Die Stunde der Seherin: Historischer Roman (German Edition)

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Some bourgeois and petty bourgeois in particular felt threatened by progress, by the abnormal growth of the cities, and by economic concentration. These anxieties were compounded by the increasingly bitter quarrels among the nations of the empire which were, in their turn, eroding the precarious balance of the multi-national state. Such fears gave rise to defensive ideologies, offered by their advocates as panaceas for a threatened world. That some individuals sought a sense of status and security in doctrines of German identity and racial virtue may be seen as reaction to the medley of nationalities at the heart of the empire.

Widerwartig war mir das Rassenkonglomerat, das die Reichshauptstadt zeigte, widerwartig dieses game Volkergemischvon Tschechen, Polen, Ungam, Ruthenen, Serben und Kroaten. Mir erschien die Riesenstadt als die Verkorperung der Blutschande. The city seemed the very embodiment of racial infamy. Its principal ingredients have been identified as Gnosticism, the Hermetic treatises on alchemy and magic, Neo- Platonism, and the Cabbala, all originating in the eastern Mediterranean area during the first few centuries AD. Gnosticism properly refers to the beliefs of certain heretical sects among the early Christians that claimed to posses gnosis, or special esoteric knowledge of spiritual matters.

Although their various doctrines differed in many respects, two common Gnostic themes exist: The Gnostic sects disappeared in the fourth century, but their ideas inspired the dualistic Manichaean religion of the second century and also the Hermetica. These Greek texts were composed in Egypt between the third and fifth centuries and developed a synthesis of Gnostic ideas, Neoplatonism and cabbalistic theosophy. Since these mystical doctrines arose against a background of cultural and social change, a correlation has been noted between the proliferation of the sects and the breakdown of the stable agricultural order of the late Roman Empire.

Prominent humanists and scholar magicians edited the old classical texts during the Renaissance and thus created a modern corpus of occult specu- lation. However, a reaction to the rationalist Enlightenment, taking the form of a quickening romantic temper, an interest in the Middle Ages and a desire for mystery, encouraged a revival of occultism in Europe from about Germany boasted several renowned scholar magicians in the Renaissance, and a number of secret societies devoted to Rosicrucianism, theosophy, and alchemy also flourished there from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

However, the impetus for the neo-romantic occult revival of the nineteenth century did not arise in Germany. It is attributable rather to the reaction against the reign of materialist, rationalist and positivist ideas in the utilitarian and industrial cultures of America and England. The modern German occult revival owes its inception to the popularity of theosophy in the Anglo-Saxon world during the s. Here theosophy refers to the international sectarian movement deriving from the activities and writings of the Russian adventuress and occultist, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky Her colourful life and travels in the s and s, her clairvoyant powers and penchant for supernatural phenomena, her interest in American spiritualism during the s, followed by her foundation of the Theosophical Society at New York in and the subsequent removal of its operations to India between and , have all been fully documented in several biographies.

Madame Blavatsky s first book, Isis Unveiled , was less an outline of her new religion than a rambling tirade against the rationalist and materialistic culture of modern Western civilization. Her use of traditional esoteric sources to discredit present-day beliefs showed clearly how much she hankered after ancient religious truths in defiance of contemporary' agnosticism and modern science.

In this enterprise she drew upon a range of secondary sources treating of pagan mythology and mystery religions, Gnosticism, the Hermetica, and the arcane lore of the Renaissance scholars, the Rosicrucians and odier secret fraternities. Coleman has shown that her work comprises a sustained and frequent plagiarism of about one hundred contemporary texts, chiefly relating to ancient and exotic religions, demonology, Freemasonry and the case for spiritualism.

Her fascination with Egypt as the fount of all wisdom arose from her enthusiastic reading of the English author Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. His later works, Zanoni 1 , A Strange Story 1 , and The Coming Race , also dwelt on esoteric initiation and secret fraternities dedicated to occult knowledge in a way which exercised an extra- ordinary fascination on the romantic mind of the nineteenth century. This work betrayed her plagiarism again but now her sources were mainly contemporary works on Hinduism and modern science. This new interest in Indian lore may reflect her sensitivity to changes in the direction of scholarship: Now the East rather than Egypt was seen as the source of ancient wisdom.

Later theosophical doctrine conse- quendy displays a marked similarity to the religious tenets of Hinduism. The Secret Doctrine claimed to describe the activities of God from the beginning of one period of universal creation until its end, a cyclical process which continues indefinitely over and over again. The story related how the present universe was born, whence it emanated, what powers fashion it, whither it is progressing, and what it all means. The first volume Cosmogenesis oudined the scheme according to which the primal unity of an unmanifest divine being differentiates itself into a multiformity of consciously evolving beings that gradually fill the universe.

The divine being manifested itself initially through an emanation and three subsequent Logoi: In the first round the universe was characterized by the predominance of fire, in the second by air, in the third by water, in the fourth by earth, and in the others by ether. This sequence reflected the cyclical fall of the universe from divine grace over the first four rounds and its following redemption over the next three, before everything contracted once more to the point of primal unity for the start of a new major cycle.

Madame Blavatsky illustrated the stages of the cosmic cycle with a variety of esoteric symbols, including triangles, triskelions, and swastikas. So extensive was her use of this latter Eastern sign of fortune and fertility that she included it in her design for the seal of the Theosophical Society.

This electro- spiritual force was in tune with contemporary vitalist and scientific thought. The second volume Anthropogenesis attempted to relate man to this grandiose vision of the cosmos. Not only was humanity assigned an age of far greater antiquity than that conceded by science, but it was also integrated into a scheme of cosmic, physical, and spiritual evolution. These theories were partly derived from late nineteenth- century scholarship concerning palaeontology, inasmuch as Blavatsky adopted a racial theory of human evolution.

She extended her cyclical doctrine with the assertion that each round witnessed the rise and fall of seven consecutive root-races, which descended on the scale of spiritual development from the first to the fourth, becoming increasingly enmeshed in the material world the Gnostic notion of a Fall from Light into Darkness was quite explicit , before ascending through progressively superior root-races from the fifth to the seventh. According to Blavatsky, present humanity constituted the fifth root- race upon a planet that was passing through the fourth cosmic round, so that a process of spiritual advance lay before the species.

The fifth root-race was called the Aryan race and had been preceded by the fourth root-race of the Atlanteans, which had largely perished in a flood that submerged their mid-Atlantic continent. The Adanteans had wielded psychic forces with which our race was not familiar, their gigantism enabled them to build Cyclopean structures, and they possessed a superior technology based upon the successful exploitation of Fohat. The third Lemurian root-race flourished on a continent which had lain in the Indian Ocean.

The individual human ego was regarded as a tiny fragment of the divine being. Through reincarnation each ego pursued a cosmic journey through the rounds and the root- races which led it towards eventual reunion with the divine being whence it had originally issued.

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This path of coundess rebirths also recorded a story of cyclical redemption: The process of reincarnation was fulfilled according to the principle of karma, whereby good acts earned their performer a superior reincarnation and bad acts an inferior reincarnation. This chiliastic vision supplemented the psychological appeal of belonging to a vast cosmic order.

These adepts were not gods but rather advanced members of our own evolutionary group, who had decided to impart their wisdom to the rest of Aryan mankind through their chosen representative, Madame Blavatsky. Like her masters, she also claimed an exclusive authority on the basis of her occult knowledge or gnosis. Her account of prehistory frequently invoked the sacred authority of elite priesthoods among the root- races of the past.

When the Lemurians had fallen into iniquity and sin, only a hierarchy of the elect remained pure in spirit. This remnant became the Lemuro- Atlantean dynasty of priest-kings who took up their abode on the fabulous island of Shamballah in the Gobi Desert.


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Firstly, the fact of a God, who is omnipresent, eternal, boundless and immutable. Secondly, the rule of periodicity, whereby all creation is subject to an endless cycle of destruction and rebirth. These rounds always terminate at a level spiritually superior to their starting-point. Thirdly, there exists a fundamental unity between all individual souls and the deity, between the microcosm and the macrocosm.

Only the hazy promise of occult initiation shimmering through its countless quo- tations from ancient beliefs, lost apocryphal writings, and the traditional Gnostic and Hermetic sources of esoteric wisdom can account for the success of her doctrine and the size of her following amongst the educated classes of several countries. Theosophy offered an appealing mixture of ancient religious ideas and new concepts borrowed from the Darwinian theory of evolution and modern science. This syncretic faith thus possessed the power to comfort certain individuals whose traditional outlook had been upset by the discrediting of orthodox religion, by the very rationalizing and de- mystifying progress of science and by the culturally dislocative impact of rapid social and economic change in the late nineteenth century.

Mosse has noted that theosophy typified the wave of anti-positivism sweeping Europe at the end of the century and observed that its outre notions made a deeper impression in Germany than in other European countries. Its advent is best understood within a wider neo-romantic protest movement in Wil- helmian Germany known as Lebensreform life reform.

This movement represented a middle-class attempt to palliate the ills of modern life, deriving from the growth of the cities and industry. The political atmosphere of the movement was apparently liberal and left-wing with its interest in land reform, but there were many overlaps with the volkisch movement. Marxian critics have even interpreted it as mere bourgeois escapism from the consequences of capitalism.

In July the first German Theosophical Society was established under the presidency of Wilhelm Hiibbe-Schleiden at Elberfeld, where Blavatsky and her chief collaborator, Henry Steel Olcott, were staying with their theosophical friends, the Gebhards. At this time Hiibbe-Schleiden was employed as a senior civil servant at the Colonial Office in Hamburg. He had travelled widely, once managing an estate in West Africa and was a prominent figure in the political lobby for an expanded German overseas empire. Olcott and Hiibbe-Schleiden travelled to Munich and Dresden to make contact with scattered theosophists and so lay the basis for a German organization.

Unfortunately for Hiibbe-Schleiden, his presidency lapsed when the formal German organization dissolved, once the scandal became more widely publicized following the exodus of the theo- sophists from India in April In Hiibbe-Schleiden stimulated a more serious awareness of occultism in Germany through the publication of a scholarly monthly periodical, Die Sphinx , which was concerned with a discussion of spiritualism, psychical research, and paranormal phenomena from a scientific point of view.

Its principal contributors were eminent psychologists, philosophers and historians. Another important member of the Sphinx circle was Karl Kiesewetter, whose studies in the history of the post-Renaissance esoteric tradition brought knowledge of the scholar magicians, the early modern alchemists and contem- porary occultism to a wider audience.

Besides this scientific current of occultism, there arose in the 1 s a broader German theosophical movement, which derived mainly from the popularizing efforts of Franz Hartmann Hartmann had been born in Donauworth and brought up in Kempten, where his father held office as a court doctor.


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After military service with a Bavarian artillery regiment in , Hartmann began his medical studies at Munich University. After completing his training at St Louis he opened an eye clinic and practised there until He then travelled round Mexico, settled briefly at New Orleans before continuing to Texas in , and in went to Georgetown in Colorado, where he became coroner in Besides his medical practice he claimed to have a speculative interest in gold- and silver-mining.

However, following his discovery of Isis Unveiled l, theosophy replaced spiritualism as his principal diversion. He resolved to visit the theosophists at Madras, travelling there by way of California, Japan and South-East Asia in late While Blavatsky and Olcott visited Europe in early , Hartmann was appointed acting president of the Society during their absence. He remained at the Society headquarters until the theosophists finally left India in April 1 However, once he had established himself as a director of a Lebensreform sanatorium at Hallein near Salzburg upon his return to Europe in , Hartmann began to disseminate the new wisdom of the East to his own countrymen.

In the second half of this decade the first peak in German theosophical publishing occurred. The chief concern of these small books lay with abstruse cosmology, karma, spiritualism and the actuality of the hidden mahatmas. In Paul Zillmann founded the Metaphysische Rundschau [Metaphysical Review], a monthly periodical which dealt with many aspects of the esoteric tradition, while also embracing new parapsychological research as a successor to Die Sphinx.

Wright were travelling through Europe to drum up overseas support for their movement. Hartmann supplied a fictional story about his discovery of a secret Rosicrucian monastery in the Bavarian Alps, which fed the minds of readers with romantic notions of adepts in the middle of modern Europe.

This Wald-Loge Forest Lodge was organized into three quasi-masonic grades of initiation. In his capacity of publisher, Paul Zillmann was an important link between the German occult subculture and the Ariosophists of Vienna, whose works he issued under his own imprint between and Theosophy remained a sectarian phenomenon in Germany, typified by small and often antagonistic local groups. In late 1 the editor of the Neue Metaphysische Rundschau received annual reports from branch societies in Berlin, Cottbus, Dresden, Essen, Graz, and Leipzig and bemoaned their evident lack of mutual fraternity.

April ], opened a theosophical centre in the capital, while at Leipzig there existed another centre associated with Arthur Weber, Hermann Rudolf, and Edwin Bohme. While these activities remained largely under the sway of Franz Hartmann and Paul Zillmann, mention must be made of another theosophical tendency in Germany. Steiner published a periodical, Luufer, at Berlin from to Astrological periodicals and a related book-series, the Astrologische Rundschau [Astrological Review ] and the Astrologische Bibliothek [Astrological library ], were also issued here from Meanwhile, other publishers had been entering the field.

Karl Rohm, who had visited the English theosophists in London in the late s, started a firm at Lorch in Wiirttemberg after the turn of the century. Although initially concerned with translations of American material, this firm was to play a vital role in German esoteric publishing during the s.

Georgiewitz-Weitzer, who wrote his own works on modern Rosicrucians, alchemy and occult medicine under the pseudonym G. The Leipzig bookseller Heinrich Tranker issued an occult book- series between and , which included the works of Karl Helmuth and Karl Heise.

From Antonius von der Linden began an ambitious book- series, Geheime Wissenschaften [Secret Sciences] , which consisted of reprints of esoteric texts from the Renaissance scholar Agrippa von Nettesheim, the Rosicrucians and eighteenth-century alchemists, together with commentaries and original texts by modern occultists. From this brief survey it can be deduced that German occult publishing activity reached its second peak between the years and 19 The story of this tradition is closely linked with Friedrich Eckstein The personal secretary of the composer Anton Bruckner, this brilliant polymath cultivated a wide circle of acquain- tance amongst the leading thinkers, writers and musicians of Vienna.

His penchant for occultism first became evident as a member of a Lebensreform group who had practised vegetarianism and discussed the doctrines of Pythagoras and the Neo-Platonists in Vienna at the end of the s. His esoteric interests later extended to German and Spanish mysticism, the legends surrounding the Templars, and the Freemasons, Wagnerian mythology, and oriental religions. In he befriended the Viennese mathematician Oskar Simony, who was impressed by the metaphysical theories of Professor Friedrich Zollner of Leipzig.

Zollner had hypothesized that spiritualistic phenomena confirmed the existence of a fourth dimension. Eckstein and Simony were also associated with the Austrian psychical researcher, Lazar von Hellenbach, who performed scientific experiments with mediums in a state of trance and contributed to Die Sphinx. Following his cordial meeting with Blavatsky in , Eckstein gathered a group of theoso- phists in Vienna. During the late s both Franz Hartmann and the young Rudolf Steiner were habitues of this circle.

Eckstein was also acquainted with the mystical group around the illiterate Christian pietist, Alois Mailander , who was lionized at Kempten and later at Darmstadt by many theosophists, including Hartmann and Hubbe-Schleiden. Eckstein corresponded with Gustav Meyrink, founder of the Blue Star theosophical lodge at Prague in , who later achieved renown as an occult novelist before the First World War. New groups devoted to occultism arose in Vienna after the turn of the century. There existed an Association for Occultism, which maintained a lending-library where its members could consult the works of Zollner, Hellenbach and du Prel.

The Association was close to Philipp Maschlufsky, who began to edit an esoteric periodical, Die Gnosis, from Although modern occultism was represented by many varied forms, its function appears relatively uniform. The attraction of this world-view was indicated at the beginning of this chapter. Occultism had flourished coincident with the decline of the Roman Empire and once again at the waning of the Middle Ages. It exercised a renewed appeal to those who found the world out of joint due to rapid social and ideological changes at the end of the nineteenth century. Certain individuals, whose sentiments and education inclined them towards an idealistic and romantic perspective, were drawn to the modern occult revival in order to find that sense of order, which had been shaken by the dissolution of erstwhile conventions and beliefs.

Since Ariosophy originated in Vienna, in response to the problems of German nationality and metropolitanism, one must consider the particular kind of theosophy which the Ariosophists adapted to their volkisch ideas. Schorske has attempted to relate this cultivation of the self to the social plight of the Viennese bourgeoisie at the end of the century. He suggests that this class had begun by supporting the temple of art as a surrogate form of assimilation into the aristocracy, but ended by finding in it an escape, a refuge from the collapse of liberalism and the emergence of vulgar mass-movements.

When theosophy had become more widely publicized through the German publishing houses at the turn of the century, its ideas reached a larger audience. Whereas the earlier Austrian theosophical movement had been defined by the mystical Christianity and personal gnosticism of cultivated individuals, its later manifestation in Vienna corresponded to a disenchantment with Catholicism coupled with the popularization of mythology, folklore and comparative religion.

The impetus came largely from Germany, and both List and Lanz drew their knowledge of theosophy from German sources. Zillmann was the first to publish both List and Lanz on esoteric subjects. Theosophy in Vienna after 1 appears to be a quasi-intellectual sectarian religious doctrine of German importation, current among persons wavering in their religious orthodoxy but who were inclined to a religious perspective. Given the antipathy towards Catholicism among volkisch nationalists and Pan- Germans in Austria at the turn of the century, theosophy commended itself as a scheme of religious beliefs which ignored Christianity in favour of a melange of mythical traditions and pseudo-scientific hypotheses consonant with contemporary anthropology, etymology, and the history of ancient cultures.

Furthermore, the very structure of theosophical thought lent itself to volkisch adoption. The implicit elitism of the hidden mahatmas with superhuman wisdom was in tune with the longing for a hierarchical social order based on the racial mystique of the Volk. The notion of an occult gnosis in theosophy, notably its obscuration due to the superimposition of alien Christian beliefs, and its revival by the chosen few, also accorded with the attempt to ascribe a long pedigree to volkisch nationalism, especially in view of its really recent origins.

In the context of the growth of German nationalism in Austria since , we can see how theosophy, otherwise only tenuously related to volkisch thought by notions of race and racial development, could lend both a religious mystique and a universal rationale to the political attitudes of a small minority.

He also represented an exceptional figure among the volkisch publicists in Germany before First of all, he was a native of Vienna, the capital of Habsburg Austria, which by the turn of the century had stood outside the mainstream of German national development, as exemplified by the Bismarckian Reich, for more than three decades. List, moreover, belonged to an older generation than most of his pre-war fellow ideologues and thus became a cult figure on the eastern edge of the German world.

He was regarded by his readers and followers as a bearded old patriarch and a mystical nationalist guru whose clairvoyant gaze had lifted the glorious Aryan and Germanic past of Austria into full view from beneath the debris of foreign influences and Christian culture. In his books and lectures List invited true Germans to behold the clearly discernible remains of a wonderful theocratic Ario- German state, wisely governed by priest- kings and gnostic initiates, in the archaeology, folklore, and landscape of his homeland.

He applied himself to cabbalistic and astrological studies and also claimed to be the last of the Armanist magicians, who had formerly wielded authority in the old Aryan world. Guido Karl Anton List was born in Vienna on 5 October , the eldest son of a prosperous middle-class merchant. Both his mother and his father were descended from trading families that had been settled in the capital for at least two generations.

The great-grandfather had also kept an inn. Several accounts suggest that List was a happy child in a secure home. In Anton von Anreiter painted a water-colour portrait of him. Young List enjoyed a good relationship with his parents. However, in , an incident occurred that revealed his lack of interest in orthodox religion. The dark and narrow vaults made a strong impression on him. He later claimed that he had knelt before a ruined altar in the crypt and sworn to build a temple to Wotan once he had grown up.

Evidently he regarded the labyrinth under the cathedral as a pre-Christian shrine dedicated to a pagan deity. List was later to claim that his conversion dated from this revelation. This ambition brought him into conflict with his father, who wanted him to work in the family leather business as the eldest son and heir.

List conformed with these paternal expectations and resigned himself to a commercial training, but his submission to the demands of work was by no means total. Henceforth he divided his time between the claims of commerce and a private world of art, imagination and nature-worship. During working hours he would assist his father, but he dedicated all his leisure time to rambling or riding through the countryside in all weathers, while sketching scenes and writing down his experiences. It is significant that his first published piece appeared in the annual of the Alpine Association.

Sport had evidently assumed the role of an active communion with the elemental realms of rivers and mountains. He was happiest if he could undertake his excursions alone. Although not averse to the company of friends, he often experienced others as a hindrance to the enjoyment of his inmost being.

His ritualization of such adventures served to make his private world even more exclusive and earned him the reputation of a lone wolf and a mystic. Such rituals are illustrated by his midsummer solstice camps. After a long hike across the Marchfeld, List and his friends had once gone to an inn. When a thunderstorm compelled the group to stay there overnight, List left to celebrate the solstice by sleeping out alone on the Geiselberg hill-fort. Downstream they came upon the ruins of the Roman town of Carnuntum, where the group camped and caroused into the night. For his friends this was a most congenial evening; for List, lost in reverie, it was the th anniversary of the tribal German victory over the Romans, which he celebrated with a fire and the burial of eight wine botdes in the shape of a swastika beneath the arch of the Pagan Gate.

He often expressed his dislike of metropolitan Vienna: The modern economy had, according to List, led humans astray under the motto of self-seeking individualism. While his father continued to manage the leather business. List could freely indulge his taste for solitude, sports, and long excursions. Being quite unsuited for commerce, he soon retired from the business and married his first wife, Helene Forster-Peters, on 26 September From to he published numerous articles about the Austrian countryside and the customs of its inhabitants in the newspapers Heimat, Deutsche Zeitung and Neue Welt, all known for their nationalist sentiment.

His studies of landscape were coloured by a pagan interpretation of local place-names, customs and popular legends. A typical early idyll about a group of medieval castles near Melk was published in the Neue Deutsche Alpenzeitung in 1 8 7 7. List now celebrated the fact that the landscape was native. The Alps and Danube were revered for their national identity; streams, fields and hills were personified as spirits culled from Teutonic myth and folklore. These early articles were distinguished from the juvenilia by their markedly volkisch and nationalist stamp.

During these years List was working at his first full-length novel, Camuntum, inspired by that memorable summer solstice party of In he published a short account ofhis vivid experiences on that occasion. Enthralled by the genius loci List had gazed into the distant past of Carnuntum. In his opinion this attack of the Quadi and Marcomanni tribes started the Germanic migrations which eventually led to the sack of Rome in and the collapse of the Empire.

To List, the very word Carnuntum evoked the hazy aura of olden Germanic valour, a signal motto recalling the event that put the ancient Germans back on the stage of world history. In the first place List placed Austrian- settled tribes in the van of the assault on Rome. Secondly, his account suggested that these tribal settlers of pre- Roman Austria and the post-Roman barbarian kingdoms of the Dark Ages constituted a continuous native occupation of the homeland.

The present political order and main confession were shown to be illegitimate, deriving from the imposition of a foreign yoke and the suppression of Germanic culture many centuries before. This mythology caught the attention of German nationalists in search of legitimations for their own disenchantment with the multi- national Austrian state.

The earliest recognition of his novel proved most valuable to List. In there had also appeared an historical work entided Der altdeutsche Volksstamm der Quaden [The ancient German Quadi tribe] by Heinrich Kirchmayr. Between Wannieck and List there developed a regular correspondence that laid the basis of a lasting friendship. Schonerer had first secured election to the Austrian Reichsrat in and became the outspoken protagonist of anti- Semitism and nationalism amongst the German nationals of the Habsburg empire.

He made his first anti-Semitic speech before the assembly in and demanded the economic and political union of German- speaking Austria with the German Reich in his election address. During this decade Schonerer achieved a modest following in many provincial groups, cultural societies, and sports clubs with similar sentiments. All these numerous associations were concerned with raising nationalist consciousness among the Austrian Germans in a variety of ways: List now made his own mark in this milieu during the s.

List became a regular contributor. In the paper published extracts of his recent book, Deutsch-Mythologische Landschaftsbilder [German- Mythological Landscape Pictures ] , which comprised an anthology of his folkloristic journalism from the previous decade. The dtles of his articles over the next years witness his tireless interest in the ancient national past of Austria: His topics were heraldry and folk customs concerning baptism, marriage, and burial. In his opinion these traditional institutions all reflected archaic Teutonic practices. List claimed this extinct faith had been the national religion of the Teutons.

In due course this imaginary priesthood would become the central idea of his political mythology. List continued to publish his own literary works throughout the s. In he had founded, together with Fanny Wschiansky, a belletristic society for the purpose of fostering neo-romantic and nationalist literature in Vienna.

This Literarische Donaugesellschaft Danubian Literary Society was modelled on the fifteenth-century litteraria sodalita Danubiana of the Viennese humanist Conrad Celte , about whom List wrote a short biography in The success of his first novel Camuntum was repeated with two more historical romances set in tribal Germany. The novel closes with the joyful return of the apostate to his original religion of sun-worship. Hardly less melodramatic was the saga Pipara , a two-volume novel which recounted the sensational career of Pipara, a Quadi maiden of Eburodunum Brno , who rose from Roman captivity to the rank of empress.

There were poetry-readings and lectures by Ottokar Stauf von der March, editor of the Tiroler Wochenschn. List also composed lyrical pieces in a mythological and nationalist idiom. The same choral society organized a List festival to commemorate the silver anniversary of his literary endeavour on 7 April By this date List had become a celebrity amongst the Pan- German groups of Austria. Aurelius Polzer had converted formally to Protestantism in ; Schonerer followed suit in It has been estimated that there were ten thousand converts in Austria by , and that over half of these were resident in Bohemia.

Her portrait shows a pretty, young woman dressed in a fashion redolent of fin-de-siecle mystery and natural appeal. An interesting product of this use of the stage as a vehicle for his ideas was the programmatic pamphlet Der Wiederaujhau von Camuntum [The Reconstruction of Camuntum]] 1 Here List called for a reconstruction of the Roman amphitheatre as an open-air stage for the production of scenarios including dragon- slaying, regattas, bardic contests and Thinge annual Germanic assemblies , which would all carry the symbolism of Wotanism to an ever wider public of Pan-Germans in Austria.

His writings focused attention on the heroic past and religious mythology of his native country. The year 1 witnessed a funda- mental change in the character of his ideas: After undergoing an eye operation to relieve a cataract in 1 , List was blind for eleven months. Throughout a long and anxious period of enforced rest, he took solace in pondering the origins of the runes and language.

This document set out the idea of a monumental pseudo-science concerned with Germanic linguistics and symbology: Although the Academy returned his manuscript with no comment, this slight piece grew over the ensuing decade to become the masterpiece of his occult-nationalist researches. This entry came to the notice of the nobility' archive, which urged an official enquiry.

He claimed that his great- grandfather had abandoned the tide upon entering a burgher trade inn keeper , but that he, Guido von List, had resumed the title after leaving commerce for a literary career in In support of his title List produced a signet ring, which his great-grandfather had allegedly worn. This bore a coat-of-arms displaying two rampant foxes List means cunning in German upon a quartered field, which was the blazon of the twelfth-century knight, Burckhardt von List, according to an old chronicle.

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Why did List want the tide must be our first question. According to his own testimony, List assumed the title once he had abandoned a commercial career.

As an author, List felt himself to be a member of a cultivated elite, according to an idealist tradition which had struck deep chords amongst the German middle classes of the nineteenth century. According to his lectures on the Wotanist priesthood, List believed that this ancient religious elite had formed the first aristocracy of tribal Germany. From to he had extended this line through his heraldic studies. These discussions treated heraldry as a system of esoteric family emblems which had been handed down from the old hierarchy to the modern nobility. His friend, Lanz von Liebenfels, had also assumed a noble title by and may have influenced List.

This interpellation was signed by fifteen Viennese dignitaries. Around Friedrich Wannieck, his son Friedrich Oskar Wannieck, Lanz von Liebenfels and some fifty other individuals signed the first announcement concerning support for a List Society. A study of its signatories reveals the widespread and significant support for List amongst public figures in Austria and Germany.

These representatives of Pan- Germanism in Austria and Germany were joined by several occultists: Hugo Goring, editor of theosophical literature at Weimar; Harald Arjuna Graved van Jostenoode, a theosophical author at Heidelberg; Max Seiling, an esoteric pamphleteer and popular philosopher in Munich; and Paul Zillmann, editor of the Metaphysische Rundschau and master of an occult lodge at Berlin. All these men endorsed the foundation of the List Society. In addition to this roll of nationalists one finds the leading German theosophist Franz Hartmann, the theosophical editor Arthur Weber, the occult novelist Karl Hilm, the theosophist General Blasius von Schemua, the collective member- ship of the Vienna Theosophical Society, and Karl Heise, a leading figure in the vegetarian and mystical Mazdaznan cult at Zurich.

Attracted by his unique amalgam of nationalist mythology and esotericism, these men were prepared to contribute ten crowns as an annual society subscription. Between 1 and , six reports were issued as booklets under the auspices of the List Society. These publications included a key to the meaning and magical power of the runes GLB 1 , a study of the political authority and organization of the Wotanist priesthood the Armanen- schaft [GLB 2 and 2a , esoteric interpretations of folklore and place- names GLB 3 and GLB 4 , and a glossary of secret Aryan messages in hieroglyphs and heraldic devices GLB 5.

In List published his masterpiece of occult linguistics and symbology GLB 6. These seven booklets represent the systematic exposition of his fantasy concerning the religious, political and social institutions of the national past. This fantasy of the past and a desired present records a Weltanschauung shared by List and his close supporters.

It will be the task of later chapters to analyse this Weltanschauung. The institutions of the Ario-Germans were frequendy discussed in the volkisch press and other newspapers. In Jerome Bal, a Hungarian schoolmaster at LevoCa, published an occult manual of Magyar heraldry, which he dedicated to List; 44 his example was followed by B. Hanftmann in his study of regional domestic architecture and by Ernst von Wolzogen in his survey of contemporary literature. He had dedicated the play to List in words of deep admiration and was delighted to introduce the old author in person to the audience.

The most important carriers of Listian ideas across the border were those members of the List Society in the German Reich who were involved in the founding of the Reichshammerbund and the Germanenorden. In subsequent chapters this ideological succession is traced through the Germanenorden and its Munich offshoot, the Thule Society, to the infant Nazi Party after the war.

The second channel concerns several shadowy volkisch figures in Germany, whose publicistic activity ensured a wider audience for Listian ideas among the German public both during and after the war. Tarnhari subse- quently published two patriotic brochures at Diessen near Munich during the war, later establishing a v olkisch publishing house at Leipzig.

His example was followed by others in the s who wrote about the religion of Armanism and guaranteed this word a certain currency in nationalist usage. Rudolf John Gorsleben, Werner von Biilow, Friedrich Bernhard Marby, Herbert Reichstein and Frodi Ingolfson Wehrmann created a complex corpus of armanist-ariosophical lore, which, while associated with the writings ofjorg Lanz von Liebenfels during the s, owed a more significant and acknowledged debt to Guido von List.

This later ariosophical movement flourished in Germany during the late s and s. Although these individuals worked in esoteric circles and sought no political involvement, a small coterie of these Edda and runological occultists enjoyed the confidence of Heinrich Himmler during the mids and contributed to the symbolism and ritual of the SS. The HAO was formally founded at the midsummer solstice of , when the most dedicated List Society members in Berlin, Hamburg, and Munich travelled to meet their Austrian colleagues in Vienna.

On 23 June the group visited the cathedral catacombs, where the young List had first sensed this pagan god, and then proceeded to other allegedly Wotanist sanctuaries on the Kahlenberg, on the Leopoldsberg and at Klosterneuburg. The commemorative photographs of this climax indicate that the congregation numbered only ten persons.

During and List wrote several articles on the approaching national millennium, which was supposed to be realized once the Allies had been defeated;Johannes Balzli published two of these predictions in his Prana in List received many letters from men at the front who expressed their gratitude for his cheering discoveries; stories of runes and ancient Aryan symbols found on stones far from hearth and home gave them hope in a final victory for the Ario- Germans.

The year brought the Allied blockade of Europe, where food and fuel supplies ran low in the cities. In the early autumn the Habsburg empire began to dissolve and the Austrians were compelled to sue for peace on 3 October List regarded the catastrophe in a millenarian context: In late the seventy- year-old guru was in poor health owing to food shortages in Vienna.

The following spring List and his wife set off to spend a period of recuperation at the manor-house of Eberhard von Brockhusen, a List Society patron who lived at Langen in Brandenburg. On the morning of 17 May the Armanist magician and prophet of national revival died in a Berlin guest-house. Following his cremation at Leipzig, the ashes were laid in an urn at Vienna Central Cemetery. Philipp Stauff wrote an obituary which appeared in the Miinchener Beobachter, a volkisch newspaper edited by Rudolf von Sebottendorff that became the official Nazi organ in the course of the next year and remained the leading Party newspaper until Although Listnever lived to see the Nazi party, he was honoured by its nascent spirit.

He called this religion Wotanism after the principal god in the Germanic pantheon. His basic sources for the ancient religion were the Edda and the runes. The Old Norse poetry of Iceland painted the colourful mythology of its pagan inhabitants, whom List regarded as Wotanist refugees from Christian persecution in early medieval Germany. The Edda thus recorded the myths and beliefs of the ancient Germans. In the Edda, Wotan was worshipped as the god of war and the lord of dead heroes in Valhalla.

He was also identified as a magician and a necromancer in the poems. According to late nineteenth- century scholars these acts reflected a form of shamanism. As a result of pain the performer of these rituals gained certain magical and psychical powers. At the climax of his suffering an understanding of the runes suddenly came to him. It is very likely that this myth reminded List of his own occult insights during his period of blindness in Thus each individual rune possessed its own name and symbolism over and above its phonetic and literary value.

These occult meanings and mottoes were supposed to represent the doctrine and maxims of the rediscovered religion of Wotanism. But Wotanism also stressed the mystical union of man with the universe as well as his magical powers. The rotation of the planets, the seasonal cycle, the growth and decay of all living organisms confirmed the truth of this simple cyclical cosmology. He claimed that these laws represented an immanent God in Nature. List conceived of all things as an emanation of a spiritual force. Man was an integral part of this unified cosmos and thus obliged to follow a single ethical precept: At her bosom all tensions were dissolved in a mystical union between man and the cosmos.

Writing of the motives of Romanticism, George L. Bewildered and challenged, men attempted to re-emphasise their own personality. But, since the rate of industrial transformation, as well as its effects, seemed to evade the grasp of reason. This longing for self-identification. His doctrine emphasized the power of the individual spirit and a sanctuary within the cosmos of Nature. As the alleged gnosis of the ancient Germans, this religion was to be revived as the faith and moral cement of a new pan-German realm. List also adopted the notions of modern theosophy for his reconstruction of the ancient gnosis.

His debt to theosophy may be understood in terms of two distinct sources. The first source concerns the writings of Max Ferdinand Sebaldt von Werth Sebaldt had begun his literary career as the editor of a periodical, Das angewandte Christentum [Applied Christianity ] , in collaboration with Moritz von Egidy, a prominent Lebensreformer in Germany. He was also a prolific writer on travel and foreign countries.

However, in he began to publish thick volumes on the subject of sexology. Both works were published by Wilhelm Friedrich of Leipzig, a publisher known for his many theosophical editions, and were illustrated with the magical curved- armed swastika by the theosophical artist Fidus. Sebaldt subsequendy published Genesis in five-volumes, which treated of eroticism, Bacchanalia, libido, and mania within a racist and sexological context.

This Berlin author clearly anticipated Ariosophy by combining racial doctrines with occult notions derived from his own bizarre interpretations of Teutonic mythology. According to Sebaldt, ancient Aryan cos- mology was defined by the creative act of the god Mundelfori, who whisked the universe out of a primal fiery chaos. There subsequendy arose a polar dualism typified by the opposite principles of matter and spirit, and the male and female sexes.

He also claimed that the swastika was a holy Aryan symbol, since it derived from the Feuerquirl fire whisk with which Mundelfori had initially twirled the cosmos into being. In September 1 the Viennese occult periodical Die Gnosis published an article by List that indicated his continuing debt to Sebaldt. He distinguished between exoteric Wotanist and esoteric Armanist forms of religious doctrine and hinted at the total authority of initiates over the ordinary people in ancient Germany.

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The Teutonic gods, Wotan, Donar and Loki, were interpreted as symbols for esoteric cosmological ideas, the Sebaldtian stamp of which would have been quite evident to contemporaries. The Wotanist priesthood, which List had first discussed in the early s, was now transformed into an exalted gnostic elite of initiates the Armanenschaft , which corresponded to the hierophants in The Secret Doctrine. Die Rita der Ario-Germanen [The Rite of the Ario- Germans ] regurgitated substantial parts of the theosophical cosmogony in its putative account of ancient Ario-Germanic belief.

He also mentioned the airships and cyclopean structures of the Adanteans. He also evidenced his debt to Blavatsky in his adoption of seven root-races for each round. List claimed that the Ario-Germans represented the fifth and current race in the present round, while ascribing the names of mythical Teutonic giants to the four preceding races.

The diluvial Adanteans were equated with the kinsfolk of the giant Bergelmir, who was supposed to have survived a flood in Norse mythology, while the third race was reckoned to be the kinsmen of the giant Thrudgelmir. In common with Blavatsky, List suggested that this third race her Lemurians had been the first to propagate themselves through sexual reproduction. The first illustrated the evolutionary stages of a round through one complete cycle from unity to multiplicity and back to unity.

Corresponding to the theosophical notions of unmanifest and manifest deities, the three Logoi, the five elemental realms now including ether and the appearance of mankind, List invoked mythological German equivalents. He called the divine being Allvater, who manifested himself in the three Logoi as Wotan, Wili, and We.

A series of anti-clockwise triskelions and swastikas and inverted triangles symbolized stages of cosmic evolution in the downsweep of the cycle i. List asserted that these latter sigils were utterly sacred, because they embraced the two antithetical forces of all creation: To the root- races of the Lemurians and Atlanteans he assigned homelands on sunken continents in accordance with the speculations of William Scott-Elliot, whose map he reproduced.

A chart at the end of this work sought to reconcile the geological periods of the Earth, as established by contemporary palaeogeography, with the stages of a theosophical round lasting 4,,, years, or a kalpa in Hindu chronology. One solution is provided by its contemporary vogue and the fact that many supporters of the List Society were interested in the occult. Schemua was a prominent theosophist and also a friend of Demeter Georgiewitz-Weitzer , who edited the Zentralblatt fur Okkultismus and wrote several occult works under the pseudonym G.

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