GERINI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA. – Pedagogue, b. at Vessalico (Imperia), 9 Feb. 1859, d. at Turin, 13 Feb. 1916. From 1884 he carried on his work as a teacher of literary subjects in the secondary schools of Cuneo, Rome and Turin; and as a scholar and writer in the field of pedagogy. An admirer and continuator of G. Allievo, he is linked to the best traditions of the Piedmontese school of pedagogy.
His principal work is Gli scrittori pedagogici italiani, nei secc. XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII e XIX (5 vols., Turin 1896-1910), which, while not making any notable contributions from the theoretical point of view nor tracing the evolutionary process of doctrines in their logical development, does however investigate with care the writings of authors, even of secondary importance, collecting a rich store of information, ideas and observations that are useful and indispensable to the historian of Italian pedagogy. He also wrote: Le dottrine pedagogiche di G. Locke (ibid. 1893); Le dottrine pedagogiche di T. Campanella (ibid. 1899); V. Gioberti e le sue idee pedagogiche, in Atti della R. Accademia di scienze di Torino, 1907, pp. 611-34; Le dottrine pedagogiche di M. T. Cicerone, L. A. Seneca, M. F. Quintiliano e Plinio il Giovane, C. Claudiano, Giuliano imperatore e Plutarco, preceded by a study on education among the Romans (ibid. 1914).
Prehistoric origins (Mesolithic and Chalcolithic periods). The chronology of the walls has been classified as follows. The city founded in 3000 was enclosed by a massive wall (A) in the northern part of the Tell; from 2100 to
The propagation of Christianity among the Germanic peoples was carried out with the utmost prudence and tolerance, even allowing pagan customs and rites to survive in some places, as among the Anglo-Saxons and Scandinavians. In other cases, where conversion was also and above all a political matter, as among the Frisians and Saxons during the time of Charlemagne, it was imposed with the rigor of laws and sometimes with the violent destruction of everything that recalled the primitive faith. These differing approaches explain not only why the picture of paganism that can be reconstructed today varies significantly among the different tribes, but also why the sources from which information can be drawn are so diverse. For the territories of Germany proper, one can say that there is only indirect information—apart from some archaeological finds of dubious interpretation and a few literary fragments that are also controversial—namely, the works of ancient writers, especially Tacitus, who provide isolated and often superficial information. Several medieval historians of the Germanic tribes—Jordanes for the Goths, Gregory of Tours for the Franks, Paul the Deacon for the Lombards, Widukind for the Saxons—and the biographies of the missionaries who evangelized the Germanic peoples—St. Columbanus, St. Gall, St. Boniface—lack precision, and the latter, understandably, are not always objective. For the regions of Northern Europe, however, where, as mentioned, paganism survived until after the year 1000, there is an incomparable wealth of direct sources, namely a substantial national literature (v. EDDA), which not only contains a complex divine saga developed organically but also preserves a complete cosmogonic and eschatological doctrine. Such a so-called Nordic mythology, however, cannot be taken as a basis for reconstructing common Germanic paganism without great caution, as it is sometimes not only the result of independent developments but has also often undergone significant foreign influences, particularly Christian ones. It does not represent a body of popular beliefs but rather a learned and aristocratic poetry of a particular epoch.
At the time of their entry into history, the Germanic peoples worshipped several anthropomorphic deities, already characterized by specific ethical traits and simple forms of worship that were not rudimentary. These deities were honored in crude wooden temples that originally lacked roofs, as sacred groves, consecrated trees, and wooden or stone idols sufficed, to which sacrifices of fruit, animals, and often human victims were offered. The priests were not organized into a special caste; their dignity may have been the prerogative of elders and prominent families, or even of the princes themselves. The collective name of the gods was *Æsir*. Their number varied according to region and era: while poets sometimes fixed it at 9, 12, or even 14, Tacitus speaks of three principal deities, a view supported by numerous other testimonies, including the famous Saxon "abjuration formula" of the 8th century, which lists the names of the gods to which neophytes had to renounce upon receiving baptism—Donar, Wodan, and Ziu. The Romans identified these with Jupiter, Mercury, and Mars, respectively, and in the North, they were known as Thor, Odin, and Tyr. The supremacy over the others and over the entire celestial community was held now by one, now by the other of the first two. In any case, this was a decidedly polytheistic system. The hypotheses of some scholars who see indications of monotheism either at the beginning of Germanic religious thought or as a final tendency in its development, or as a latent characteristic, are unsustainable. Instead, it is a fact that all three were, to varying degrees, war deities, and their principal attributes were related to warfare—a trait that may not have been original but was acquired through the turbulent events and centuries of migration that exalted the warrior instincts of these peoples. This left a dark and bellicose mark on their divine saga, just as it provided the motif for the tragic fatalism that permeates their national epic.
Of these three deities, Ziu is certainly the oldest, representing the original sky god of Aryan antiquity, common to all Indo-European peoples, as evidenced by etymological concordance. By the historical period among the Germans, however, he had already assumed the character and attributes of a war god, so much so that Tacitus, who mentions his cult among certain peoples and recounts that victors consecrated all the men of the defeated army to him, identified him with Mars. Similarly, when the Germans of the Rhine region in the 3rd and 4th centuries felt the need to translate the Latin names of the days of the week into German, replacing the names of the Roman deities after which they were named, Ziu took the place of Mars to render *dies Martis*: *Ziostag* and, in the North, *Tysdagr*. Whether Ziu, under the name of Irmin, as the eponymous ancestor of the Erminones, should be identified with the enigmatic Irminsul or *columna universalis*—a gigantic tree trunk venerated especially among the Saxons but also elsewhere, one of which was destroyed by Charlemagne in 772 near Eresburg—or whether the term *Irmin* lends a superlative sense to compounds without any relation to a particular deity remains uncertain.
Donar, who in the North bore the name Thor, enjoyed widespread cult. A god of thunder, as his name indicates, he was first mistakenly identified by Tacitus with Hercules and later correctly with Jupiter, though he only later and solely in Scandinavia held the first place among all the gods; in other regions, he seems to have always held a position inferior to Ziu and then to Wodan. He was considered the strongest and most valiant of the gods and was invoked by warriors before battle. Animal sacrifices were offered to him, and trees were consecrated to him, such as the oak of Geismar, felled by St. Boniface, whose wood was used to build an oratory dedicated to St. Peter. In the North, he is the god of the common people, protector of the home, property, and nation. As the personification of natural force used in defense of the weak, he appears as the invincible vanquisher of hostile giants, the avenger, and the protector of the divine community. Depicted as a tall, robust man with a long red beard, armed with a
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**GERMANS, RELIGION OF - Pagan votive altar of the Matronae Germaniae found beneath the floor of the Romanesque crypt of St. Cassius Collegiate Church in Bonn.**
(From Rivista di Archeologia cristiana, 9 [1932], p. 135)
**GERMANS, RELIGION OF - Pagan votive altar of the Matronae Germaniae found beneath the floor of the Romanesque crypt of St. Cassius Collegiate Church in Bonn.**
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hammer, he was the patron of farmers and sailors, and his cult spread widely among the Germanic peoples. The day of the week dedicated to him, Thursday (*dies Jovis*), retained his name in all Germanic languages except in the southern regions, i.e., in modern standard German, where it became *Donnerstag*. This fact may serve as evidence that, at the time the Latin names were introduced, the populations of the territories that would later become High German did not practice the cult of Wodan.
Beside Odin, from the earliest testimonies, stands a female divinity, Frija; but apart from a Lombard legend transmitted by Paul the Deacon, in which she appears under the name of Frea, and a few magical formulae, she is very poorly documented outside the Scandinavian countries, where she took the name of Frigg, and is the goddess of love, marital happiness, and the home: she therefore corresponds, as the companion of the supreme god, more to Venus than to Juno, and indeed she took the latter’s place in all the Germanic names for Friday.
Very little, indeed nothing more than the Latinized name, is known of other divinities, probably local, mentioned by Tacitus: Tafana, worshipped by the Marsi; Nehalennia, who is depicted on some votive stones; Badhuenna, to whom a grove was sacred among the Frisians; a god Requelivahanus, mentioned on a stone of the 11th century; and others besides. Particular mention, however, must be made of the goddess Nerthus, whom Tacitus identifies with Mother Earth, worshipped among certain peoples of Jutland, and whose sanctuary, which was the national temple of the Ingvaeones, stood in the midst of a forest on a lonely island in the Baltic, and in which was kept the chariot on which the statue of the goddess was solemnly carried about, perhaps to celebrate the fertility of the earth and the awakening of vegetation. Her cult shows a great concordance with that of the god Njord and his son Freyr in the Nordic sources, the latter of whom sometimes occupied a prominent place in Sweden beside Thor and Odin. They did not, however, belong to the divine race of the Æsir, but to that of the Vanir, a race equally powerful, though more barbarous and crude, who waged war on the Æsir and then reconciled themselves by a pact whereby two of them were received into the council of the Æsir, who in exchange gave up two of their own. This war of two divine races is certainly a reflection of a cultural struggle between the followers of an ancient faith and those of a foreign religion, perhaps the immigration of the cult of Odin into Sweden, where the worship of Freyr was already ancient, and the consequent fusion of the two cults. Also characteristic of the North, and therefore later and independent creations, are other divinities, of whom it will suffice here to mention Baldr, god of purity and innocence and martyr to a fatal betrayal, whose death will be the sad prelude to the end of the world; Loki, originally a fire-spirit, genius of evil and father of a terrible brood, among whom Hel, goddess of death, personification, that is, of the ancient Germanic concept of a subterranean place that receives the souls of all the dead, and later, when Nordic imagination had created Valhalla for heroes who died in battle, only of those who died of old age or disease. Finally, even the vague and rudimentary ideas of the ancient Germans about the origin of the gods and races underwent extraordinary development in Nordic literature, where, partly through the work of the people and partly through that of the poets, they were systematized into a veritable doctrine embracing the entire divine saga in a grand picture containing the individual myths as individual acts of the terrible universal drama. They have been handed down especially in the first book of the Edda, the Völuspá, which is at once the book of origins and the prophecy of the end (v. COSMOGONY).
After the first being, the ancestor of the first Æsir, Odin, and then Vili and Vé, had been born, they built Ásgard, or the garden of the Æsir, where for a long time they lived a life of joy in the golden age. But their fate is darkened from the day when Loki, by his cunning, brings about the death of the righteous Baldr, and finally hurls them towards the catastrophe, towards the “twilight of the gods,” in which, in a terrible battle between the Æsir and the hostile powers, all perish, while the world is consumed by fire and every living thing disappears. But from the vast ashes a new earth emerges, fairer than the old, on which grain grows without the hand of man having sown II.
