The Ancient Germanic Pagan Roots of the Pennsylvania Dutch
>The Pennsylvania Dutch are quite unique in this country, in that they have tenaciously clung to a great many of the peasant traditions which their ancestors had brought with them from the Old Country.
This adherence of the Pennsylvania Dutch, for more than two centuries, to the native peasant customs of their German forefathers can only be explained by the fact that they did not lose their original group consciousness after they had settled in America. Instead of being readily absorbed by the new environment, as were the countless individual settlers from other German, and non-German, peasant communities of Europe, the Pennsylvania Dutch possessed in the peasant traditions of their old homeland a cultural force that was sufficiently strong to shape their new environment into a peasant community of distinctive character. In achieving this, they were substantially aided by a very happy coincidence: the amazing similarity between their old homeland and Pennsylvania. This similarity not only extends to the physiognomy of the landscape but also to climate and soil conditions. There is hardly a region in the Keystone State, which has not an almost exact counterpart somewhere in southwestern Germany. Such exceptionally good fortune allowed them to continue in their new home, with a minimum of adjustments, where they had left off in the Old Country. Nothing, in the new environment, was so essentially different as to estrange them from their native peasant views and practices.
The barn symbols here discussed occur in America exclusively with the Pennsylvania Dutch peasantry. Hence one may expect some light on their origin and significance from analogous occurrences in German peasant art which, like the peasant art of any part of Europe, is a depository of prehistoric and pagan values otherwise long obliterated.
There is ample evidence that these various symbols that occur in European peasant art, inclusive of the Pennsylvania Dutch area, have their origin in a Cult of the Sun that during the Bronze Age was practiced ‘in Ireland on the west and throughout the greater part of Europe.’
The most careful and methodical exploration of Bronze Age sites, throughout the entire European continent, over many decades, has proved that ‘the Sun Cult must have been in honor throughout Europe for at least 1,500 years, and was consequently one of the most enduring religions the world has known.
>Cont. at //renegadetribune.com/the-ancient-european-roots-of-pennsylvania-dutch-barn-symbols/