Elite Germanic Pagans Buried ‘Devil’s Money’ as Offerings for Their Gods at This Ancient Cult Site

Researchers in the eastern Netherlands have discovered an ancient site used for cult rituals, as evidenced by structural remains and deposits of silver and gold coins and jewelry. This so-called “devil’s money,” which was left as offerings for pagan gods, may represent some of the last such tributes made by locals before they converted to Christianity in the eighth century.

Located in the village of Hezingen, some 80 miles east of Amsterdam, the site was excavated in 2020 and 2021, after metal detectorists unearthed some coins in the area. According to a statement, the site was likely built in the early seventh century and used for around 100 years by local pagans. The researchers detailed their findings in a study published in the journal Medieval Archaeology last December.

“The people here were undoubtedly Germanic,” lead author Jan-Willem de Kort, an archaeologist at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. Hezingen lies within the territory of the Saxons, the former residents of modern-day Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.

Buried at the Hezingen site, researchers discovered 25 gold coins, as well as gold pendants and a fragment of a silver earring. As de Kort tells Live Science, these treasures were buried in several deposits that might have constituted offerings to a pagan god—possibly Wodan, the Germanic persona of the Norse god Odin.

Based on the positions of postholes, researchers believe the site was composed of a row of wooden posts and a large boulder. The posts would have “aligned with the spring and autumn equinoxes,” indicating that the site’s builders may have used it to conduct “seasonal rituals, possibly related to sowing and harvests,” the statement notes.

“The four rows of poles are [aligned] exactly east-west,” says de Kort in the statement. “Because of the high elevation, the sun rises here at the spring equinox exactly in the east.”

According to the study, cult sites like Hezingen are rare, but they’re crucial to understanding how Europeans’ ritualistic behaviors changed as the continent slowly converted from paganism to Christianity, triggered by the conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine I in the early fourth century.

Hezingen once lay just north of the Roman Empire’s northern border, the Lower German Limes. Germanic peoples repeatedly attacked that border and took back the land Rome had conquered, long before the Hezingen site was built in the 600s. But by the late eighth century, Christian missionaries like Plechelmus and Lebuinus had spread the gospel to Hezingen, and the region’s first Christian churches were built, says de Kort in the statement.

As missionaries arrived in Germania, they recorded the habits of local pagans, writing that in order to convert to Christianity, these individuals needed to renounce their old gods and stop offering them “devil’s money.”

The Hezingen site’s age may illuminate a key detail of the region’s Christianization process. The site’s wealth of gold and silver artifacts indicates its users were regional elites. They likely sacrificed rare objects to demonstrate their power and status, says de Kort in the statement, whereas “the finds at the other cult sites are probably more the result of personal offerings and thus less precious.”

The fact that the Hezingen site was abandoned in the late seventh or early eighth century—before widespread Christianization in Saxon country—suggests that the region’s elites were some of the first people to convert to Christianity. If the cult site wasn’t voluntarily abandoned, the paper posits, it might have been looted by thieves or destroyed by Christian missionaries.

As the researchers write in the study, “The inhabitants of the area were probably aware of this new religion, which was all-exclusive and did not tolerate competition.”

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Sonja Anderson is a writer and reporter based in Chicago.