antibuddha
09-24-2006, 02:44 AM
ALFRED SCHULER
On the host of her vulva was burning the swastika, the
token of fire. . .
--- Alfred Schuler
Was it real, this circle? When the torches
Shone on the pallid faces, and the vapours
Floated from vessels round the holy youth; your words
Lifted us, flaming, into worlds of madness. . .
--- Stefan George
It is my firm conviction that, since the death of Nietzsche,
there has been no greater, no more esoteric event for
mankind than Schuler's demise.
--- Ludwig Klages
ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING letters even written by petitioner to monarch must surely be the following, written in 1898 on a parchment roll by Alfred Schuler and addressed to the empress Elisabeth of Austria:
Condemned to death, inexorably, by the overwhelming substantiality of the present, dedicated to life as to the hearth and swastika of the coming world, I approach YOUR MAJESTY with the staff and bonds of a supplicant and stand before the MAJESTY OF YOUR SOUL, blinded and drawn by a radiance which gleams between pillars and many-coloured fragrances [ . . . ] Maimed in existence, excluded from resonance in world and image, without means of developing my talents I saw my ecstasies shudder on walls, in foliage, in the delights and enticements of the living and my life, which sought the roots of existence, haunted by noose and murderer. Desperate for help my glance encircled all. Everywhere the same. . . A crust of hatred around the earthly globe. The corpse of an ancient, dying swastika in the most extreme degradation. And where --- seldom indeed --- an eye in gold and ripeness cut away this crust, then I saw --- again --- most certain catastrophe. But a voice cried out: 'Porphyrogenetos, beseech the Empress for help. . . seek help from the highest of your symbols. That which is unique belongs to the one who is unique. See, a flame gleaming in purple. A lamp burning above black waters. If SHE does not know you, then expire gently! My primary copper are you [. . . ] You are the proof of my sun, as yet concealed which, child-like and seething, flames to new horizons [ . . . ] I now seek to lay the mystery of my urn at your feet: my Caaba. My most Inner Being. How much of the precious sap it still contains, or how much has been drunk by greedy vampires I do not know. . .”(1)
The effect that this peroration may have had will never be known: the Empress was murdered in September 1898 as she walked from her hotel to the steamer in Geneva, before the document was put into her hands.
“My Caaba, my copper” --- the terminology is as bizarre as the contents of the Tabularium itself, a collection of highly charged, hieroglyphic pronouncements which the parchment roll was meant to accompany. This consisted of twenty one plates made of thin, very hard cardboard, twenty centimetres long and ten centimetres wide, covered with a gleaming cochineal red and gilded at the edges. The left hand border of each plate had four holes for the insertion of cords which were also gilded and threaded with polished gems. The first and last of the plates were covered with intricate tracery and rich ornamentation; the remaining nineteen contained those fragmentary, gnomic utterances which Schuler considered to be his most important. The plates were contained in a tightly fitting case coloured with a patina of copper; the front of the case was decorated by a richly ornamental golden band, about one centimetre across, and a golden circle, seven centimetres in diameter in which there stood a winged figure of Eros moving through the zodiac and holding in his right hand a blossoming pomegranate, in his left a lyre with the inscription ΚΟΣΜΟΓΟΝΟΣ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΠΟΙΕΙ (illustration in Cosmogonische Augen 479). The inscriptions were exlcusively Schuler's own work; the ornamentation and figurative decoration were aided by a painter with whom he was acquainted. It took him some eighteen months (and the whole of what remained of his modest capital) to complete: it was, as we know, not delivered.
Who was he? A discussion of his work is not made easy by the fact that he published next to nothing in his lifetime apart from one review and one poem,(2) and by the luxuriant tangle of anecdotes which led to a general misrepresentation and obfuscation. Legends are legion: the plan to cure the insane Nietzsche by “korybantiasis” (the dancing of beautiful ephebes dressed in copper, Fu V 60); the Roman “feast” (29 April 1899) at which Schuler declaimed his portentous visions with such rapture and conviction the Stefan George fled and sought solace with beer-drinkers, fearing or Schuler's sanity;(3) the defection of Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages from the George-Kreis and the declaration which Schuler insisted be delivered to Wolfskehl by a solider;(4) the fear expressed by Franziska Gräfn zu Reventlow of a physical attack by Schuler;(5) the refreshing irreverence of Roderich Huch (the violent rings which Schuler saw whilst masturbating);(6) the acerbic comments of Theodor Lessing.(7) Yet Rilke's sincere admiration for Schuler, together with Wolfskehl's generous comments in his New Zealand exile, should also not be forgotten in any attempt to reach an understanding of Schuler's recondite and opaque utterances. There is much that is daunting, even forbidding in Schuler's work, but its very uniqueness draws the interpreter to it.
Alfred Schuler moved from Mainz to Munih with his mother in 1887 and matriculated at the university, ostensibly to study history, art-history and archaeology under Professor Ludwig Traube, paleographer and editor of late Roman lyric poetry and Professor Adolf Furtwängler, archaeologist in charge of various excavations in Greece (and father of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler). It soon became apparent that academic study was alien to Schuler. As a child Schuler had experienced, not unlike Heinrich Schliemann, an almost mystical rapture when confronted by artifacts of classical antiquity; fragments of pottery and coins covered with the patina of age obsessed him, and he responded with an almost erotic ravishment to objects dating from the Roman period. Theodor Lessing would later claim that
there was nothing classical or religious for him which did not have some connection with Eros [. . . ] His hedonistic-heathen philosophy, which abhorred anything which smacked of morality, stemmed from a homo-erotic attitude, something feminine and atavistic, which was only interested in masculine strength.(8)
Schuler's sexual proclivities are not our concern here: suffice it that the cult of the “passive” and “maternal” owes much to Bachofen, whose influence was considerable. In 1893 Schuler made the acquaintance of Ludwig Klages and, through him, many of the Munich avant-garde, including the “pale salon-Jesuit Derleth” and his remarkable sister Anna Maria. It becomes difficult to separate the man from the lurid and frequently prurient anecdotes which thwart any attempt to discuss Schuler's ideas, but one of the most striking of his beliefs is his contempt for the modern world (for “progress”) and his admiration for Imperial Rome, particularly its later emperors. There is much of Schuler in the figure of Chaim Breisacher in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (in chapter twenty eight), although it has been argued(9) that Mann drew upon Oskar Goldberg here, author of Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews, 1925); Breisacher exulted in the damnation of humanism, liberalism, and tolerance and sought the starkest, most authoritarian absolute, despising Christianity and seeing alarming signs of degeneration in some of the early Hebrew prophets. In Schuler's case it is the post-Roman world which is castigated, and the intellectual tradition of nearly tow thousand years excoriated as “Gehirnstrolcherei,” an untranslatable term but one which might be rendered as “cerebral vagaries.” It was Life which Schuler would extol, not mere existence, but powerful, “shuddering,” passionate life or “Blutleuchte,” life radiant and suffused with erotic energy. And the ultimate symbol for this ecstatic, cosmic rapture will be the swastika, fons et origo of life-affirmation.
Nero as artist-emperor (Qualis artifex pereo!) and Ludwig II of Bavaria as his incarnation, the amoral cult of beauty fusing with the praise of Renaissance violence (Nietzsche's “Cesare Borgia als Papst”: 6, 251) --- this was the heady atmosphere which Schuler imbibed in Munich. The excesses of the late Roman emperors had fascinated the exponents of French decadence, but not only these: in Germany it is George's Algabal poems (Heliogabalus, but Nero's presence is undeniable), which are exemplary, as are Ludwig Quidde's essay Caligula (1894) and Oskar Pannizza's play Nero (1898); as early as 1866, however, Robert Hammerling, in his epic Ahasuerus in Rom, had exulted in pictures of splendour and cruelty. Both Nietzsche and Schuler were aware of Jacob Burckhardt's speculation (in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Liepzig 1898) of what Cesare Borgia might have achieved had he not been struck down by illness at a critical time and how me might, through poison, have decimated the College of Cardinals and secured the papacy for himself. This “healthiest of all tropical monsters” (5, 117), this “beast of prey, healthy and sound!” (11, 21) seemed to many to be a throw-back to a time before the triumph of Christianity, a time of Roman glory, of atavistic triumphalism.(10).Schuler absorbed much from Traube and Furtwängler but the strained and eccentric atmosphere of Schwabing encouraged and fostered an anti-intellectualism and a cult of irrational vitalism. Rome, “Blutleuchte” and Swastika --- these three components are the strands that characterize Schuler's thought, although “thought” is a misnomer, for “telesmatic” (i.e. talismanic) pictures, emerging from the blood, eclipse ratiocination and communicate more deeply. For Schuler, as for Klages, the corruption of life began with Judaeo-Christianity and a “historical” (as opposed to a “cosmic” viewpoint), a will to rational truth which “de-actualizes” the world: this will be the central argument in Klages's Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Mind as Adversary of the Soul, 1929-1932). And it is Klages who, in 1944, attempted a definition of Schuler's “Blutleuchte”: it is “a continuous, deeply moving shudder. . . a dark strangeness which throbs and seethes in a secret dwelling, dwelling, a wild, woeful exultation, mixed with the beauty of the storm. It is Eros and Child, golden unity of life, and, as such, gazes into radiant visions. In it the mystery of the maternal cosmos is made manifest.”(11)
The obsession with Rome is apparent both in Schuler's fragments and in the series of lectures he gave under the title Vom Wesen der Ewigen Stadt (On the True Nature of the Eternal City); these were given in 1915 and repeated later. As soon as Schuler had matriculated at the university in Munich he sought out Henrik Ibsen, whose Emperor and Galilean had fascinated him, a work published in 1873 and only performed some twenty years later. Ibsen was in Munich in 1890, living in the Maximilianstrasse here Schuler had visited him. On his way to Ibsen's rooms he composed the “Periodonikes” scene of a projected three volume Nero novel. Emperor and Galilean could not fail to make an impact on him, being a portrayal of a search for a religion which exulted the joy of life and which refused to submit to the chill of Christian ethics;(12) the extraordinary opening, set in Constantinople, with Julian and his brother waiting for the mad Emperor's hand to fall on them as it had on their eleven murdered kinsmen, the march on Rome and Julian's murder by a Christian fell on fertile ground. It has only now been possible, thanks to Baal Müller's edition, to gain an insight into Schuler's fragmentary utterances, his hectic visions and heightened ecstasies, and this chapter will now try to elucidate them.
The Cosmogoniae Fragmenta (Fragments of a Cosmogony), is a mass of disordered material whose preface refers to a journey to Rome (1894) and a procssion of masked figures, to dithyrambic convulsions and, strangely, to the music of Carmen which deeply moved the author (CA 72) as it had Friedrich Nietzsche some six years previously (Ludwig Derleth is also mentioned). A “Nietzsche-Trias” follows, a group of three aphorisms which seeks, with sensuous imagery to find a new sexuality, from an awareness of which “a miraculous palm tree” arises whose dates swell like “eine neue Sonne,” (a new sun:CA 74); a voice laments the Christian concept of agape which cuts deeply into life's fecundity. These fragments were meant to be incorporated into the Nero novel and exult in images of violet and purple, of emerald columns and rose-entwined pillars, of perfume and incense (CA 75). A “Tabula Secunda” contains the following couplet: “What is Freedom in the Thrust of Becoming? Eros in Pan. / What is Eros in Decline and Death? Christian delusion” (CA 76). This is the basic and central dichotomy for Schuler, the “ultimus paganorum” (Wolfskehl); Christianity is seen as inimical to life, to sexuality, to joy, and the victory of the pale Galilean strikes at the very heart of life itself. Dithyrambic perorations proclaim the triumph of Eros in Imperial Rome, the triumph of that which is cosmic, of life exultant in alabaster temples, beneath umbrageous and fragrant trees, in the “amethyst-purple of dream-heavy poppy”. “Let Eros alone be the light of thine eye” (CA 80) --- this injunction climaxes in a vision of red moons circling in a “violet ecstasy,” with green suns enveloped in a crimson, sparkling inebriation.
In the section “Trias Emesa Nazareth” Schuler evokes the spirit of Heliogabalus who was born in Emesea (now Homs in Syria), high priest of the sun god who, aged fourteen, became Emperor of Rome. George's Algabal poems, as has been noted, are the finest German contribution to the decadent cult of Heliogabalus, but George is but one of the poètes maudits who saw in the degenerate boy-Emperor the personifcation of wanton and sterile debauchery.(13) Louis Coouperus's De berg van Licht may be adduced as an example, as may Jean Lombard's L'agonie; this novel described a Rom in the grip of barbaric and voluptuous cults where the Christians are struggling for survival against the rule of the fifteen-year old adolescent Emperor. Heliogabalus, mitred, bejewelled, long-haired, painted and effiminate, wishes to impose on Rome the worship of the phallic black stone, a symbol of his tyrannical power. He proceeds around Rome with a motley entourage of naked women, eunuchs, priests, captives, subservient senators and various wild beasts. Heliogabalus leads the orgies, copulating publicly with both sexes; opponents are murdered and thrown into the cloaca maxima, where Heliogabalus an his mother would later find their deaths. For Schuler,however, he is a “Sonnekind,” a child of the sun, a figure in whom the “Blutleuchte,” or blood-radiance is most powerful felt: he represents radiant, transfigured or “telesmatic” life, “open existence” (these terms will be explained more fully later); the “Nazarene” however, is denial, or “closed existence.” Schuler knows that, geographically, the distance between Emesea and Nazareth is short indeed, but Roman and Jew are separated by an unbridgeable gulf (CA 81). A “Triptychon des Korbyantischen Dithyrambos” exults in the wild dance of life, a praise for Life as its most naked, most intense --- “I am the Light. . . I am the Eye. . . I am the pearl. . . I am the frenzy. . . I am life” (CA 83) --- here Nietzschean Lebensjahung achieves its most triumphant expression.
Most fascinating is the section “Domus Aurea Cella Ithyphalli. Reiter-trias.” Here Nero's golden house is portrayed, with a room of the Erect Phallus. In the centre of the room was a mosaic pattern of the revolving swastika whose purple, twitching limbs sprayed forth golden ears of corn. Again, a discussion of the importance of the swastika for Schuler follows later; what is also significant ther is the fact that the praiseof the phallus is transformed into the cult of the hermaphrodite in that a scrotum is described which is a container for oil, and the opening in the glans, from which a flame emerges, also has the form of female genitalia. Sexuality, however deviant or esoteric to the modern mind, was at the heart of pagan life, exemplified by the whirling swastika, hermaphroditic oneness and dancing fire. Paralipomena to the Cosmogonos include a prayer for extinction, reabsorption into maternal darkness.
O mother night
Take now this last lamp [the poet] unto you
into your gentle, black-wreathed holy hand.
Its drunken wick has drunk, the fool, of too much oil.
Its tongue longed longingly in too much death.
To you, o mother, mother!
Extinguish
loosen. . .
(i]CA[/i]90)
Reference to Bachofen's [i]Das Mutterecht[/i] (Mother Right) follows later; suffice it here to comment on Schuler's increasing insistence on the maternal, on warmth and womb, source of fecundity and life: a section: “My Mother” recounts that “My mother is triumphant night and my father the flaming diurnal star; I, however, am sweet dusk. . .” (CA 92). This is remote, indeed, from Zarathustra's solar imperiousness, but he, too, had longed for darkness, longed to be suckled, to receive and not to give (4, 136). The reference to “Horus-Isitich” (CA 93) and to Zeus elaborates the theme of fatherlessness; Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, conceived after the death of his father avenges the latter's death after years of concealment (he is often portrayed as a falcon, or a child). Strange indeed that Nietzsche should claim, in [i]Ecce Homo[/i] (1908) that “I still live as my mother, after my father had already died --- to speak in riddles. . .” (6, 264). A final fragment attacks the desacralisation of the world by Luther and the Reformation, the extirpation of pagan rituals and a “Jewish rabies” that blights the earth. (CA 93)
The [i]Neroniana[/i] material relates to Schuler's plans for a work on Nero, a figure who fascinated him (and not only him) at this time. The plans for a Nero novel came to him, he writes (CA 101) after the meeting with Ibsen in 1890; the scattered notes contain a vituperative onslaught against Tolstoy, particularly [i]The Kreutzer Sonata[/i] for tis damnation of sexual love and advocation of agape --- “the gospel of exhaustion” (CA 103). For Nietzsche, Tolstoy's cult of pity was a symptom of decadence (6, 174); Schuler deliberately constasts it with “Cosmische Kraft” or cosmic power, “essential life,” energy and fire (CA 103), with the quadrumvirate “Goethe-Nietzsche-Dionysos-Uebermensch” held as an ideal antidote. The [i]Fragmenta Neronis Domini[/i] contains an ecstatic introit:
He rears up
Bull Dionysos
Branded with golden sacrifical ribbons.
Cosmos
Stigma.
Cosmos
Brand.
Ready for axe and axe blow.
Bull rage
Ready for heart blood
To fill the chalice for the inebriate
For drunk ones, for sunk ones
Hot, steaming bowls of the heart's blood.
For all that is trampled
In fragments and ordure
Light-eyes which dive into trembling garlands.
For all that rend serpents in ravings of night.
I close the ring of blood
Around the child Aeon
I open the mouth of ardour
To the one unknowning.
This flaming, seething
rearing, dreaming
lit with glittering sword flash
Darkened by shield
Corybantiasis
Nero cosmogonos
(CA108)
A drunken tone of joy and suffering is expressed here, a Dionysian ecstasy with a god as bull whose gushing, steamy blood fills the sacrificial chalices as a wild dance is executed. Most remarkable is the section “Ex capite de comsomogonia” which runs thus: “Host in the shrine. Cosmos the pregnant life-cell. Tongue of fire the essence of life. Child-like peoples exult in the urn-shape. The urn is divine for them, a pregnant mother their primary idol. On the host of her vulva the swastika is burning, the sign of fire its revelation. Crucified wood and nails. Crucified fire. In the cult of the primeval cell is announced all that is still come to pass. . .” (CA 109). Further utterances extol the “Cinqueccento,” that remarkable century in which a pagan life-affirmation arose again in art, an art of beauty and blood. It is a vision of “Lebensessenz,” of “Blutleuchte” of radiant, gleaming blood, but the triumph of beauty and life was short-lived, a “monstrous black mass of slag, of scoria, of Nazarene brimstone” (CA 112) scorched the earth, and “murderous miasmas rose from the choking canals.” This was the conquest of Rome by Luther, for Luther destroyed the “cells of light,” extinguished by the joy of “Blutleuchte” and elevated the pale Galilean as the sole path to salvation. The attack against Luther is continued in “Nero triumphans”: the “scandal of Wittenberg” ensured the rise of a world without sacraments, a world of materialism and utilitarianism. No longer are there festivals to commemorate “the marriage of the soul with the light”; vulgar conformism is the order of the day where Nietzsche's “last man” has triumphed --- it is the age of the mob, the louse (CA 113). Noble features are no longer found, the prevailing physiognomy is that of the dog. In a moving section Schuler defends his own homosexuality: the homosexual world feeling, as one of
the most radiant centres of individualistic light-creation (Lichtbildungen) in the world of
antiquity [. . . ] disappeared immediately with the triumphs of Christianity from literature and
art. That purple net which spun a transfiguration of the senses over objects and space is
destroyed without mercy. (CA 114).
Christianity has no place for the Greek concept of [i]agon[/i], of noble struggle, a contest for the highest prize; agape prevents this. But Schuler also extols hardness and praises pain and violence:
Birth bursts open the mother's womb. Birth for the mother is blood, is pain, an experience of
death. The volcanic destroys when it erupts. This is the law of nature. Killing is the right of each
fiery force. As it is the right of youth, the young, strong, blood-filled [i]sabella proles[/i],
radiant in the steel and the gleam of weapons. (CA 113)
The praise of violence, of killing even, grates upon the modern sensibility. Even more startling is the elevation of the swastika as the ultimate symbol of life.
Whether it stood as Caius [Caius Caesar] with silver hands in an azure night and pulled the
moon into the calvary of its embrace. Whether it sparkled as Otho in the white coral and linen
on the shoulder buckles of common legionaries and triumphant in the leather-smell of collars or
the handles of shields, leaping as a drunken spark into all hearts, to leap forth from all eyes, all
lips radiant, shouting solar joy, whilst its vessel burst in sacrificial death [. . . ] (CA 118)
The swastika is seen as cosmic symbol, glittering in the night or stitched as imperial signature or the uniform of Roman soldiers. Schuler's wildly associative mode of writing now hails Nero, “the censer, who lit the purifying vapour, who arched the rings of love into the vilest corner, who draws the sweetness of honey from any common song, filling it with march-like visions of the future, letting it blush at its urgency.” And [i]Swastika[/i] ends with the following: “We hurl fire into the night and copper-rage till there is blood from town to village to hamlet. Till it seethes in town and village and hamlet. . . to the last poplar-darkened cottage over which the towering sunflowers dream in night and silver..” “Copper-rage” reminds us of he “kuretes” or ephebes who, dressed in copper, were to cure the insane Nietzsche (an idea which, apparently, Langbehn also entertained: CA31); it is obvious that an emblem of a swastika is used by Schuler in a highly idiosyncratic manner, as we shall later see. It is found once more in the last poem in the [i]Fragmenta Neronis Domini[/i], the haunting and elusive “Phallikos.” The title refers to the ithyphallic Bacchic hymns which accompanied the procession of the phallus:
In zenith of blueness we gaze now at purple.
Tit of milch-woman.
Omphalos, swelling.
Within the scarlet mesh of the ribbons
Swells now and fills now the golden phallus.
Not man, not maid.
Create, conceive is the same.
The one who creates not, creates light.
The one who conceives not, bears light.
In the heart of the depths the One is now gleaming.
From this
Life rolls forth in golden spirals.
Wider and wider the whirling swastika
Wider and paler. Wider and colder.
Soma and moonring freeze its flow.
In zenith of newness we gaze now at purple.
Tit of milch-woman.
Omphalos, swelling.
Within the scarlet mesh of the ribbons
Swells now and fills the golden phallus.
(CA 119)
The omphalos is the navel of the earth, the site of Delphic oracle; in depiction it is fused with a phallus or uterine symbolism, hence supporting the significant notion of androgyny in Schuler. “Soma” is a Sanskrit word for the intoxicating extract from certain hallucinogenic plants; the moon is held to be the chalice of this intoxicant. The poem tells of whirling life, of swastika, swelling phallus and “milch-woman”; an epilogue describes “essential life,” cosmic world cultures, hermaphroditic unity, and swastika as the zenith of human consciousness: the enemy is Juda. Juda is wretchedness, is “stinking goat-reek”, is Sodom, onanism, the rejection of the Hellenic, of paederasty; it is pestilence, and the Reformation is a manifestation of Mosaic perfidy and the beginning of modernism, of mechanization and crass Americanization. It is syphilis, anarchy, and “la bête humaine,” stagnation and mendacity (CA 120).
There is much that is controversial here, much that, with hindsight, has a sinister resonance. Before these concepts may be discussed the remaining fragment should be examined, and some knowledge gleaned of the lecture cycle that Schuler gave in Munich during the war years. The next fragmentary grouping bears the neologistic title [i]Cella Vulgivaga[/i]; the opening lines refer to Schuler's Nero obsession and also Ludwig Quidde's brochure on Nero. Quidde, an eminent historian and a politician with pacifist convictions, had published the writing in [i]Die Gesellschaft[/i] (1894) and had tactly criticized the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II; Quidde's descriptions of Nero had obviously Schuler's full support. The [i]Cella Vulgivaga[/i] is especially cryptic with frequent references to dancing youths, spinning circles, swastikas, fly-wheels, masturbation and Poe's story [i]The Pit and the Pendulum[/i]; there is a repetition of the swastika, token of fire, burning on the vulva of the priestess (CA 124) and to Nietzsche's cure (the dancing copper-dressed ephebes: CA 125). The most important utterance is the [i]Odin Trias[/i] completed in 1899 and handed to Ludwig Klages inscribed in ornamental calligraphy. The title page contained a black sqaure two and a half centimetres in length and breadth and held in a wide golden circle within which a swastika (upon a white base) rotates, and from the arms of which twelve golden stars emerge: the whole was held by another square with a golden inscription “Vitae, Lumini Intimo, Cellaque” (to life, to the inner light, to the cell --- CA 384). The [i]Trias[/i] starts with Odin hanging on the tree in the “oil blue night,” wounded by the spear, the “inner phallus”; he hears of the rune of love and descends, longing for physical beings, the “seething cell-hearth.” The second passage described Jesus on the cross, eaten by Moloch, the “cella judica.” He does not find the rune, his is “unable to redeem the cross of the spinning swastika” (CA 129). He hangs on the cross, longing for love, but Moloch frustrates him. The final section portrays the poet's soul hanging, as Odin, in the tree in an oil-blue night. Shuddering, it finds the rune of love. The cross is given “feet,” that is, it becomes a “Hakenkreuz” (or fylfot), a swastika, and the “cells” or living essences are liberated from materiality and dross. Schuler thought highly of this almost impenetrable utterance: Judaised Christianity could not redeem the world, and more ancient, more poent symbols were to be worshipped.
The remaining fragments are less substantial; Müller speaks of the cultivation of an aphoristic style which attempts to emulate Nietzsche (CA 384). Schuler laments Nietzsche's loneliness and compares it with that of Elisabeth of Austria (CA 131); two aphorisms refer to [i]The Magic Flute[/i] and attack freemasonry, the mason representing the “Proto-Bock des Mosaismus” ([i]CA 133[/i]). “We serve a Queen of Night” --- this statement will lead to a vehement attack against the world of the father that would not be out of place in an expressionist manifesto.
Where you find patriarchs you should seize their white beards and drown their worthy wrinkled visages in urine --- and, best of all, start with your own fathers. The hand of him who crushes their calcified grasp will never whither. For then our law prevails, the mother with the thousand breasts, the Christian whore of Babylon. ([i]CA133[/i])
This is the world of the Magna Mater, where Bachofen eclipses Nietzsche and the moon triumphs over the sun, the moon which Zarathustra felt might give birth to a sun, but did not (4, 156). Nietzsche is quoted verbatim (CA 134): “What did the parson's son confess? ' Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage to face that which he actually [i]knows[/i]'” (the quotation comes from [i]Götzendammerung[/i] (The Twilight of the Idols: 6, 59). Schuler proposes a quotation from Nero (as reported by Suetonius) instead: “There has not yet been a Caesar who in fact realised what he is actually allowed to do” (CA 134). Nero represents the supreme artists, beyond mortality and exulting in his power, and Nietzsche's vision of Cesare Borgia as Pope, as has been noted, is a variation of this concept of Roman power and aesthetic imperiousness, incorporated in one ruthless figure. Schuler also deplored the “Los von Rom” movement of his day for in the Catholic church he still detected ancient mysteries, the cult of Mother and Child, the symbolism of star and crescent moon (CA 140). The attack on Jahwe-Kronos-Moloch is repeated, a composite trinity of Schuler's imagination which represents patriarchy and a “child-devouring morality.” The onslaught against Juda and modernity is familiar; the Sun-king Ludwig II is hailed as a reincarnation of artistic glory, a true king who was succeeded by an “Oberförster” (Luitpold). The remaining fragment ([i] Aeolus, Lucerius, Tiberius[/i]) need not detain us.
Ludwig Klages did not only publish a selection of the fragments, he also included in his 1940 edition a text of the famous series of lectures which Schuler, after initial reluctance, decided to give on Vom Wesen der Ewigen Stadt (On the True Nature of the Eternal City). Schuler's mother died in 1913 leaving him penniless, and after the break with George in 1904 Schuler had few associates who could offer material support. In the home of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann he did, however, meet Professor Gustav Willibald Freytag, son of the novelist Gustav Freytag, who was able to offer some finacial help (he employed Schuler to bring his library into order). With the outbreak of the war Freytag's financial position worsened and Schuler was advised to earn a modest income by lecturing. In 1915 he gave three evening lectures in the home of Graf von Seyssel d'Aix and repeated these in an extended form in the winter of 1917-1918 and, again, in 1922, in the Bruckmann house in Munich (there was also a private reading in the home of the Swedish painter Bertil Malmberg shortly before his death in 1923). Rainer Maria Rilke attended the 1915 readings and wrote an enthusiastic letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis on March 18 of that year: he also went again to listen to Schuler in 1917, and a letter to Schuler (30 November 1917) expresses his admiration. Speculation that another listener may have been Adolf Hitler has been proved to be false.(14)
What is the argument of these lectures? It is apparent from the start that Schuler is not speaking as an antiquarian by as a man obsessed by Dionysian antiquity, a man overwhelmed by evidence of “cosmic life.” The opening address insists: “My lectures speak to the soul, not the intellect. They seek to uncover inner sources of light within the listener. They woo in an erotic fashion: they seek procreation and the birth of light --- their intention is, therefore, a religious act” (CA 219). Gazing within himself, the speaker informed his audience, he became aware of a throbbing effulgence, a telesmatic, mystical force, an “essential life” pulsing within the blood. (The word “telesmatic” derives from the Greek “telesma,” or “completion”: it gives us the word “talismanic” and is best understood as meaning “magical,” or “numinous”). This living entity when coming into contact with “cosmic radiance,” glows and ignites. This is an erotic moment, and “Blutleuchte” results: it is a heightened state of awareness , of “Ergiffenheit.” “Substance” becomes “essence” (or “Telesma”) when the blood begins to gleam in ecstatic moments of heroic, or erotic or magical experience, coming into contact and fusing with the cosmic spirit, becoming one with all that is and has been (CA 220). The figure of the hermaphrodite is extolled here, symbolising cosmic nuptials where the “polarised electrodes” of the telesmatic essence engage with an eternal self-impregnation. It was the lecturer's aim to seek out moments of cosmic ecstasy in world history, above all antiquity. Of great importance here is the swastika: “At the heart of antiquity stood the swastika, the spinning, rotating, wheel” (CA 222). This symbolised “open life” (das offene Leben), a sense of wholeness or oneness, erotic and glowing. The lecture ended with the lament that world history demonstrated a tragic loss of “Blutleuchte,” of consecration and Dionysian celebration: the general mass of humanity is now incapable of experiencing awe and a sense of cosmic wonder. It deplored the “human fleas” that pullulated upon earth, the “atomised” senselessness of modern existence (CA 230); the reference to Nietzsche is also a telling one here.
It was the second lecture that greatly appealed to Rilke with its discussion of the realm of death. “Imagine,” he wrote to the Princess, “that a man with an intuitive knowledge of Imperial Rome should undertake to explain the world in such a way that it was the dead who were truly essential and the realm of death one vast, unheard-of existence, our own little span of life was a kind of exception --- and all this supported by an immense erudition [ . . . ]”(15) Schuler argued that death was not simply a “reservoir of life” but that those who had passed into the other realm after having achieved “Blutleuchte” would somehow remain eternally “present.” Schuler would also use the image of the dark side of the moon for the “other relationship” (Rilke's “andere Bezug”): death is not a Christian realm of purgatory and punishment but a transfigured complement to existence on earth. The facility with which Schuler moved among the Roman dead enormously impressed the poet who, after Schuler's death, explained to his wife that there was much of this thinker in the [i]Sonnets to Orpheus,[/i] and that he had placed some narcissi on the altar of a deserted country chapel near Muzo in his memory.(16)
Lecture three emphasizes the importance of Imperial Rome as a manifestation of “quintessential being” (CA 240). Denigrated and vilified, it nevertheless exhibited a unique florescence. Schuler delights in portrayals of festivals, banquets, baths: the symbolism is phallic and uterine, the salt-cellar holding pride of place as “sperma majorum.” Of interest in the fourth lecture is a discussion of Nietzsche's concept of gladiatorial conflict as a canalisation or sublimation of brutality(CA 257). Schuler insists that gladiatorial battles were essentially matriarchal, that is, a demonstration of the violence of masculinity and the destructive male urge: the homage to Bachofen is very important, “the first to uncover the matriarchal aspect of antiquity” (CA 268). Korybantiasis, “Sonnekind” and the worship of “lithos psychicos” (Seelenstein) follow, the “sun child”, a radiant boy, representing “open life”: were andrognynous --- Julius Caesar's raiment had long, loose sleeves with fringes, Nero's breast-cloth was derived from female dress, Caligula wore male and female dress alternately, sometimes appearing as a dancer, sometimes as Aphrodite, and Heliogabalus, the supreme “sun child,” surrounded by his dancing copper-clad warriors is the fixed point of a spinning wheel or swastika; his eternal enemy is the Magus, or patriarchal God, the tyrant representing “closed life” ([i]FuV[/i] 233). The central image of the last lecture is that of Livia sitting before her house as the eagle drops a white hen into her lap, a hen which carries in its beak a blossoming laurel (CA 291). The meaning is clear: her womb is to be more powerful than Augustus Caesar's military might. And the lectures end with a trenody, a lament for the decline of Rome and for the rise of Christianity, a religion that extinguised “Blutleuchte” and insists upon the doctrines of damnation and original sin. Yet the final picture is not one of total pessimism --- as the head of Orpheus still sang as it floated towards the isle of Lesbos, so two contemporary figures gleam as exemplars of some cosmic awareness, two who found death by water: Ludwig II the Bavarian king who was drowned in 1866 in the Starnbergersee and Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, murdered on the waterfront in Geneva in 1898. And both those noble souls are victims, “crushed by the black wheel which now is master over the earth”(17) (CA 304). After speaking these words after the 1922 lecture Schuler slowly walked backwards and declaimed the following verses before disappearing behind a black curtain:
We shall return. We are not dead.
Limbs that are swimming in primal red.
We speak, and our blood is the living page,
Husks of the sinners in purple rage.
When the time has rushed in a passionless red
When the time is rotten and full of dread
We come again, through pain and fear ---.
([i]FuV[/i] 92)
What is to be made of these lectures? Much is impenetrable, much, again, verges upon the bizarre. The Rome portrayed has little to do with the Rome of Mommsen or Eduard Meyer; it is eccentric, tropical, Dionysian, the scene of cults and rituals which represent “das offene Leben.” Subsequent world history is darkened by “das geschlossene Leben,” by Moloch or Jahwe, a Jewish-Christian world of sinfulness, fanaticism and vindictive aggression. The juxtaposition of sun-child and Magus exemplifies the basic clash between soteriological golden life and dark oppression, between a matriarchal state of wholeness and the violent world of thrusting masculinity. The homage to Bachofen is not peripheral; both Schuler and Klages derived much from the Swiss scholar whose [i]Das Mutterrecht[/i] (Mother Right) received its second printing in 1897. It was Karl Wolfskehl who first read Bachofen (both [i]Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten[/i] [On the Symbolism of Graves among the Ancients] and [i]Das Mutterrecht[/i]); he gave a copy of the former to Klages as a gift, and Klages had it bound in finest snake-skin. Bachofen's [i]Die Sage von Tanaquil[/i] (The Legend of Tanaquil, 1870), an investigation int oriental practices in ancient Rome, was also a potent inspiration. It is not easy, after almost a century, to imagine the fertile discussion in the house of Wolfskehl and other in Schwabing, discussions revolving around “Blutleuchte,” cosmic verities, androgyny and related topics; one source of information (admittedly anecdotal) is Roderich Huch, cousin of the novelist Friedrich Huch, who had moved to Munich in 1899 and had been introduced to the “Kosmiker” by his cousin (Roderich had been hailed as the “Sonnekind”; he had previously fallen from grace by refusing to stand naked before Stefan George).(18) Huch learned that rapture (Glut), for Schuler, was present above all in heathen peoples, especially the Romans: it was destoryed by Christianity and particularly the Reformation, but might be found in exceptional beings, even in the twentieth century. Women were worthy recipients and vessels of “Lebensglut,” their apparent passivity elevating them above arid professional furtherance (Franziska zu Reventlow was praised for having given birth to an illegitimate son whose father she did not even know). The Jews were singled out for particular opprobrium for insisting on patriarchy, and Dionysian “Rasuch” was hailed as an antidote to Jewish legalism. The created world was born from a passive soul: here Nietzsche, worshipped as the great announcer and herald from above, might be criticized for disseminating the doctrine of the will to power. A problem was posed by Wolfskehl who, albeit Jewish, preached matriarchy and celebrated Dionysian festivals in his house, striding through Schwabing with flowing beard and blazing eyes, as a “rapturous Oriental” he was, as we know, rejected because of his Zionism. It is obvious that the term “Jude” (or “molochitisch”) has little to do with race or religion but with “Substanz,” or general attitude to the cosmos; Luther, condemned by Schuler for his removal from Christianity of the last remnants of heathenism, was called “Jew,” as was Bismarck for his espousal of “Realpolitik.” The term “Jew” could only be understood as a secret cipher within a gnostic system which sought to separate those who were open to cosmic epiphanies and those who were not.(19) If Schuler was anti-Semitic then his aversion was eclectic, eccentric, and wholly idiosyncratic. There is no perfervid nationalism here, for it was not Germany that provided the highest manifestation of “Blutleuchte” or “Lebensglut,” but Imperial Rome. And the swastika, we remember, is not a symbol of German nationalism, but hangs as a silver jewel in the sky, or burns upon the vulva of the earth goddess.
It is now appropriate to tackle this most problematic sign and its place in Schuler's Weltanschauung. The swastika was originally an ancient Indian ornament (in Sanskrit the word “svastika” means well-being or good fortune); later, however, the sign became associated with esoteric ideas asserting the superiority of the Aryan peoples. Klages claimed that Schuler had come across the symbol (a “Hakenkreuz”) in 1895 and had given it the Indian name “svastika”; Roderich Huch recalls Schuler's ecstasy on seeing the swastika on a tea service in Wolfskehl's home. We have noted its significance in the [i]Fragmenta[/i] and also in the lectures. Recent studies have drawn attention to the appropriation of the swastika by occult and völksich groups in late nineteenth century Germany and Austria;(20) Franz Hartmannused the sign on his theosophical journal [i]Lotosblüthen[/i] (Lotus Blossoms, 1896-1900); Guido von List used both swastika and triskelion (three-legged) glyphs in such publication as [i]Die Rita der Ario-Germanen[/i] (The Rites of the Ario-Germans, 1908) and [i]Die Bilderschrift der Germanen[/i] (The Hieroglyphics of the Germans, 1910), where he argued that the swastika was a symbol of light and fire, now to be associated with the “Armanen,” that is, the Nordic, racially pure peoples (it is claimed the he buried eight bottles of win in the form of a swastika beneath the ruins of the Roman city of Carnuntum); Lanz von Liebenfels, author of [i]Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflignen und dem Götter-Elektron[/i] (Theology or the Doctrine of the Apes of Sodom and the Electron of the Gods, 1905) propagated the idea of a chosen people, and, at Burg Werfenstein, founded the Orvo Novi Templi, embarking upon a crusade against miscegenation (it was claimed that the swastika was used as a symbol by the Templars); other groups, such as the “Germanenorden” with its doctrine of “ariosophy” or Nordic supremacy, used a curved swastika, superimposed upon a cross, as its heraldic device. The “Thule Society” would foster a semi-religious belief in a race of Aryan god-men and demand the extermination of inferiors: Heinrich Himmler proved particularly susceptible to these notions. A further thrust is provided by those who preached a “Welteisehre” (Hans Hörbiger),(21) where ice was regarded as the fundamental substance of the universe and where a comparison is made between glacial cosmogony and the cosmology of the Iceland eddas with their references to cataclysms (Muspilheim and Niflheim), and from those who proposed the existence of an ancient race which was supposed to have its origin in the Artic and then spread southwards across Eurasia.(22) The swastika would then be held to symbolise the Nordic race; the fifteen stars of the Great and Little Bears move in a pattern which, to primitive man, represented a wheel or swastika (the seasonal positions of Ursa minor around the pole-star, Thurbon, represent this). The astrologer Richard Morrison (who died in 1874( founded an “Order of the Swastika or the Brotherhood of the Mystic Cross,” and it was Madame Blavatsky who incorporated the swastika into the seal of the Theosophical Society as symbolising the centripetal and centrifugal powers that preserve harmony and keep the universe in steady, unceasing motion.(23) Occultism, völksich “ariosophy” and theosophy --- the swastika has proved a proud and powerful cipher for disparate believers, feeding into the early days of National Socialism when Adolf Hitler selected the “right hand” swastika to be the emblem for his party, a movement representing, some have claimed, the “Wheel of the Black Sun,” an earthly fire recreated by man, or the ancient, counterclockwise movement of the return of the Aryan races to their esoteric center.
It is axiomatic that Schuler would have rejected “ariosophy” or any emphasis on Nordic polar myth: his gaze was firmly fixed on the Mediterranean, upon Imperial Rome above all. (The reference to Dante's [i]Paradiso[/i] to the “fifteen stars,” the “primal wheel” revolving around the pole may have been known to him). His reference to the swastika burning on the vulva of the priestess, the crucified wood and nails, is puzzling; a recent study(24) on the swastika helps to throw some light. Heinrich Schliemann discovered in Troy many potsherds and whorls upon which the swastika was inscribed; he claimed that around six hundred objects were excavated which were adorned by this ornament. One of Schliemann's closest collaborates and honorary director of the French archaeological institute in Athens was Emile Bournof, cartographer and polymath who sought to link the swastika to an Aryan, anti-Semitic tradition. His work [i]La Science des religions[/i] (1888) may be wayward enough, but one page of the English translation of Schliemann's [i]Ilia[/i] (London 1880) is given in Quinn's study and this page, discussing Bournof, helps us to understand Schuler's swastika.(25) Bournof held that both the right-hand and the left-hand swastikas represent the two pieces of wood which were laid crosswise upon one another before the sacrificial altars in order to produce the sacred fire, and the ends of which were bent round at right angles and fastened by means of four nails. At the point where the two pieces of wood were joined there was a small hole in which a thin piece of wood, in the form of a lance, was rotated by means of a cord made of cowhair and hemp until the fire was generated by friction. An idol excavated by Schliemann had the swastika emblem on her vulva: the generator of fire, also of life, are closely parallel. It is almost certain that Schuler read Schliemann' [i]Ilios. Stadt und Land der Trojaner[/i] (1881) as this would have been compulsory reading for any student of archaeology (as would [i]Ithaka[/i], 1896, [i]Trojanische Altertümer[/i], 1874, [i]Toja[/i], 1883, and [i]Tirnys[/i], 1886). Attempts to claim the swastika for Nordic man Schuler would have rejected, but the swastika as womb or well of procreation would have fascinated him.
Alfred Schuler is remote from pan-German irrationalism. His “anti-Semitism,” although it may be reprehensibly irresponsible, belongs in a different order from that of Adolf Hitler,. Schuler dismissed Christianity as a form of “Judaism for the people,” a vengeful and guilt-ridden doctrine; indeed, the Christian “Moloch” may be the more vindictive and sinister of the deities (Nietzsche's analysis of morality in [i]Zur Genealogie der Moral[/i] is very close here). What would he have made of an incipient Nazi party, the burgeoning swastika flags becoming increasingly apparent in Munich? Did he not believe that it was the swastika rather than the Christian cross which “can, as no other sign, warn and arouse us, light the holy flame in us so that we become joyful sacrifices to the highest [ . . . ] a victory sign of the new inner-world God?”(26) He died in 1923 before the November putsch: a letter to Kurt Saucke, the Munich book seller, expresses the fear that “the nationalistic tumour [ . . . ] is the drunken torch of death lighting the masses the way to the slaughterhouse.”(27) The brutish ignorance of the S.A. Would have appalled him, albeit an awareness of the indebtedness of Italian fascism to Imperial Rome maye have led to a tentative support of Mussolini, as it did in Rilke's case. Fascism as “a modern counterpart of earlier hierarchic societies in which authority, stability and inequality had provided the soil of flowering cultures(28) had its appeal, but the ruthless masculinity of Nazism none. Hitler was no Heliogabalus, and the symbol adopted by the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the red of socialism, the white of nationalism, and the black of racism was an offensive travesty. Schuler was not, [i]pace[/i] Aschheim, a Nazi, and it would be appropriate to let Karl Wolfskehl, in his New Zealand exile, have the last magnanimous word: “The figure of Alfred Schuler continues to exist in the wholeness of its mythical reality, in its plenitude, its greatness [ . . . ] Schuler himself will remain, vulnerable, wondrous, and full of deep significance.(29)
NOTES
1. Alfred Schuler, [i]Cosmogonische Augen. Gesammelte Schriften,[/i] ed. By Ball Müller (Paderborn: Igel Verlag, 1997), 307-308. This is the first time that Schuler's work has been readily available and all further references to Schuler's writing, unless otherwise stated, will be to this edition under the abbreviation CA. Ludwig Klages and three other literary executors published a selection of Schuler's work under the title [i]Dichtungen[/i] in 1930; then years later Klages published [i]Alfred Schuler. Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlaß[/i] (Liepzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth) which remained the sole source of information on Schuler until Ball Müller's edition (Klages's 1940 selection, when quoted, will be abbreviated as [i]FuV[/i]. Selections from the [i]Neronis Domini Fragmenta[/i] may be found in Walter Killy, [i]Die deutsche Literatur. 7.20. Jahrhundert 1880-1930. Texte und Zeugnisse[/i] (Munich: Beck, 1967), 1088; Schuler's review of Ibsen's [i]Master Builder[/i], together with some of the Kosmoganiea Fragmenta[/i] are included in Walter Schmitz, [i]Die Müchner Moderne[/i] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). Futher quotations from Schuler's [i] Nachlaß [/i] may be found in Gerhard Plumpe, [i]Alfred Schuler. Chaos und Neubginn. Zur Funktion des Mythos in der Moderne[/i] (Berlin: Agora Verlag, 1978).
2. The review appeared under the title “Einige Gedanken über Ibsens neuestes Werk [i]Baumeiter Solness[/i]” in [i]Die Gesellschaft[/i] 9 (1893), 352-355 (CA 214-217); the poem is a sonnet dedicated to the author Leopold von Andrian and was published in [i]Blätter für die Kunst 7[/i] (1904: [i]CA 141[/i].
3. See [i]FuV[/i] 72-3, also George's poem [i]AS[/i] from [i]Das Jahr der Seele[/i] (The Year of the Soul), which specifically refers to that evening and the experience of “worlds of madness.” This “römisches Fest” should not be confused with the later “Antikes Fest” which was held in Wolfskehl's house on February 22, 1903 where Wolfskehl appeared as Dionysus, George as Caesar and Schuler as the Earth-mother.
4.[i]FuV[/i] 76. The defection, or “Großer Schwabinger Krach” has been sensationalized and trivialized in many memoirs and [i]romans à clef.[/i] The reasons are succintly described in [/i]CA[/i] 28-30 and relate basically to Wolfskehl's Zionism which was anathema to Schuler and Klages despite the latter's admiration for Wolfskehl as the embodiment of an “altjüdische Rasse.” George defended Wolfskehl against Klages, and the rift between George and the “Kosmiker” was sealed. For Wolfskel's position (and magnanimity) see [i]Briefweschel. Karl und Hanna. Wolfskehl/Friedrich Gundolf (1899-1931) ed. by Karlhans Kluncker, 2 vols. (Amesterdam: Castrum Peregrinit, 1988), vol. 1, 93 and 119. See also Gundolf's letter printed in [i]Die Münchner Moderne[/i], op. Cit. 479, on the “Zerfall der Kosmischen Runde” where Shuler appears a “der violette Ringelrno.” (Wolfskehl did, for a while, carry a loaded pistol to ward off physical attack: he accidentally shot himself in the leg --- see [/i]CA[/i] 29). For a more sober account see Gerhard Plumpe, “Alfred Schuler und die Kosmische Rune” in Manfred Frank, [i]Götter im Exil. Vorlesnugen über die neue Mythologie[/i] (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), vol. 2, 213-256, also Martin Vogel, [i]Apollinsch und Dionysisch. Geschichte eines genialen Irrtums[/i] (Regensburg: Gustave Bosse Verlag, 1960) especially 259-277.
5. Franziska zu Reventlow, [i]Tagebücher 1895-1910[/i] (Frankfurt a. M.: Sicher 1976) [Jan. 1904], 277.
6. Roderich Huch, [i]Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages und Stefan George. Erinerungen an Kreise und Kirsen der Jahrhundertwende in München-Schwabing[/i] (Amsterdamn: Castrum Peregrini, 1873) 36.
7. Theodor Lessing, [i]Einmal und nie wieder[/i] (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1969), especially 322-329. (Schuler is described as “an oddity, a curious mixture of charlatan and genius, a show-off and a visionary.”)
8. Lessing, [i]Einmal[/i], 256.
9. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, “Zwischen Rilke und Hitler --- Alfred Schuler,” [i]Zeitschrift für Religion and Geitsesgeschicte[/i] 19 (1967), 336.
10. Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand, [i]Gründerzeit[/i] (Berlin, Aufbau, 1965), 260.
11. Ludwig Klages, [i]Rhythm und Runen. Nachlaß herausgegeben von ihm selbst (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1944), 270.
12. Michael Meyer, [i]Ibsen[/i] (London: Penguin, 1985), 397.
13. Wolfdietrich Rasch, [i]Die literarische Décadence um 1900[/i] (Munich: Beck, 1986), 170.
14. Rober Boehringer, [i]Mein Bild von Stefan George[/i] (Munich: Küpper, 1951) 109, claims that Hitler was present at the first lecture given in Elsa Bruckmann's house in Munich in 1922; Karl-Heinz Schuler has demonstrated without a doubt that Hitler first visited the Bruckmann home in 1924, after Schuler's death. In “Alfred Schuler un der Nationalsozialismus,” [i]Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft[/i] 41 (1997), 383-388.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke. [i]Briefe in zwie Bänden[i], ed. By Horst Naleswi (Frankfurt a. M: Insel, 1991), vol. 1, 566 (March 18, 1915).
16. Rainer Maria Rilke, 2, 301 (April 23, 1923).
17. Another example of the poeticising of Elisabeth's death is D'Annuzio's description, translated by Hofmannsthal as [i]Kaiserin Elisabeth[/i] (Hofmannsthal ed. Cit., [i]Prosa[/i] 1), 369. “Women, strangers, let down the braids of her imperial hair and sprinkled her with water, they found upon her breasts two drops of topaz coloured blood, and in her eyes the staring apprehensions of that which lay beyond the grave.”
18. Roderich Huch, op. Cit. 39.
19. Steve Aschheim, [i]Culture and Catastrophe. German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and other Crises[/i] (London: Macmillan, 1966), 59, writes convincingly on Otto Weiniger's tortured attempts at defining what it meant to be a Jew. “Judaism was, for him, not a historical tradition or an ethnic or racial category. It was rather a Platonic idea, a psychic negative potential of all human beings. There are 'Aryans who are more Jewish than many Jews, and actual Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans,' he wrote in his famous [i]Sex and Character[/i] (1903).” Ascheim is, however, less perceptive when he boldly states that Schuler was a Nazi (73).
20. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, [i]The Occult Roots of Nazism. The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1945[/i] (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985).
21. Robert Browen, [i]Universal Ice and Ideology in the Nazi State[/i] (London: Belhaven, 1993).
22. Joscelyn Godwin, [i]Arktos. The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival[/i] (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
23. Peter Washington, [i]Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru.[/i] (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993).
24. Malcolm Quinn, [i]The Svastika. Constructing the Symbol[/i] (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
25. Quinn, [i]Svastika[i], 81.
26. This description of the swastika appeared in 1918 in Eugen Diedrich's [i]Die Tat[/i]; it is quoted in Martin Green, [i]Mountain of Truth. The Counter-culture Begins. Ascona 1900-1920.[/i] (Hannover, NH and London: UP of New England, 1986.)
27. Hans-Eggbert Schröder, [i]Ludwig Klages 1872-1956. Katalog zur Centenar Austellung,[/i] Mabach am Neckar (1972), 84. Schröder comments of Schuler's disgust at the vulgarization of the swastika by the Nazis and his subsequent request that an ornamental trefoil be carved instead upon his masoleum.
28. J.R. Harrison, [i]The Reactionaries. Yeat, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence. A Study of the Antidemocratic Intellegentsia.[/i] (New York: Schocken, 1967), 1995-6.
29. Kaltenbrunner, [i]Zwisten Rilke und Hitlerp[/i], 347.
On the host of her vulva was burning the swastika, the
token of fire. . .
--- Alfred Schuler
Was it real, this circle? When the torches
Shone on the pallid faces, and the vapours
Floated from vessels round the holy youth; your words
Lifted us, flaming, into worlds of madness. . .
--- Stefan George
It is my firm conviction that, since the death of Nietzsche,
there has been no greater, no more esoteric event for
mankind than Schuler's demise.
--- Ludwig Klages
ONE OF THE MOST AMAZING letters even written by petitioner to monarch must surely be the following, written in 1898 on a parchment roll by Alfred Schuler and addressed to the empress Elisabeth of Austria:
Condemned to death, inexorably, by the overwhelming substantiality of the present, dedicated to life as to the hearth and swastika of the coming world, I approach YOUR MAJESTY with the staff and bonds of a supplicant and stand before the MAJESTY OF YOUR SOUL, blinded and drawn by a radiance which gleams between pillars and many-coloured fragrances [ . . . ] Maimed in existence, excluded from resonance in world and image, without means of developing my talents I saw my ecstasies shudder on walls, in foliage, in the delights and enticements of the living and my life, which sought the roots of existence, haunted by noose and murderer. Desperate for help my glance encircled all. Everywhere the same. . . A crust of hatred around the earthly globe. The corpse of an ancient, dying swastika in the most extreme degradation. And where --- seldom indeed --- an eye in gold and ripeness cut away this crust, then I saw --- again --- most certain catastrophe. But a voice cried out: 'Porphyrogenetos, beseech the Empress for help. . . seek help from the highest of your symbols. That which is unique belongs to the one who is unique. See, a flame gleaming in purple. A lamp burning above black waters. If SHE does not know you, then expire gently! My primary copper are you [. . . ] You are the proof of my sun, as yet concealed which, child-like and seething, flames to new horizons [ . . . ] I now seek to lay the mystery of my urn at your feet: my Caaba. My most Inner Being. How much of the precious sap it still contains, or how much has been drunk by greedy vampires I do not know. . .”(1)
The effect that this peroration may have had will never be known: the Empress was murdered in September 1898 as she walked from her hotel to the steamer in Geneva, before the document was put into her hands.
“My Caaba, my copper” --- the terminology is as bizarre as the contents of the Tabularium itself, a collection of highly charged, hieroglyphic pronouncements which the parchment roll was meant to accompany. This consisted of twenty one plates made of thin, very hard cardboard, twenty centimetres long and ten centimetres wide, covered with a gleaming cochineal red and gilded at the edges. The left hand border of each plate had four holes for the insertion of cords which were also gilded and threaded with polished gems. The first and last of the plates were covered with intricate tracery and rich ornamentation; the remaining nineteen contained those fragmentary, gnomic utterances which Schuler considered to be his most important. The plates were contained in a tightly fitting case coloured with a patina of copper; the front of the case was decorated by a richly ornamental golden band, about one centimetre across, and a golden circle, seven centimetres in diameter in which there stood a winged figure of Eros moving through the zodiac and holding in his right hand a blossoming pomegranate, in his left a lyre with the inscription ΚΟΣΜΟΓΟΝΟΣ ΠΑΝΤΑ ΠΟΙΕΙ (illustration in Cosmogonische Augen 479). The inscriptions were exlcusively Schuler's own work; the ornamentation and figurative decoration were aided by a painter with whom he was acquainted. It took him some eighteen months (and the whole of what remained of his modest capital) to complete: it was, as we know, not delivered.
Who was he? A discussion of his work is not made easy by the fact that he published next to nothing in his lifetime apart from one review and one poem,(2) and by the luxuriant tangle of anecdotes which led to a general misrepresentation and obfuscation. Legends are legion: the plan to cure the insane Nietzsche by “korybantiasis” (the dancing of beautiful ephebes dressed in copper, Fu V 60); the Roman “feast” (29 April 1899) at which Schuler declaimed his portentous visions with such rapture and conviction the Stefan George fled and sought solace with beer-drinkers, fearing or Schuler's sanity;(3) the defection of Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages from the George-Kreis and the declaration which Schuler insisted be delivered to Wolfskehl by a solider;(4) the fear expressed by Franziska Gräfn zu Reventlow of a physical attack by Schuler;(5) the refreshing irreverence of Roderich Huch (the violent rings which Schuler saw whilst masturbating);(6) the acerbic comments of Theodor Lessing.(7) Yet Rilke's sincere admiration for Schuler, together with Wolfskehl's generous comments in his New Zealand exile, should also not be forgotten in any attempt to reach an understanding of Schuler's recondite and opaque utterances. There is much that is daunting, even forbidding in Schuler's work, but its very uniqueness draws the interpreter to it.
Alfred Schuler moved from Mainz to Munih with his mother in 1887 and matriculated at the university, ostensibly to study history, art-history and archaeology under Professor Ludwig Traube, paleographer and editor of late Roman lyric poetry and Professor Adolf Furtwängler, archaeologist in charge of various excavations in Greece (and father of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler). It soon became apparent that academic study was alien to Schuler. As a child Schuler had experienced, not unlike Heinrich Schliemann, an almost mystical rapture when confronted by artifacts of classical antiquity; fragments of pottery and coins covered with the patina of age obsessed him, and he responded with an almost erotic ravishment to objects dating from the Roman period. Theodor Lessing would later claim that
there was nothing classical or religious for him which did not have some connection with Eros [. . . ] His hedonistic-heathen philosophy, which abhorred anything which smacked of morality, stemmed from a homo-erotic attitude, something feminine and atavistic, which was only interested in masculine strength.(8)
Schuler's sexual proclivities are not our concern here: suffice it that the cult of the “passive” and “maternal” owes much to Bachofen, whose influence was considerable. In 1893 Schuler made the acquaintance of Ludwig Klages and, through him, many of the Munich avant-garde, including the “pale salon-Jesuit Derleth” and his remarkable sister Anna Maria. It becomes difficult to separate the man from the lurid and frequently prurient anecdotes which thwart any attempt to discuss Schuler's ideas, but one of the most striking of his beliefs is his contempt for the modern world (for “progress”) and his admiration for Imperial Rome, particularly its later emperors. There is much of Schuler in the figure of Chaim Breisacher in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (in chapter twenty eight), although it has been argued(9) that Mann drew upon Oskar Goldberg here, author of Die Wirklichkeit der Hebräer (The Reality of the Hebrews, 1925); Breisacher exulted in the damnation of humanism, liberalism, and tolerance and sought the starkest, most authoritarian absolute, despising Christianity and seeing alarming signs of degeneration in some of the early Hebrew prophets. In Schuler's case it is the post-Roman world which is castigated, and the intellectual tradition of nearly tow thousand years excoriated as “Gehirnstrolcherei,” an untranslatable term but one which might be rendered as “cerebral vagaries.” It was Life which Schuler would extol, not mere existence, but powerful, “shuddering,” passionate life or “Blutleuchte,” life radiant and suffused with erotic energy. And the ultimate symbol for this ecstatic, cosmic rapture will be the swastika, fons et origo of life-affirmation.
Nero as artist-emperor (Qualis artifex pereo!) and Ludwig II of Bavaria as his incarnation, the amoral cult of beauty fusing with the praise of Renaissance violence (Nietzsche's “Cesare Borgia als Papst”: 6, 251) --- this was the heady atmosphere which Schuler imbibed in Munich. The excesses of the late Roman emperors had fascinated the exponents of French decadence, but not only these: in Germany it is George's Algabal poems (Heliogabalus, but Nero's presence is undeniable), which are exemplary, as are Ludwig Quidde's essay Caligula (1894) and Oskar Pannizza's play Nero (1898); as early as 1866, however, Robert Hammerling, in his epic Ahasuerus in Rom, had exulted in pictures of splendour and cruelty. Both Nietzsche and Schuler were aware of Jacob Burckhardt's speculation (in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Liepzig 1898) of what Cesare Borgia might have achieved had he not been struck down by illness at a critical time and how me might, through poison, have decimated the College of Cardinals and secured the papacy for himself. This “healthiest of all tropical monsters” (5, 117), this “beast of prey, healthy and sound!” (11, 21) seemed to many to be a throw-back to a time before the triumph of Christianity, a time of Roman glory, of atavistic triumphalism.(10).Schuler absorbed much from Traube and Furtwängler but the strained and eccentric atmosphere of Schwabing encouraged and fostered an anti-intellectualism and a cult of irrational vitalism. Rome, “Blutleuchte” and Swastika --- these three components are the strands that characterize Schuler's thought, although “thought” is a misnomer, for “telesmatic” (i.e. talismanic) pictures, emerging from the blood, eclipse ratiocination and communicate more deeply. For Schuler, as for Klages, the corruption of life began with Judaeo-Christianity and a “historical” (as opposed to a “cosmic” viewpoint), a will to rational truth which “de-actualizes” the world: this will be the central argument in Klages's Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Mind as Adversary of the Soul, 1929-1932). And it is Klages who, in 1944, attempted a definition of Schuler's “Blutleuchte”: it is “a continuous, deeply moving shudder. . . a dark strangeness which throbs and seethes in a secret dwelling, dwelling, a wild, woeful exultation, mixed with the beauty of the storm. It is Eros and Child, golden unity of life, and, as such, gazes into radiant visions. In it the mystery of the maternal cosmos is made manifest.”(11)
The obsession with Rome is apparent both in Schuler's fragments and in the series of lectures he gave under the title Vom Wesen der Ewigen Stadt (On the True Nature of the Eternal City); these were given in 1915 and repeated later. As soon as Schuler had matriculated at the university in Munich he sought out Henrik Ibsen, whose Emperor and Galilean had fascinated him, a work published in 1873 and only performed some twenty years later. Ibsen was in Munich in 1890, living in the Maximilianstrasse here Schuler had visited him. On his way to Ibsen's rooms he composed the “Periodonikes” scene of a projected three volume Nero novel. Emperor and Galilean could not fail to make an impact on him, being a portrayal of a search for a religion which exulted the joy of life and which refused to submit to the chill of Christian ethics;(12) the extraordinary opening, set in Constantinople, with Julian and his brother waiting for the mad Emperor's hand to fall on them as it had on their eleven murdered kinsmen, the march on Rome and Julian's murder by a Christian fell on fertile ground. It has only now been possible, thanks to Baal Müller's edition, to gain an insight into Schuler's fragmentary utterances, his hectic visions and heightened ecstasies, and this chapter will now try to elucidate them.
The Cosmogoniae Fragmenta (Fragments of a Cosmogony), is a mass of disordered material whose preface refers to a journey to Rome (1894) and a procssion of masked figures, to dithyrambic convulsions and, strangely, to the music of Carmen which deeply moved the author (CA 72) as it had Friedrich Nietzsche some six years previously (Ludwig Derleth is also mentioned). A “Nietzsche-Trias” follows, a group of three aphorisms which seeks, with sensuous imagery to find a new sexuality, from an awareness of which “a miraculous palm tree” arises whose dates swell like “eine neue Sonne,” (a new sun:CA 74); a voice laments the Christian concept of agape which cuts deeply into life's fecundity. These fragments were meant to be incorporated into the Nero novel and exult in images of violet and purple, of emerald columns and rose-entwined pillars, of perfume and incense (CA 75). A “Tabula Secunda” contains the following couplet: “What is Freedom in the Thrust of Becoming? Eros in Pan. / What is Eros in Decline and Death? Christian delusion” (CA 76). This is the basic and central dichotomy for Schuler, the “ultimus paganorum” (Wolfskehl); Christianity is seen as inimical to life, to sexuality, to joy, and the victory of the pale Galilean strikes at the very heart of life itself. Dithyrambic perorations proclaim the triumph of Eros in Imperial Rome, the triumph of that which is cosmic, of life exultant in alabaster temples, beneath umbrageous and fragrant trees, in the “amethyst-purple of dream-heavy poppy”. “Let Eros alone be the light of thine eye” (CA 80) --- this injunction climaxes in a vision of red moons circling in a “violet ecstasy,” with green suns enveloped in a crimson, sparkling inebriation.
In the section “Trias Emesa Nazareth” Schuler evokes the spirit of Heliogabalus who was born in Emesea (now Homs in Syria), high priest of the sun god who, aged fourteen, became Emperor of Rome. George's Algabal poems, as has been noted, are the finest German contribution to the decadent cult of Heliogabalus, but George is but one of the poètes maudits who saw in the degenerate boy-Emperor the personifcation of wanton and sterile debauchery.(13) Louis Coouperus's De berg van Licht may be adduced as an example, as may Jean Lombard's L'agonie; this novel described a Rom in the grip of barbaric and voluptuous cults where the Christians are struggling for survival against the rule of the fifteen-year old adolescent Emperor. Heliogabalus, mitred, bejewelled, long-haired, painted and effiminate, wishes to impose on Rome the worship of the phallic black stone, a symbol of his tyrannical power. He proceeds around Rome with a motley entourage of naked women, eunuchs, priests, captives, subservient senators and various wild beasts. Heliogabalus leads the orgies, copulating publicly with both sexes; opponents are murdered and thrown into the cloaca maxima, where Heliogabalus an his mother would later find their deaths. For Schuler,however, he is a “Sonnekind,” a child of the sun, a figure in whom the “Blutleuchte,” or blood-radiance is most powerful felt: he represents radiant, transfigured or “telesmatic” life, “open existence” (these terms will be explained more fully later); the “Nazarene” however, is denial, or “closed existence.” Schuler knows that, geographically, the distance between Emesea and Nazareth is short indeed, but Roman and Jew are separated by an unbridgeable gulf (CA 81). A “Triptychon des Korbyantischen Dithyrambos” exults in the wild dance of life, a praise for Life as its most naked, most intense --- “I am the Light. . . I am the Eye. . . I am the pearl. . . I am the frenzy. . . I am life” (CA 83) --- here Nietzschean Lebensjahung achieves its most triumphant expression.
Most fascinating is the section “Domus Aurea Cella Ithyphalli. Reiter-trias.” Here Nero's golden house is portrayed, with a room of the Erect Phallus. In the centre of the room was a mosaic pattern of the revolving swastika whose purple, twitching limbs sprayed forth golden ears of corn. Again, a discussion of the importance of the swastika for Schuler follows later; what is also significant ther is the fact that the praiseof the phallus is transformed into the cult of the hermaphrodite in that a scrotum is described which is a container for oil, and the opening in the glans, from which a flame emerges, also has the form of female genitalia. Sexuality, however deviant or esoteric to the modern mind, was at the heart of pagan life, exemplified by the whirling swastika, hermaphroditic oneness and dancing fire. Paralipomena to the Cosmogonos include a prayer for extinction, reabsorption into maternal darkness.
O mother night
Take now this last lamp [the poet] unto you
into your gentle, black-wreathed holy hand.
Its drunken wick has drunk, the fool, of too much oil.
Its tongue longed longingly in too much death.
To you, o mother, mother!
Extinguish
loosen. . .
(i]CA[/i]90)
Reference to Bachofen's [i]Das Mutterecht[/i] (Mother Right) follows later; suffice it here to comment on Schuler's increasing insistence on the maternal, on warmth and womb, source of fecundity and life: a section: “My Mother” recounts that “My mother is triumphant night and my father the flaming diurnal star; I, however, am sweet dusk. . .” (CA 92). This is remote, indeed, from Zarathustra's solar imperiousness, but he, too, had longed for darkness, longed to be suckled, to receive and not to give (4, 136). The reference to “Horus-Isitich” (CA 93) and to Zeus elaborates the theme of fatherlessness; Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, conceived after the death of his father avenges the latter's death after years of concealment (he is often portrayed as a falcon, or a child). Strange indeed that Nietzsche should claim, in [i]Ecce Homo[/i] (1908) that “I still live as my mother, after my father had already died --- to speak in riddles. . .” (6, 264). A final fragment attacks the desacralisation of the world by Luther and the Reformation, the extirpation of pagan rituals and a “Jewish rabies” that blights the earth. (CA 93)
The [i]Neroniana[/i] material relates to Schuler's plans for a work on Nero, a figure who fascinated him (and not only him) at this time. The plans for a Nero novel came to him, he writes (CA 101) after the meeting with Ibsen in 1890; the scattered notes contain a vituperative onslaught against Tolstoy, particularly [i]The Kreutzer Sonata[/i] for tis damnation of sexual love and advocation of agape --- “the gospel of exhaustion” (CA 103). For Nietzsche, Tolstoy's cult of pity was a symptom of decadence (6, 174); Schuler deliberately constasts it with “Cosmische Kraft” or cosmic power, “essential life,” energy and fire (CA 103), with the quadrumvirate “Goethe-Nietzsche-Dionysos-Uebermensch” held as an ideal antidote. The [i]Fragmenta Neronis Domini[/i] contains an ecstatic introit:
He rears up
Bull Dionysos
Branded with golden sacrifical ribbons.
Cosmos
Stigma.
Cosmos
Brand.
Ready for axe and axe blow.
Bull rage
Ready for heart blood
To fill the chalice for the inebriate
For drunk ones, for sunk ones
Hot, steaming bowls of the heart's blood.
For all that is trampled
In fragments and ordure
Light-eyes which dive into trembling garlands.
For all that rend serpents in ravings of night.
I close the ring of blood
Around the child Aeon
I open the mouth of ardour
To the one unknowning.
This flaming, seething
rearing, dreaming
lit with glittering sword flash
Darkened by shield
Corybantiasis
Nero cosmogonos
(CA108)
A drunken tone of joy and suffering is expressed here, a Dionysian ecstasy with a god as bull whose gushing, steamy blood fills the sacrificial chalices as a wild dance is executed. Most remarkable is the section “Ex capite de comsomogonia” which runs thus: “Host in the shrine. Cosmos the pregnant life-cell. Tongue of fire the essence of life. Child-like peoples exult in the urn-shape. The urn is divine for them, a pregnant mother their primary idol. On the host of her vulva the swastika is burning, the sign of fire its revelation. Crucified wood and nails. Crucified fire. In the cult of the primeval cell is announced all that is still come to pass. . .” (CA 109). Further utterances extol the “Cinqueccento,” that remarkable century in which a pagan life-affirmation arose again in art, an art of beauty and blood. It is a vision of “Lebensessenz,” of “Blutleuchte” of radiant, gleaming blood, but the triumph of beauty and life was short-lived, a “monstrous black mass of slag, of scoria, of Nazarene brimstone” (CA 112) scorched the earth, and “murderous miasmas rose from the choking canals.” This was the conquest of Rome by Luther, for Luther destroyed the “cells of light,” extinguished by the joy of “Blutleuchte” and elevated the pale Galilean as the sole path to salvation. The attack against Luther is continued in “Nero triumphans”: the “scandal of Wittenberg” ensured the rise of a world without sacraments, a world of materialism and utilitarianism. No longer are there festivals to commemorate “the marriage of the soul with the light”; vulgar conformism is the order of the day where Nietzsche's “last man” has triumphed --- it is the age of the mob, the louse (CA 113). Noble features are no longer found, the prevailing physiognomy is that of the dog. In a moving section Schuler defends his own homosexuality: the homosexual world feeling, as one of
the most radiant centres of individualistic light-creation (Lichtbildungen) in the world of
antiquity [. . . ] disappeared immediately with the triumphs of Christianity from literature and
art. That purple net which spun a transfiguration of the senses over objects and space is
destroyed without mercy. (CA 114).
Christianity has no place for the Greek concept of [i]agon[/i], of noble struggle, a contest for the highest prize; agape prevents this. But Schuler also extols hardness and praises pain and violence:
Birth bursts open the mother's womb. Birth for the mother is blood, is pain, an experience of
death. The volcanic destroys when it erupts. This is the law of nature. Killing is the right of each
fiery force. As it is the right of youth, the young, strong, blood-filled [i]sabella proles[/i],
radiant in the steel and the gleam of weapons. (CA 113)
The praise of violence, of killing even, grates upon the modern sensibility. Even more startling is the elevation of the swastika as the ultimate symbol of life.
Whether it stood as Caius [Caius Caesar] with silver hands in an azure night and pulled the
moon into the calvary of its embrace. Whether it sparkled as Otho in the white coral and linen
on the shoulder buckles of common legionaries and triumphant in the leather-smell of collars or
the handles of shields, leaping as a drunken spark into all hearts, to leap forth from all eyes, all
lips radiant, shouting solar joy, whilst its vessel burst in sacrificial death [. . . ] (CA 118)
The swastika is seen as cosmic symbol, glittering in the night or stitched as imperial signature or the uniform of Roman soldiers. Schuler's wildly associative mode of writing now hails Nero, “the censer, who lit the purifying vapour, who arched the rings of love into the vilest corner, who draws the sweetness of honey from any common song, filling it with march-like visions of the future, letting it blush at its urgency.” And [i]Swastika[/i] ends with the following: “We hurl fire into the night and copper-rage till there is blood from town to village to hamlet. Till it seethes in town and village and hamlet. . . to the last poplar-darkened cottage over which the towering sunflowers dream in night and silver..” “Copper-rage” reminds us of he “kuretes” or ephebes who, dressed in copper, were to cure the insane Nietzsche (an idea which, apparently, Langbehn also entertained: CA31); it is obvious that an emblem of a swastika is used by Schuler in a highly idiosyncratic manner, as we shall later see. It is found once more in the last poem in the [i]Fragmenta Neronis Domini[/i], the haunting and elusive “Phallikos.” The title refers to the ithyphallic Bacchic hymns which accompanied the procession of the phallus:
In zenith of blueness we gaze now at purple.
Tit of milch-woman.
Omphalos, swelling.
Within the scarlet mesh of the ribbons
Swells now and fills now the golden phallus.
Not man, not maid.
Create, conceive is the same.
The one who creates not, creates light.
The one who conceives not, bears light.
In the heart of the depths the One is now gleaming.
From this
Life rolls forth in golden spirals.
Wider and wider the whirling swastika
Wider and paler. Wider and colder.
Soma and moonring freeze its flow.
In zenith of newness we gaze now at purple.
Tit of milch-woman.
Omphalos, swelling.
Within the scarlet mesh of the ribbons
Swells now and fills the golden phallus.
(CA 119)
The omphalos is the navel of the earth, the site of Delphic oracle; in depiction it is fused with a phallus or uterine symbolism, hence supporting the significant notion of androgyny in Schuler. “Soma” is a Sanskrit word for the intoxicating extract from certain hallucinogenic plants; the moon is held to be the chalice of this intoxicant. The poem tells of whirling life, of swastika, swelling phallus and “milch-woman”; an epilogue describes “essential life,” cosmic world cultures, hermaphroditic unity, and swastika as the zenith of human consciousness: the enemy is Juda. Juda is wretchedness, is “stinking goat-reek”, is Sodom, onanism, the rejection of the Hellenic, of paederasty; it is pestilence, and the Reformation is a manifestation of Mosaic perfidy and the beginning of modernism, of mechanization and crass Americanization. It is syphilis, anarchy, and “la bête humaine,” stagnation and mendacity (CA 120).
There is much that is controversial here, much that, with hindsight, has a sinister resonance. Before these concepts may be discussed the remaining fragment should be examined, and some knowledge gleaned of the lecture cycle that Schuler gave in Munich during the war years. The next fragmentary grouping bears the neologistic title [i]Cella Vulgivaga[/i]; the opening lines refer to Schuler's Nero obsession and also Ludwig Quidde's brochure on Nero. Quidde, an eminent historian and a politician with pacifist convictions, had published the writing in [i]Die Gesellschaft[/i] (1894) and had tactly criticized the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II; Quidde's descriptions of Nero had obviously Schuler's full support. The [i]Cella Vulgivaga[/i] is especially cryptic with frequent references to dancing youths, spinning circles, swastikas, fly-wheels, masturbation and Poe's story [i]The Pit and the Pendulum[/i]; there is a repetition of the swastika, token of fire, burning on the vulva of the priestess (CA 124) and to Nietzsche's cure (the dancing copper-dressed ephebes: CA 125). The most important utterance is the [i]Odin Trias[/i] completed in 1899 and handed to Ludwig Klages inscribed in ornamental calligraphy. The title page contained a black sqaure two and a half centimetres in length and breadth and held in a wide golden circle within which a swastika (upon a white base) rotates, and from the arms of which twelve golden stars emerge: the whole was held by another square with a golden inscription “Vitae, Lumini Intimo, Cellaque” (to life, to the inner light, to the cell --- CA 384). The [i]Trias[/i] starts with Odin hanging on the tree in the “oil blue night,” wounded by the spear, the “inner phallus”; he hears of the rune of love and descends, longing for physical beings, the “seething cell-hearth.” The second passage described Jesus on the cross, eaten by Moloch, the “cella judica.” He does not find the rune, his is “unable to redeem the cross of the spinning swastika” (CA 129). He hangs on the cross, longing for love, but Moloch frustrates him. The final section portrays the poet's soul hanging, as Odin, in the tree in an oil-blue night. Shuddering, it finds the rune of love. The cross is given “feet,” that is, it becomes a “Hakenkreuz” (or fylfot), a swastika, and the “cells” or living essences are liberated from materiality and dross. Schuler thought highly of this almost impenetrable utterance: Judaised Christianity could not redeem the world, and more ancient, more poent symbols were to be worshipped.
The remaining fragments are less substantial; Müller speaks of the cultivation of an aphoristic style which attempts to emulate Nietzsche (CA 384). Schuler laments Nietzsche's loneliness and compares it with that of Elisabeth of Austria (CA 131); two aphorisms refer to [i]The Magic Flute[/i] and attack freemasonry, the mason representing the “Proto-Bock des Mosaismus” ([i]CA 133[/i]). “We serve a Queen of Night” --- this statement will lead to a vehement attack against the world of the father that would not be out of place in an expressionist manifesto.
Where you find patriarchs you should seize their white beards and drown their worthy wrinkled visages in urine --- and, best of all, start with your own fathers. The hand of him who crushes their calcified grasp will never whither. For then our law prevails, the mother with the thousand breasts, the Christian whore of Babylon. ([i]CA133[/i])
This is the world of the Magna Mater, where Bachofen eclipses Nietzsche and the moon triumphs over the sun, the moon which Zarathustra felt might give birth to a sun, but did not (4, 156). Nietzsche is quoted verbatim (CA 134): “What did the parson's son confess? ' Even the bravest of us rarely has the courage to face that which he actually [i]knows[/i]'” (the quotation comes from [i]Götzendammerung[/i] (The Twilight of the Idols: 6, 59). Schuler proposes a quotation from Nero (as reported by Suetonius) instead: “There has not yet been a Caesar who in fact realised what he is actually allowed to do” (CA 134). Nero represents the supreme artists, beyond mortality and exulting in his power, and Nietzsche's vision of Cesare Borgia as Pope, as has been noted, is a variation of this concept of Roman power and aesthetic imperiousness, incorporated in one ruthless figure. Schuler also deplored the “Los von Rom” movement of his day for in the Catholic church he still detected ancient mysteries, the cult of Mother and Child, the symbolism of star and crescent moon (CA 140). The attack on Jahwe-Kronos-Moloch is repeated, a composite trinity of Schuler's imagination which represents patriarchy and a “child-devouring morality.” The onslaught against Juda and modernity is familiar; the Sun-king Ludwig II is hailed as a reincarnation of artistic glory, a true king who was succeeded by an “Oberförster” (Luitpold). The remaining fragment ([i] Aeolus, Lucerius, Tiberius[/i]) need not detain us.
Ludwig Klages did not only publish a selection of the fragments, he also included in his 1940 edition a text of the famous series of lectures which Schuler, after initial reluctance, decided to give on Vom Wesen der Ewigen Stadt (On the True Nature of the Eternal City). Schuler's mother died in 1913 leaving him penniless, and after the break with George in 1904 Schuler had few associates who could offer material support. In the home of the publisher Hugo Bruckmann he did, however, meet Professor Gustav Willibald Freytag, son of the novelist Gustav Freytag, who was able to offer some finacial help (he employed Schuler to bring his library into order). With the outbreak of the war Freytag's financial position worsened and Schuler was advised to earn a modest income by lecturing. In 1915 he gave three evening lectures in the home of Graf von Seyssel d'Aix and repeated these in an extended form in the winter of 1917-1918 and, again, in 1922, in the Bruckmann house in Munich (there was also a private reading in the home of the Swedish painter Bertil Malmberg shortly before his death in 1923). Rainer Maria Rilke attended the 1915 readings and wrote an enthusiastic letter to Marie von Thurn und Taxis on March 18 of that year: he also went again to listen to Schuler in 1917, and a letter to Schuler (30 November 1917) expresses his admiration. Speculation that another listener may have been Adolf Hitler has been proved to be false.(14)
What is the argument of these lectures? It is apparent from the start that Schuler is not speaking as an antiquarian by as a man obsessed by Dionysian antiquity, a man overwhelmed by evidence of “cosmic life.” The opening address insists: “My lectures speak to the soul, not the intellect. They seek to uncover inner sources of light within the listener. They woo in an erotic fashion: they seek procreation and the birth of light --- their intention is, therefore, a religious act” (CA 219). Gazing within himself, the speaker informed his audience, he became aware of a throbbing effulgence, a telesmatic, mystical force, an “essential life” pulsing within the blood. (The word “telesmatic” derives from the Greek “telesma,” or “completion”: it gives us the word “talismanic” and is best understood as meaning “magical,” or “numinous”). This living entity when coming into contact with “cosmic radiance,” glows and ignites. This is an erotic moment, and “Blutleuchte” results: it is a heightened state of awareness , of “Ergiffenheit.” “Substance” becomes “essence” (or “Telesma”) when the blood begins to gleam in ecstatic moments of heroic, or erotic or magical experience, coming into contact and fusing with the cosmic spirit, becoming one with all that is and has been (CA 220). The figure of the hermaphrodite is extolled here, symbolising cosmic nuptials where the “polarised electrodes” of the telesmatic essence engage with an eternal self-impregnation. It was the lecturer's aim to seek out moments of cosmic ecstasy in world history, above all antiquity. Of great importance here is the swastika: “At the heart of antiquity stood the swastika, the spinning, rotating, wheel” (CA 222). This symbolised “open life” (das offene Leben), a sense of wholeness or oneness, erotic and glowing. The lecture ended with the lament that world history demonstrated a tragic loss of “Blutleuchte,” of consecration and Dionysian celebration: the general mass of humanity is now incapable of experiencing awe and a sense of cosmic wonder. It deplored the “human fleas” that pullulated upon earth, the “atomised” senselessness of modern existence (CA 230); the reference to Nietzsche is also a telling one here.
It was the second lecture that greatly appealed to Rilke with its discussion of the realm of death. “Imagine,” he wrote to the Princess, “that a man with an intuitive knowledge of Imperial Rome should undertake to explain the world in such a way that it was the dead who were truly essential and the realm of death one vast, unheard-of existence, our own little span of life was a kind of exception --- and all this supported by an immense erudition [ . . . ]”(15) Schuler argued that death was not simply a “reservoir of life” but that those who had passed into the other realm after having achieved “Blutleuchte” would somehow remain eternally “present.” Schuler would also use the image of the dark side of the moon for the “other relationship” (Rilke's “andere Bezug”): death is not a Christian realm of purgatory and punishment but a transfigured complement to existence on earth. The facility with which Schuler moved among the Roman dead enormously impressed the poet who, after Schuler's death, explained to his wife that there was much of this thinker in the [i]Sonnets to Orpheus,[/i] and that he had placed some narcissi on the altar of a deserted country chapel near Muzo in his memory.(16)
Lecture three emphasizes the importance of Imperial Rome as a manifestation of “quintessential being” (CA 240). Denigrated and vilified, it nevertheless exhibited a unique florescence. Schuler delights in portrayals of festivals, banquets, baths: the symbolism is phallic and uterine, the salt-cellar holding pride of place as “sperma majorum.” Of interest in the fourth lecture is a discussion of Nietzsche's concept of gladiatorial conflict as a canalisation or sublimation of brutality(CA 257). Schuler insists that gladiatorial battles were essentially matriarchal, that is, a demonstration of the violence of masculinity and the destructive male urge: the homage to Bachofen is very important, “the first to uncover the matriarchal aspect of antiquity” (CA 268). Korybantiasis, “Sonnekind” and the worship of “lithos psychicos” (Seelenstein) follow, the “sun child”, a radiant boy, representing “open life”: were andrognynous --- Julius Caesar's raiment had long, loose sleeves with fringes, Nero's breast-cloth was derived from female dress, Caligula wore male and female dress alternately, sometimes appearing as a dancer, sometimes as Aphrodite, and Heliogabalus, the supreme “sun child,” surrounded by his dancing copper-clad warriors is the fixed point of a spinning wheel or swastika; his eternal enemy is the Magus, or patriarchal God, the tyrant representing “closed life” ([i]FuV[/i] 233). The central image of the last lecture is that of Livia sitting before her house as the eagle drops a white hen into her lap, a hen which carries in its beak a blossoming laurel (CA 291). The meaning is clear: her womb is to be more powerful than Augustus Caesar's military might. And the lectures end with a trenody, a lament for the decline of Rome and for the rise of Christianity, a religion that extinguised “Blutleuchte” and insists upon the doctrines of damnation and original sin. Yet the final picture is not one of total pessimism --- as the head of Orpheus still sang as it floated towards the isle of Lesbos, so two contemporary figures gleam as exemplars of some cosmic awareness, two who found death by water: Ludwig II the Bavarian king who was drowned in 1866 in the Starnbergersee and Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary, murdered on the waterfront in Geneva in 1898. And both those noble souls are victims, “crushed by the black wheel which now is master over the earth”(17) (CA 304). After speaking these words after the 1922 lecture Schuler slowly walked backwards and declaimed the following verses before disappearing behind a black curtain:
We shall return. We are not dead.
Limbs that are swimming in primal red.
We speak, and our blood is the living page,
Husks of the sinners in purple rage.
When the time has rushed in a passionless red
When the time is rotten and full of dread
We come again, through pain and fear ---.
([i]FuV[/i] 92)
What is to be made of these lectures? Much is impenetrable, much, again, verges upon the bizarre. The Rome portrayed has little to do with the Rome of Mommsen or Eduard Meyer; it is eccentric, tropical, Dionysian, the scene of cults and rituals which represent “das offene Leben.” Subsequent world history is darkened by “das geschlossene Leben,” by Moloch or Jahwe, a Jewish-Christian world of sinfulness, fanaticism and vindictive aggression. The juxtaposition of sun-child and Magus exemplifies the basic clash between soteriological golden life and dark oppression, between a matriarchal state of wholeness and the violent world of thrusting masculinity. The homage to Bachofen is not peripheral; both Schuler and Klages derived much from the Swiss scholar whose [i]Das Mutterrecht[/i] (Mother Right) received its second printing in 1897. It was Karl Wolfskehl who first read Bachofen (both [i]Versuch über die Gräbersymbolik der Alten[/i] [On the Symbolism of Graves among the Ancients] and [i]Das Mutterrecht[/i]); he gave a copy of the former to Klages as a gift, and Klages had it bound in finest snake-skin. Bachofen's [i]Die Sage von Tanaquil[/i] (The Legend of Tanaquil, 1870), an investigation int oriental practices in ancient Rome, was also a potent inspiration. It is not easy, after almost a century, to imagine the fertile discussion in the house of Wolfskehl and other in Schwabing, discussions revolving around “Blutleuchte,” cosmic verities, androgyny and related topics; one source of information (admittedly anecdotal) is Roderich Huch, cousin of the novelist Friedrich Huch, who had moved to Munich in 1899 and had been introduced to the “Kosmiker” by his cousin (Roderich had been hailed as the “Sonnekind”; he had previously fallen from grace by refusing to stand naked before Stefan George).(18) Huch learned that rapture (Glut), for Schuler, was present above all in heathen peoples, especially the Romans: it was destoryed by Christianity and particularly the Reformation, but might be found in exceptional beings, even in the twentieth century. Women were worthy recipients and vessels of “Lebensglut,” their apparent passivity elevating them above arid professional furtherance (Franziska zu Reventlow was praised for having given birth to an illegitimate son whose father she did not even know). The Jews were singled out for particular opprobrium for insisting on patriarchy, and Dionysian “Rasuch” was hailed as an antidote to Jewish legalism. The created world was born from a passive soul: here Nietzsche, worshipped as the great announcer and herald from above, might be criticized for disseminating the doctrine of the will to power. A problem was posed by Wolfskehl who, albeit Jewish, preached matriarchy and celebrated Dionysian festivals in his house, striding through Schwabing with flowing beard and blazing eyes, as a “rapturous Oriental” he was, as we know, rejected because of his Zionism. It is obvious that the term “Jude” (or “molochitisch”) has little to do with race or religion but with “Substanz,” or general attitude to the cosmos; Luther, condemned by Schuler for his removal from Christianity of the last remnants of heathenism, was called “Jew,” as was Bismarck for his espousal of “Realpolitik.” The term “Jew” could only be understood as a secret cipher within a gnostic system which sought to separate those who were open to cosmic epiphanies and those who were not.(19) If Schuler was anti-Semitic then his aversion was eclectic, eccentric, and wholly idiosyncratic. There is no perfervid nationalism here, for it was not Germany that provided the highest manifestation of “Blutleuchte” or “Lebensglut,” but Imperial Rome. And the swastika, we remember, is not a symbol of German nationalism, but hangs as a silver jewel in the sky, or burns upon the vulva of the earth goddess.
It is now appropriate to tackle this most problematic sign and its place in Schuler's Weltanschauung. The swastika was originally an ancient Indian ornament (in Sanskrit the word “svastika” means well-being or good fortune); later, however, the sign became associated with esoteric ideas asserting the superiority of the Aryan peoples. Klages claimed that Schuler had come across the symbol (a “Hakenkreuz”) in 1895 and had given it the Indian name “svastika”; Roderich Huch recalls Schuler's ecstasy on seeing the swastika on a tea service in Wolfskehl's home. We have noted its significance in the [i]Fragmenta[/i] and also in the lectures. Recent studies have drawn attention to the appropriation of the swastika by occult and völksich groups in late nineteenth century Germany and Austria;(20) Franz Hartmannused the sign on his theosophical journal [i]Lotosblüthen[/i] (Lotus Blossoms, 1896-1900); Guido von List used both swastika and triskelion (three-legged) glyphs in such publication as [i]Die Rita der Ario-Germanen[/i] (The Rites of the Ario-Germans, 1908) and [i]Die Bilderschrift der Germanen[/i] (The Hieroglyphics of the Germans, 1910), where he argued that the swastika was a symbol of light and fire, now to be associated with the “Armanen,” that is, the Nordic, racially pure peoples (it is claimed the he buried eight bottles of win in the form of a swastika beneath the ruins of the Roman city of Carnuntum); Lanz von Liebenfels, author of [i]Theozoologie oder die Kunde von den Sodoms-Äfflignen und dem Götter-Elektron[/i] (Theology or the Doctrine of the Apes of Sodom and the Electron of the Gods, 1905) propagated the idea of a chosen people, and, at Burg Werfenstein, founded the Orvo Novi Templi, embarking upon a crusade against miscegenation (it was claimed that the swastika was used as a symbol by the Templars); other groups, such as the “Germanenorden” with its doctrine of “ariosophy” or Nordic supremacy, used a curved swastika, superimposed upon a cross, as its heraldic device. The “Thule Society” would foster a semi-religious belief in a race of Aryan god-men and demand the extermination of inferiors: Heinrich Himmler proved particularly susceptible to these notions. A further thrust is provided by those who preached a “Welteisehre” (Hans Hörbiger),(21) where ice was regarded as the fundamental substance of the universe and where a comparison is made between glacial cosmogony and the cosmology of the Iceland eddas with their references to cataclysms (Muspilheim and Niflheim), and from those who proposed the existence of an ancient race which was supposed to have its origin in the Artic and then spread southwards across Eurasia.(22) The swastika would then be held to symbolise the Nordic race; the fifteen stars of the Great and Little Bears move in a pattern which, to primitive man, represented a wheel or swastika (the seasonal positions of Ursa minor around the pole-star, Thurbon, represent this). The astrologer Richard Morrison (who died in 1874( founded an “Order of the Swastika or the Brotherhood of the Mystic Cross,” and it was Madame Blavatsky who incorporated the swastika into the seal of the Theosophical Society as symbolising the centripetal and centrifugal powers that preserve harmony and keep the universe in steady, unceasing motion.(23) Occultism, völksich “ariosophy” and theosophy --- the swastika has proved a proud and powerful cipher for disparate believers, feeding into the early days of National Socialism when Adolf Hitler selected the “right hand” swastika to be the emblem for his party, a movement representing, some have claimed, the “Wheel of the Black Sun,” an earthly fire recreated by man, or the ancient, counterclockwise movement of the return of the Aryan races to their esoteric center.
It is axiomatic that Schuler would have rejected “ariosophy” or any emphasis on Nordic polar myth: his gaze was firmly fixed on the Mediterranean, upon Imperial Rome above all. (The reference to Dante's [i]Paradiso[/i] to the “fifteen stars,” the “primal wheel” revolving around the pole may have been known to him). His reference to the swastika burning on the vulva of the priestess, the crucified wood and nails, is puzzling; a recent study(24) on the swastika helps to throw some light. Heinrich Schliemann discovered in Troy many potsherds and whorls upon which the swastika was inscribed; he claimed that around six hundred objects were excavated which were adorned by this ornament. One of Schliemann's closest collaborates and honorary director of the French archaeological institute in Athens was Emile Bournof, cartographer and polymath who sought to link the swastika to an Aryan, anti-Semitic tradition. His work [i]La Science des religions[/i] (1888) may be wayward enough, but one page of the English translation of Schliemann's [i]Ilia[/i] (London 1880) is given in Quinn's study and this page, discussing Bournof, helps us to understand Schuler's swastika.(25) Bournof held that both the right-hand and the left-hand swastikas represent the two pieces of wood which were laid crosswise upon one another before the sacrificial altars in order to produce the sacred fire, and the ends of which were bent round at right angles and fastened by means of four nails. At the point where the two pieces of wood were joined there was a small hole in which a thin piece of wood, in the form of a lance, was rotated by means of a cord made of cowhair and hemp until the fire was generated by friction. An idol excavated by Schliemann had the swastika emblem on her vulva: the generator of fire, also of life, are closely parallel. It is almost certain that Schuler read Schliemann' [i]Ilios. Stadt und Land der Trojaner[/i] (1881) as this would have been compulsory reading for any student of archaeology (as would [i]Ithaka[/i], 1896, [i]Trojanische Altertümer[/i], 1874, [i]Toja[/i], 1883, and [i]Tirnys[/i], 1886). Attempts to claim the swastika for Nordic man Schuler would have rejected, but the swastika as womb or well of procreation would have fascinated him.
Alfred Schuler is remote from pan-German irrationalism. His “anti-Semitism,” although it may be reprehensibly irresponsible, belongs in a different order from that of Adolf Hitler,. Schuler dismissed Christianity as a form of “Judaism for the people,” a vengeful and guilt-ridden doctrine; indeed, the Christian “Moloch” may be the more vindictive and sinister of the deities (Nietzsche's analysis of morality in [i]Zur Genealogie der Moral[/i] is very close here). What would he have made of an incipient Nazi party, the burgeoning swastika flags becoming increasingly apparent in Munich? Did he not believe that it was the swastika rather than the Christian cross which “can, as no other sign, warn and arouse us, light the holy flame in us so that we become joyful sacrifices to the highest [ . . . ] a victory sign of the new inner-world God?”(26) He died in 1923 before the November putsch: a letter to Kurt Saucke, the Munich book seller, expresses the fear that “the nationalistic tumour [ . . . ] is the drunken torch of death lighting the masses the way to the slaughterhouse.”(27) The brutish ignorance of the S.A. Would have appalled him, albeit an awareness of the indebtedness of Italian fascism to Imperial Rome maye have led to a tentative support of Mussolini, as it did in Rilke's case. Fascism as “a modern counterpart of earlier hierarchic societies in which authority, stability and inequality had provided the soil of flowering cultures(28) had its appeal, but the ruthless masculinity of Nazism none. Hitler was no Heliogabalus, and the symbol adopted by the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the red of socialism, the white of nationalism, and the black of racism was an offensive travesty. Schuler was not, [i]pace[/i] Aschheim, a Nazi, and it would be appropriate to let Karl Wolfskehl, in his New Zealand exile, have the last magnanimous word: “The figure of Alfred Schuler continues to exist in the wholeness of its mythical reality, in its plenitude, its greatness [ . . . ] Schuler himself will remain, vulnerable, wondrous, and full of deep significance.(29)
NOTES
1. Alfred Schuler, [i]Cosmogonische Augen. Gesammelte Schriften,[/i] ed. By Ball Müller (Paderborn: Igel Verlag, 1997), 307-308. This is the first time that Schuler's work has been readily available and all further references to Schuler's writing, unless otherwise stated, will be to this edition under the abbreviation CA. Ludwig Klages and three other literary executors published a selection of Schuler's work under the title [i]Dichtungen[/i] in 1930; then years later Klages published [i]Alfred Schuler. Fragmente und Vortrage aus dem Nachlaß[/i] (Liepzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth) which remained the sole source of information on Schuler until Ball Müller's edition (Klages's 1940 selection, when quoted, will be abbreviated as [i]FuV[/i]. Selections from the [i]Neronis Domini Fragmenta[/i] may be found in Walter Killy, [i]Die deutsche Literatur. 7.20. Jahrhundert 1880-1930. Texte und Zeugnisse[/i] (Munich: Beck, 1967), 1088; Schuler's review of Ibsen's [i]Master Builder[/i], together with some of the Kosmoganiea Fragmenta[/i] are included in Walter Schmitz, [i]Die Müchner Moderne[/i] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1990). Futher quotations from Schuler's [i] Nachlaß [/i] may be found in Gerhard Plumpe, [i]Alfred Schuler. Chaos und Neubginn. Zur Funktion des Mythos in der Moderne[/i] (Berlin: Agora Verlag, 1978).
2. The review appeared under the title “Einige Gedanken über Ibsens neuestes Werk [i]Baumeiter Solness[/i]” in [i]Die Gesellschaft[/i] 9 (1893), 352-355 (CA 214-217); the poem is a sonnet dedicated to the author Leopold von Andrian and was published in [i]Blätter für die Kunst 7[/i] (1904: [i]CA 141[/i].
3. See [i]FuV[/i] 72-3, also George's poem [i]AS[/i] from [i]Das Jahr der Seele[/i] (The Year of the Soul), which specifically refers to that evening and the experience of “worlds of madness.” This “römisches Fest” should not be confused with the later “Antikes Fest” which was held in Wolfskehl's house on February 22, 1903 where Wolfskehl appeared as Dionysus, George as Caesar and Schuler as the Earth-mother.
4.[i]FuV[/i] 76. The defection, or “Großer Schwabinger Krach” has been sensationalized and trivialized in many memoirs and [i]romans à clef.[/i] The reasons are succintly described in [/i]CA[/i] 28-30 and relate basically to Wolfskehl's Zionism which was anathema to Schuler and Klages despite the latter's admiration for Wolfskehl as the embodiment of an “altjüdische Rasse.” George defended Wolfskehl against Klages, and the rift between George and the “Kosmiker” was sealed. For Wolfskel's position (and magnanimity) see [i]Briefweschel. Karl und Hanna. Wolfskehl/Friedrich Gundolf (1899-1931) ed. by Karlhans Kluncker, 2 vols. (Amesterdam: Castrum Peregrinit, 1988), vol. 1, 93 and 119. See also Gundolf's letter printed in [i]Die Münchner Moderne[/i], op. Cit. 479, on the “Zerfall der Kosmischen Runde” where Shuler appears a “der violette Ringelrno.” (Wolfskehl did, for a while, carry a loaded pistol to ward off physical attack: he accidentally shot himself in the leg --- see [/i]CA[/i] 29). For a more sober account see Gerhard Plumpe, “Alfred Schuler und die Kosmische Rune” in Manfred Frank, [i]Götter im Exil. Vorlesnugen über die neue Mythologie[/i] (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1988), vol. 2, 213-256, also Martin Vogel, [i]Apollinsch und Dionysisch. Geschichte eines genialen Irrtums[/i] (Regensburg: Gustave Bosse Verlag, 1960) especially 259-277.
5. Franziska zu Reventlow, [i]Tagebücher 1895-1910[/i] (Frankfurt a. M.: Sicher 1976) [Jan. 1904], 277.
6. Roderich Huch, [i]Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages und Stefan George. Erinerungen an Kreise und Kirsen der Jahrhundertwende in München-Schwabing[/i] (Amsterdamn: Castrum Peregrini, 1873) 36.
7. Theodor Lessing, [i]Einmal und nie wieder[/i] (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1969), especially 322-329. (Schuler is described as “an oddity, a curious mixture of charlatan and genius, a show-off and a visionary.”)
8. Lessing, [i]Einmal[/i], 256.
9. Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, “Zwischen Rilke und Hitler --- Alfred Schuler,” [i]Zeitschrift für Religion and Geitsesgeschicte[/i] 19 (1967), 336.
10. Richard Hamann and Jost Hermand, [i]Gründerzeit[/i] (Berlin, Aufbau, 1965), 260.
11. Ludwig Klages, [i]Rhythm und Runen. Nachlaß herausgegeben von ihm selbst (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1944), 270.
12. Michael Meyer, [i]Ibsen[/i] (London: Penguin, 1985), 397.
13. Wolfdietrich Rasch, [i]Die literarische Décadence um 1900[/i] (Munich: Beck, 1986), 170.
14. Rober Boehringer, [i]Mein Bild von Stefan George[/i] (Munich: Küpper, 1951) 109, claims that Hitler was present at the first lecture given in Elsa Bruckmann's house in Munich in 1922; Karl-Heinz Schuler has demonstrated without a doubt that Hitler first visited the Bruckmann home in 1924, after Schuler's death. In “Alfred Schuler un der Nationalsozialismus,” [i]Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft[/i] 41 (1997), 383-388.
15. Rainer Maria Rilke. [i]Briefe in zwie Bänden[i], ed. By Horst Naleswi (Frankfurt a. M: Insel, 1991), vol. 1, 566 (March 18, 1915).
16. Rainer Maria Rilke, 2, 301 (April 23, 1923).
17. Another example of the poeticising of Elisabeth's death is D'Annuzio's description, translated by Hofmannsthal as [i]Kaiserin Elisabeth[/i] (Hofmannsthal ed. Cit., [i]Prosa[/i] 1), 369. “Women, strangers, let down the braids of her imperial hair and sprinkled her with water, they found upon her breasts two drops of topaz coloured blood, and in her eyes the staring apprehensions of that which lay beyond the grave.”
18. Roderich Huch, op. Cit. 39.
19. Steve Aschheim, [i]Culture and Catastrophe. German and Jewish Confrontations with National Socialism and other Crises[/i] (London: Macmillan, 1966), 59, writes convincingly on Otto Weiniger's tortured attempts at defining what it meant to be a Jew. “Judaism was, for him, not a historical tradition or an ethnic or racial category. It was rather a Platonic idea, a psychic negative potential of all human beings. There are 'Aryans who are more Jewish than many Jews, and actual Jews who are more Aryan than certain Aryans,' he wrote in his famous [i]Sex and Character[/i] (1903).” Ascheim is, however, less perceptive when he boldly states that Schuler was a Nazi (73).
20. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, [i]The Occult Roots of Nazism. The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890-1945[/i] (Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985).
21. Robert Browen, [i]Universal Ice and Ideology in the Nazi State[/i] (London: Belhaven, 1993).
22. Joscelyn Godwin, [i]Arktos. The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism and Nazi Survival[/i] (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
23. Peter Washington, [i]Madame Blavatsky's Baboon. Theosophy and the Emergence of the Western Guru.[/i] (London: Secker and Warburg, 1993).
24. Malcolm Quinn, [i]The Svastika. Constructing the Symbol[/i] (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).
25. Quinn, [i]Svastika[i], 81.
26. This description of the swastika appeared in 1918 in Eugen Diedrich's [i]Die Tat[/i]; it is quoted in Martin Green, [i]Mountain of Truth. The Counter-culture Begins. Ascona 1900-1920.[/i] (Hannover, NH and London: UP of New England, 1986.)
27. Hans-Eggbert Schröder, [i]Ludwig Klages 1872-1956. Katalog zur Centenar Austellung,[/i] Mabach am Neckar (1972), 84. Schröder comments of Schuler's disgust at the vulgarization of the swastika by the Nazis and his subsequent request that an ornamental trefoil be carved instead upon his masoleum.
28. J.R. Harrison, [i]The Reactionaries. Yeat, Lewis, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence. A Study of the Antidemocratic Intellegentsia.[/i] (New York: Schocken, 1967), 1995-6.
29. Kaltenbrunner, [i]Zwisten Rilke und Hitlerp[/i], 347.