Opera provides a barometer of well-informed popular European culture in the early 19th century: in 1817 Giovanni Pacini brought druids to the stage in Trieste with an opera to a libretto by Felice Romani about a druid priestess, La Sacerdotessa d'Irminsul ("The Priestess of Irminsul").
The Saxon pagan religion appears to have focussed on the worship of the Irminsul or "great pillar"; a divine tree that connected Heaven and Earth and is thought to have existed at a site close to modern Obermarsberg.