Seeresses of the Germanic World

A thousand years of prophetic women

From the first Roman reports to the last Icelandic sagas, one figure appears again and again among the Germanic peoples: a woman who sees what others cannot, and who is listened to.

This page follows that figure through the historical record. For her craft, and for its modern revival, see Seidr and the Seeress.

The priestesses of the Cimbri

The earliest account is also the grimmest. Around 100 BCE the Cimbri, a people from the far north, fought their way across Europe and destroyed several Roman armies. The Greek geographer Strabo records that they were accompanied by priestesses who were also seers: gray-haired women in white, with linen cloaks pinned at the shoulder, bronze belts, and bare feet.

These women, Strabo says, met the prisoners of war sword in hand, led them to a great bronze cauldron, and read the future from their blood. We have no way to test the story, and Roman writers enjoyed describing the savagery of their enemies. But it shows that from the first moment Germanic peoples enter written history, women are prominent among their religious specialists.

Veleda

The best-documented seeress of antiquity is Veleda of the Bructeri, a people living east of the lower Rhine. In 69 CE the Batavian leader Civilis raised a revolt against Rome. Veleda foretold that the Germans would triumph and the legions be destroyed. When that came to pass, her authority became immense.

Tacitus, who was a boy at the time and wrote within living memory of these events, describes how she was approached. She lived in a tower. No one was allowed to see or speak to her directly; one of her kinsmen carried questions up and answers down, "like the messenger of a god." When the city of Cologne negotiated with a neighboring tribe, both sides agreed to take Civilis and Veleda as arbiters. A captured Roman flagship was towed up the river Lippe as a gift to her.

Her name may itself be a title, related to a Celtic word for a seer. She was eventually taken by the Romans, around 77 CE. A short, mocking Greek poem found on a marble fragment in Italy suggests that she ended her days there, in the service of a temple.

Albruna, Ganna, and Waluburg

Veleda was not alone, and she was not the first. Tacitus says that before her the Germans had honored a seeress whose name is usually read as Albruna, "and many others." The name, if the reading is right, means something like "one who has the secret knowledge of the elves."

Ganna succeeded Veleda as the leading seeress in Germany. The historian Cassius Dio reports that in the reign of the emperor Domitian she came before the emperor together with Masyos, king of the Semnones, was received with honor, and returned home. A seeress, in other words, took part in an embassy to the emperor alongside a king.

Waluburg is known from a single remarkable object: a piece of broken pottery from the second century CE, found on the island of Elephantine in southern Egypt. It carries a list of names in Greek, and among them is "Waluburg, sibyl of the Semnones." How a seeress of a people from the river Elbe came to be on the Nile we do not know. One suggestion is that she served with Germanic troops in the Roman army. The first part of her name probably means "staff," which is the mark of the seeress a thousand years later in the North.

Gambara and the Haliurunnae

Among the Lombards, the wise woman Gambara is remembered as the mother of the people's first leaders and the one who won them the favor of the goddess Frea. Her story is told on our page about early Germanic society. Her name, too, may contain a word for staff.

The Gothic historian Jordanes preserves a darker memory. He tells how a Gothic king found among his people certain women called Haliurunnae, a word that seems to mean those who know the secrets of the dead, and drove them into the wilderness. The story is hostile and legendary, but the Gothic word is real, and it shows that such women were known among the eastern Germanic peoples as well.

Thiota

The figure of the prophetic woman did not vanish with conversion, though what she prophesied became Christian. The Annals of Fulda record that in 847 a woman named Thiota came from Alemannia to the city of Mainz, declaring that the end of the world had been revealed to her and would come that very year. She gathered a large following of ordinary people, and, the annalist admits with dismay, of clergy too. She was brought before a council of bishops, where she confessed that a priest had put her up to it for gain, and she was publicly flogged for presuming to preach.

Thiota was not a heathen seeress, and we should not make her one. But the account shows a woman who claimed to speak for the holy drawing crowds in a Christian city more than seven centuries after Veleda, and it shows how the new authorities dealt with her.

The volva of the North

In the Norse sources, written in Iceland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the seeress is called a volva or spakona. She appears at every level of the literature.

• In myth. In Voluspa, Odin seeks out a volva to learn the fate of the world. In another poem he rides to the gate of Hel and raises a dead seeress from her grave to interpret his son's dreams. The highest god goes to a woman when he needs to know.
• In legend. A seeress named Heid tells the hero Arrow-Odd that his own horse will be the death of him, and nothing he does can prevent it.
• In the family sagas. Seeresses travel between farms in winter, foretelling the season and the fortunes of the household. The fullest account, of Thorbjorg in Greenland, is described on our seidr page.

The sagas, written by Christians, often treat these women with suspicion. They never treat them as unimportant.

What the pattern tells us

These accounts come from different centuries, different languages, and writers who knew nothing of one another. They agree on the essentials. The seer is a woman. She is set apart: in a tower, on a high seat, at the edge of the community. She is often marked by a staff. And she is consulted on matters of the highest public importance, by men who hold power.

Whatever else is uncertain about the old religion, this is not. For at least a thousand years, among the Germanic peoples, the voice of the holy was very often a woman's voice.