Swabian Pagans could consecrate that day as Zisastag. Although some have denied such a goddess was even revered (Simek, 52; Kohl, 21-39), other scholars have attested to her from surviving medieval texts and folk traditions. She has harvest and fertility connotations, and is also known as consort of the god Ziu, the Sky Father God whose name stemmed from Proto-Germanic *Tiwaz and was known as Týr to the Scandinavians.
 |
| Portrayal of Augsburg from 1550, with the Perlachturm in the background |
Ancient Roots of Augsburg
Zisa is mentioned in at least three medieval manuscripts: Codex Monac and Codex Emmeran from 1135CE, and Suevicarum rerum scriptores by the early 17th-century Swiss jurist Melchior Goldast (Grundy, 85). Her earliest record is the 11th century Latin text Excerptum ex Gallia Historia, a manuscript written by abbots from Ursberg and now held in Wien, wherein its alleged that Augsburg was originally named Cisaris after her. However, another source suggests the original name was Ziusburg, after Ziu who was honored with a special sword dance during which oaths were made (Guerber, 85-86). The Nuremberg Chronicle (1493), better known as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik after its author, has this passage:
"And they chose for themselves the goddess Ziza, whom they believed to be Ceres. After the same goddess the city was named Zizaria. Her temple remained there intact until the time of the Romans, when it fell into ruin. And the city bore the name of a mountain that to this day the inhabitants of Augusta [Augsburg] call the Eisenberg. The city was afterwards protected by the Rhaeti and the Vindelici with walls, turrets and other defenses; and it endured much war at the hands of the Romans. These people always loved freedom and therefore held themselves aloof from the Romans. At a later date the Divine Augustus Octavian sent Titus Ennius, the praetor, with the Marcian Legion, and other generals, against them. In this legion Avar Bogudis, the king's son, a youth trained in weapons among the Greeks and Latins, and Varus (Varro), a tribune of the soldiers, became famous. These besieged the city in the late summer with a large force of Romans, and harassed it in many ways. In this storming Avar the Greek was slain, and he was buried in the village of Creichsaueron. The following inscription has been found indicating his origin and his end. 'The praetor also perished together with his Marcian legion so that few survived that battle who could tell what had taken place. And the destroyed legion gave to the region where the defeat occurred the name that now in the middle of the city is called Perleich [Latin perdita legio 'destroyed legion']'. Thus it is written. The hill here indicates by its name the Roman disaster where the Marcian Legion at once utterly perished. Varus (Varro), whom they called Verres, fled over the water, hid himself in the marshes, and gave his name to Lake Vernensee. Afterwards, that consul died miserably." (Folio XCI Verso)
 |
| Woodcut from the Nuremberg Chronicle |
Commentary
This account is not entirely free from the erroneous, as it repeats the common trope - first invented by the Romans and later repeated by the Christianized Franks - of forging a fictitious link with the ancient Trojans rather than appreciating our ancestors; a motif built upon the three motives of a translatio imperii political agenda, idealizing Greco-Roman Classicism as the measure of "civilization", and a Christianized obsession with the Near East rather than honoring our origins within our own forests, river valleys and mountains. The work also seeks to twist Swabian history into a linear Biblical timeline. Given its close parallels to the event, it seems to be a semi-fictionalized version of the Roman defeat in Teutoburger Wald applied to the Augsburg region.
We do know that Augsburg was "officially" founded as Augusta Vindelicorum in 15BCE, in honor of the Roman Emperor Augustus and named after the local Celtic tribe of the Vindelici. This lends credence to the notion of a pre-Roman history of Augsburg, as the Celts definitely had their own towns which were merely added on by the Romans. I personally came across this trend on travels to Thrace and Anatolia, where I saw Roman-era additions to pre-existing ancient settlements, so why not our Celtic-Germanic ancestors? I would tend to agree with at least one Swabian writer who proposes our origins in Germanic Suebi and Alemanni warriors intermarrying with the Celts who previously settled the region and cultivated the land.
Ceres was a Roman goddess of agriculture and fertility - there were multiple ones, as in other pantheons, to accurately describe the multifaceted complexities of nature cycles - so despite the obsession with interpretatio romana, a valid point could be made that Zisa was a localized equivalent of an agriculture/fertility goddess. The Eisenberg or "iron mountain" could have some credence, since the Danubian Celts were indeed known for their advanced iron and bronze works that were esteemed by the Romans. Perhaps "Perleich" survives in the historic Perlachturm and I wonder if, contrary to a Roman link, its not instead related to the goddess Frau Perchta, known "precisely in those Upper German regions where Holda leaves off, in Swabia, in Alsace, in Switzerland, in Bavaria and Austria" (Grimm, 272).
 |
| Die wilde Jagd |
The events in Augsburg seem to have taken place sometime in the 1st century BCE and the Romans were defeated due to the timing: The day before was Zisa's feast day and the Suebi warriors were still gathered for the occasion. "They built a great temple to give to Ziza the goddess that they worshipped according to pagan customs in those days," declares a 13th-century poem cited by the German folklorist Jakob Grimm. "The temple long stood uninjured until in age its fall was decreed and as from age it passed away the mountain received its name where the work (werck) had stood, is still called today Zizenberck."
Etymology
Generally skeptical, a German religious history scholar named Kohl points out how a nearby hill named Cisunberc or Cisenberg was attested from a charter dated 1300. He nevertheless discounts the Zisa-based etymology by pointing out Old German glosses to Latin texts called Augsburg "Agistadium" or "Eistetin", which he suggests derived from the masculine personal name Agi/Egi. There could be some credence to this, if we consider Egi as a common name among Swabian nobility, while Agi seems to be a localized version of the Greek female name Agatha.
Kohl proposed that Zisa/Cisa was invented by the author of the Excerptum - despite being a Christian abbot - as an explanation for the place-name Cisenberg. Rather, he suggests that its origin was Cisaeara, "altar of Cisa" in Latin; or that it derived from "mountain on which siskins [zeisige, a type of finch bird] nest" or "mountain in the form of a breast (zitze)." But this latter explanation would not necessarily discount a goddess named Zisa, as breasts were symbolic of fertility goddesses - certainly within our Swabian region, going back at least to the "Venus of Hohle Fels" figurine 35,000-40,000 years ago, made from mammoth ivory and suggesting the prehistoric roots in "Our Lady of the Mammoth".
 |
| Venus of Hohle Fels |
"Isis of the Suebi"?
Worldwide, the Earth was traditionally personified as a goddess who nurtured her children and was fertilized by the Sky who was personified as a god. This Earth Goddess was known under different localized names. In Germania, the Roman Cornelius Tacitus alluded to an earth goddess known as "Isis of the Suebi", whose identity is unknown but likely a local goddess with whom he found some common qualities as the Egyptian goddess Isis, as it was the Roman custom to compare deities of different cultures.
Nigel Pennick regards Zisa as a localized Earth Goddess, while Grimm thought Tacitus' "Isis of the Suebi" was actually a reference to Zisa (Grimm, 298-299). A predecessor in this view seemed to be Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547), a German humanist and jurist who also served as a senior official in the municipal government of the Imperial City of Augsburg, who earlier proposed the same connection (Pieper, 500).
I discount Grimm's idea that "Isis of the Suebi" was Zisa, as her cult involved a ship and that symbolism does not seem to have been common in the region. It seems most likely to have been the Frisian goddess Nehalennia, whose emblem was the ship. So that was a Northern German figure, perhaps indicative again of Tacitus' erroneous knowledge of the different practices of the Germanic tribes. For unlike the imperial centralized Roman Cult, while there were common deities among all the Germanic or Celtic tribes, there were also many localized deities as seen for example in the various Matronae.
 |
| Matronae altar from Rheinland |
Zisa Remnants Surviving Under Christianization
There were many surviving remnants of Zisa worship, long after Christianization. Grimm mentioned a pagan Swabian Duke named Esenerius, who built a chapel in his castle in Hillomondt (now called Kempten), in the southern region of Schwaben, with a venerated image of Zisa (Pennick, 109). A plaque on a church outside the city walls said: "Impious worship long ago defiled the Gallusberg, and then offered it to you, Ziza" (Wood, 95).
The catholic Church of St. Peter am Perlach was built over Zisa's temple grounds at Zisenburg. The Suebi knew Tuesday as "Zistag" in her honor, a name banned by the Diocese of Augsburg to eradicate our indigenous traditions and renamed it "Aftermontag" (Schreiwer and Eckhart, 72-74), much like it renamed Wednesday "Mittwoch" from "Wotanstag". Nevertheless, the names of our European deities generally survive in days of the week.
 |
| "Mary, Undoer of Knots" |
Much like various pre-Christian goddesses were identified with the Virgin Mary, so too was Zisa Christianized as "Maria Knotenlöserin" (Mary Untier/Undoer of Knots). Her image as such was portrayed in the Baroque "Mary, Undoer of Knots" (1700) by Augsburg painter Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner (1625-1705). This painting is currently inside St. Peter am Perlach, whose Perlachturm has a weathervane topped with a woman wearing a crown and holding a pinecone; the crown can loosely be Christianized as the "Queen of Heaven" while the pinecone is a common ancient pre-Abrahamic motif as we will see later.
The "knots" imagery is a peculiar one without a Christian basis, but employs native Germanic imagery of individual fate or destiny, called Urlag in Old High German, symbolically "spinning" and "weaving" into the broader Web of Wurt. Etymology provides a fuller meaning of this symbolism: Respectively, Proto-Indo-European *wert- "to turn, rotate" and Germanic *wirþ- "to come to pass, to become, to be due"; and Proto-Germanic *uz- "out" + *laga "situation, law". Thus describing fate in terms of Natural Law, not a fixed "fate" in later Abrahamic notions.
 |
| Web of Wurt....and the Runes |
Within this role, Zisa and other goddesses of fate or destiny loosen the "knots and tangles" of troubles, smoothing the way to prosperity and well-being. Zisa undoes Urlag if one's cause is just (Schreiwer and Eckhart, 72-74), much like her husband Ziu is also associated with justice. In our ancient Germanic lore, "weaving" and "spinning" also had shamanic/magical connotations, but this imagery survived the literalist Christians who failed to see the deeper symbolism behind such imagery, which they reduced to actual "weaving" and "spinning" of yarn.
Renaissance as a Pagan Revival
Some of my favorite contemporary thinkers have made a compelling case that the Renaissance was a Pagan revival, with its classical ideas and laying the foundations for the Romantic period when there was a celebration of folk customs and ethnic traditions. This would not necessarily be conscious (as indeed few Renaissance thinkers would have proclaimed themselves Pagan), but rather operating on what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious, which boiled forth through new trends in European societies.
 |
| Goldener Saal, Augsburg Rathaus |
German humanists from the Renaissance associated the images of various women around Augsburg with Zisa, including some in churches and some dug up in the city (Kohl, 21-29). This includes a red-dressed woman in the Augsburg Town Hall's Golden Hall (Pennick, 107-108), which is interesting because Ziu is also associated with red - another expression of the divine marriage of masculine and feminine, especially pertinent here since Ziu being the Sky Father would naturally have an Earth Mother as his consort.
The local humanists tended to extol Greco-Roman mythological figures, so that depictions of Medusa that appeared in Augsburg from this time can be seen as veiled references to the native Zisa, including the Medusenhaupt that was at the evangelisch Ulrichskirche. The humanist and historian Markus Welser (1558-1614) referred to the "great stone Götz, which can be seen to this day above the gate of St. Ulrich's Church." In 1457, the local Benedictine monk Sigmund Meisterlin depicted Zisa in his Chronographie Augustensium, illustrated by the councilman Hektor Mülich (1420-1489).
 |
| Augsburg Coat of Arms |
Pinecone: A Symbol of Abundance, Regeneration, and the Third Eye
Aside from the symbolic knots, Zisa is also associated with the pinecone, particularly the Zirbelnuss or Swiss pinecone, which appears on Augsburg's Coat of Arms, called the Stadtpir. The city's original symbol was a bunch of grapes - Augster being a type of grapes, hence a possible origin of the name. Grapes and pinecones are symbolic of fertility and abundance, fitting in with my view that Zisa is a localized version of the Earth Mother goddess. The pinecone also symbolizes protection, regeneration, and continuity.
The pinecone motif commonly appeared among the Greeks and Romans as the thrysus, an ivy leaf-covered staff topped with a pinecone. The fertility and wine god known as Dionysus to the Greeks and Bacchus to the Romans was shown with a thrysus and, not surprising given his other quality was ecstasy, Dionysian initiates used it for their mystic rituals. Callimachus, a Greek historian of the 3rd century BCE, described an Athenian sculpture of a dancing maenad - as female followers of Dionysus were called - holding a thrysus and dating to the 5th century. The Romans built a massive bronze pinecone sculpture called the pigna that sat atop the Pantheon.
 |
| The Greek god Dionysus with the thyrsus |
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| Fontana della Pigna, Roma |
The Myths are allegories of deeper natural and cosmic forces, not to be taken literally, so that in this way the pinecone symbolizes Zisa as a protectoress over the Swabians. This is because the pinecone's multiple layers protect its delicate seeds. Another layer of meaning (pardon the pun) can be seen in the pineal gland, called such due to its resemblance to the pinecone. Producing melatonin, the pineal gland has a direct connection to sleep and waking states. One's level of melatonin is based on the amount of light one is exposed to, which the ancients recognized through the sacredness of the Sun and deities associated with light-bringing and different aspects of brightness.
However, the fact that the pineal gland releases greater amounts of melatonin when dark shows this interplay of darkness and light. The ancients understood the natural cycle of birth, death and rebirth, that life can come from death as can be observed within nature. Hence, the pinecone was also a symbol of regeneration because it releases its seeds after a fire and from those scattered seeds new life grows. No surprise then that the gland named after this symbol would also have esoteric associations with the Third Eye and thus expanded consciousness. As Above, So Below. As Within, So Without.
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| Natural mysteries: Just as the pineal gland resembles the pinecone, the ancients instinctively knew the cerebellum resembled tree trunks; encoded it within various spiral symbols like the triskele |
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| A large pinecone from a nearby forest, on part of my ancestor altar |
Sources:
Grimm, Jakob. Teutonic Mythology, trans. James Stallybrass, Vol. 1. London: George Bell and Sons, 1882.
Grundy, Stephan. "Freyja and Frigg," The Concept of the Goddess. Sandra Billington and Miranda Green, eds. New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 56-67.
Guerber, Hélène Adeline. Myths of the Norsemen: From the Eddas and Sagas. London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1908.
Kohl, R. "Die Augsburger Cisa - eine germanische Göttin?," Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, Leipzig, Vol. 33, 1936, pp. 21-39.
Pennick, Nigel. "The Goddess Zisa," TYR, Atlanta: Ultra Press, Vol. 1, 2002, pp. 107-110.
Pieper, Christoph. "Germany's Glory, Past and Present: Konrad Peutinger's Sermones convivales de mirandis Germanie antiquitatibus and Antiquarian Philology," The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture. Karl A.E. Enenkel and Konrad A. Ottenheym, eds. Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp. 485-510.
Schnith, Karl. "Mittelalterliche Augsburger Gründungslegenden," Fälschungen im Mittelalter, München, Vol. 1, 1988, pp. 497-517.
Schreiwer, Robert L. and Ammerili Eckhart. A Dictionary of Urglaawe Terminology. Lulu.com, 2012.
Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology, trans. Angela Hall. Suffolk, England: Boydell and Brewer, 2007.
Wood, Christopher S. "Notation of visual information in the earliest archaeological scholarship," Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, Vol. 17, 2001, Nos. 1-2, pp. 94-118.
Nicely presented, and very well written. As to ship symbolism, the Suebi Angeln traveled by sea to celebrate the festival of Nerthus for hundreds of years off the coast of Norway, before migrating to Augsburg and other Schwaben territories. I suspect Nerthus and Zisa/Cisa refer to the same concepts of Suebi spiritually. The Wessobrunn prayer of the 8th century attest to the Cyowarist.
ReplyDeleteThank you! You are better informed than me on our pre-migration period. Has the island where the Nerthus festival occurred been identified? I know Tacitus is vague about the location. I didn't know about the Wessobrunn prayer, so had to research it and can now say you're on to something. Grimm, Hans Ferdinand Massmann, and Karl Blind all suggested its Heathen origin. I found an old source: Karl Blind, "An Old German Poem and a Vedic Hymn," Fraser's Magazine, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., Vol. XV, June 1877,
DeleteDefinitely the mention of the "sky above", which he compares to the "Upper Heaven" of the Eddas, seems to have a link to Ziu and Zisa, especially since it then describes landscape. Of course he wasn't Heathen and apparently knew nothing about Tiwaz. The words about "nothing" in the beginning, seems to be describing the primordial void and the chaos in the Voluspa's "creation" story. Blind finds some other traces of polytheism and similar words as the Nibelungen. So thanks for bringing this to my attention and giving me another rabbit hole to research.