A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult (10 page)

One poet above all is associated with the idea of Sehnsucht, the ultimate symbol of which became the illusive `blue flower' of his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800). Georg Friedrich Philipp von Hardenberg - better known as Novalis, Latin for `newly ploughed field' and his mother's maiden name - was born on 2 May 1772 (less than two months after Swedenborg's death) on the estate of Oberwied- erstedt, not far from Halle, on land acquired by a branch of his ancient family in the 17th century. His father, Baron Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus von Hardenberg was a strict convert to Count Zinzendorfs Moravian Brotherhood, and enforced a sombre and joyless regimen of piety and religious observance. A humourless character, Baron von Hardenberg refused to speak with his neighbours, considering trivial talk unChristian. His relations with the wider world were equally curt: a story tells of his once reading of the French Revolution in a newspaper; the reports of atheism and other antiChristian sentiments enraged him, and he threw the paper down, vowing never to look at one again, a pledge by all reports he assiduously kept.

Novalis's mother, however, was affectionate and indulgent, and did her best to shield the young poet and his siblings from their father's wrath. Novalis grew up, as many poets do, in isolation, wandering through his family's mansion and estate on the Harz river, alone with his thoughts and the landscape. A sickly child, in many ways Novalis' early years resemble those of Saint-Martin and Karl von Eckharthausen. As his translator Arthur Versluis remarks "perhaps it was just this isolation, this childhood in which (he was) left to (his) own devices, which began to disclose the manifold inner world to Novalis ..."s The rigid and rarely interrupted routine of the outer world was compensated for by a burgeoning complex interior realm, a shifting scenery of myth, early poetic intuition and magical realities.

Arguments with his father eventually exiled Novalis from his home - a common predicament that would be later mirrored in the poet's cosmic loneliness: perhaps the most well known of Novalis's aphorisms reads, "All philosophy is homesickness." He moved to his uncle's estate in Lucklum, where the library was a welcome change from his father's devotional tracts. In 1791 he left to study law at Jena, where he was a student of Schiller, and in 1793 he read mathematics, chemistry and philosophy at Wittenberg, where he became friends with the philosophers Friedrich Schlegel and Johann Gottlob Fichte. It was also at this time that he met the twelve and half year old Sophie von Kuhn, who played a tragic Lolita to Novalis' not-quite middle-aged Humbert Humbert.

Novalis was immediately struck by Sophie's beauty, and reports are that others who met her shared his enthusiasm. But it is difficult not to find something morbid in the 24 year old Novalis' obsession with a girl just reaching puberty, although he was not alone in such predilections: the equally romantic and even more morbid Edgar Allan Poe married the thirteen year old Virginia Clemm at the age of 26.

Novalis kept his engagement to Sophie a secret, fearing his father would object to their marriage: more on the grounds of Sophie's humble background than on their age differences. His father, however, was uncharacteristically taken with the girl, which says much for her charm, and consented to their union. Sadly, fate conspired against Novalis, and in November 1795, Sophie fell seriously in, with a tumour of the liver. By spring of 1796, her condition had improved, but by the summer it declined, and an operation was necessary. Others followed, but were unsuccessful, and, after a long, agonizing struggle, she died in March of 1797, not yet sixteen. Less than a month later his brother Erasmus also died from consumption, the same disease that would eventually kill Novalis himself. Early death, loss and mourning were abundant influences on Novalis' worldvievy.

While it's clear that Novalis' love for Sophie was sincere, one can't help but wonder at the psychological underpinnings of his infatuation. As John Neubauer in his study of the poet remarks, examples of her letters suggest that Sophie was as unequal a partner intellectually as she was sexually; and Novalis' friend the theologian Friedrich Schliermacher commented that he did not believe Novalis chose "his beloved correctly, or rather, that he had even found her; I am almost convinced, she would not have sufficed him, had she stayed alive."' Novalis had already had at least one affair before meeting Sophie, and his university days carousing with Friedrich Schlegel more than likely included some sexual activity. But although he was sexual active, he also felt a need to repress his urges. Erotic fantasies and day dreams obsessed him, and he often sought the company of sexually unattainable women in order to mitigate these desires. The sexual act itself also repelled him; speaking with his brother about his first encounter with Sophie, he remarked that his "tender feelings" for her dissolved with the first "vulgar signs of favour." It may be reading too much into a perhaps harmless infatuation, but Sophie seems in many ways a figure of pure Sehnsucht: an ideal beauty, who remained, at least for the present, untouchable. Between pure sexual fantasy, and the reality of actual sex, she shimmered like a promising dawn. With Sophie's death, that unattainability became permanent; it was only then that Novalis allowed himself to recast her as a symbol of mystical union, an expression of the erotic spirituality common to the alchemical, hermetic and kabbalistic tradition in which Novalis found himself.

All of Novalis' work is saturated in the Pythagorean, hermetic themes of unity with the divine. Like Swedenborg, Blake and many others, Novalis saw the external, physical world as a symbol of a deeper, spiritual reality. With Sophie's death, Novalis saw in his chaste love for her a means of breaking through the outer shell and entering the radiant source. That transition, according to him, took place on 13 May 1797, when Novalis had a mystical experience, while contemplating Sophie's grave. There, as he recorded in his diary, "I was indescribably happy- moments of flashing enthusiasm - I blew the grave away like dust - her presence was palpable - I believed she would step forward at any minute."

In the two months prior to his experience, Novalis practised a form of `active imagination', engaging in various spiritual disciplines the aim of which was to prepare him for his breakthrough. These were, in part at least, strenuous attempts to curb his sexual fantasies while maintaining a strict focus on his love for the deceased teenager with whom he hoped to soon be rejoined in death. A diary of the time records a struggle between "sensuous imaginings" and his determination to maintain his "engagement in a higher sense." Novalis, like other, later dark romantics - Wagner and Mahler come to mind - sought in death a release from life's illusions; yet it was only in a higher, spiritual union, that his sexual hunger could be allowed free expression. One product of this tension are the' mystico-erotic Hymns to the Night (1800), one of the few of the poet's works published in his life time. In the third hymn we find a poeticized account of Novalis' grave experience.

In preparation for his mystical encounter, Novalis visited Sophie's grave frequently, poured over her letters and mementos, and read spiritual and mystical literature. How much his vision of Sophie was a product of his own powerful imagination is debatable, and the fact that sophia is Greek for wisdom, union with which is the central aim of mystical practice, cannot have escaped the attentive reader. That he practised conjuring her image up is clear from passages in his diary. A week before the vision, he recorded seeing her in profile, sitting beside him on his sofa, wearing a green scarf. One inspiration was a letter from his brother Carl, who spoke of a sudden yearning to die, brought on by a thunderstorm. He spoke of the "genuine sincerity" with which he contemplated being struck by lightning, the flash transporting one to "the eternal embrace of our beloved ones."

Death, for Novalis, meant transfiguration, an ecstatic escape from time and space, a notion shared by many Romantics, and captured in the canvases of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. Whether this was so, or whether the grave meant sheer oblivion, Novalis did not have to wait long to find out. In 1798, Novalis met Julie von Charpentier, and his obsession with Sophie had apparently abated enough for him to become romantically involved with her. Their engagement, however, was doomed. Although his literary career was beginning to blossom (he had already met Goethe, and in Jena Novalis was the centre of a circle which included Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Friedrich Schelling and Friedrich Schliermacher) the tuberculosis that destroyed his brother was ravaging his own delicate frame. He continued to write and to fulfill his duties as an inspector of the Saxon salt mines but in October of 1800 his lungs suffered a major collapse. His health declined and on 25 March 1801 - four years and six days after Sophie's death - he and his beloved met in what we must assume was a more lasting union. At the age of 28, Novalis died.

E. T.A. Hoffmann

Perhaps the most romantic of the Romantics was a strangely self-divided individual whose wild dual personality and bouts of alcoholic excess were complemented by a meticulous concern for social duty and a work schedule that would daunt even the most disciplined character. Ernst Theodore Amadeus Hoffmann was by day a respected juror and civil servant, holding at different times in his life positions with the civil administration in Poland and the Prussian Supreme Court in Berlin. By night, however, he was something very different. A considerable graphic artist, Hoffmann was also a composer. Although most of his music is lost today, he is known to have written ten operas (one of which, Undine, is arguably the first Romantic work in that form) two symphonies, two masses, several cantatas, much incidental music and dozens of chamber works. He was also a capable conductor, know for his productions of Mozart and Gluck, as well as a brilliant music critic. Hoffmann's essays on Beethoven, at a time when the public had yet to acquire a taste for him, as well as on the idea of music as an autonomous spiritual world helped, more than anything else, to create the image of the composer as the hierophant of a higher, ideal realm. With Coleridge and Baudelaire, Hoffmann is one of those rare writers who turn criticism into an art. His essays and reviews arguing for an appreciation of music as a self-sufficient non-representational art form - for the superiority of instrumental against vocal music, a preference practically unheard of in his day - would influence important musical theorists like Schumann, Wagner and Schopenhauer, and would later feed the aesthetic doctrine of Symbolism, which would dominate the late 19th century. This is not surprising: music, and the `superior world' that it depicted, was the central experience of Hoffmann's life. In "Beethoven's Instrumental Music," Hoffmann expressed the reason for this in a succinct formula. "Music," he wrote, "reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all precise feelings in order to embrace an inexpressible longing."

Like Novalis, Hoffmann too knew Sehnsucht. Yet it was not only in his writings on music that Hoffmann spoke of another world. If it already seems that he was gifted enough for several people - and to some extent Hoffmann was several people - he was also the author of some of the most bizarre and beloved stories and novels of the 19th century. In many ways Hoffmann is like a cross between Edgar Allan Poe and Hans Christian Andersen, both of whom read his tales with profit. His stories have the glitter and dazzle of fairy tales, yet are often shot through with a disturbing, macabre sensibility. Yet, like Goethe, he is one of those German authors that have never really got across to an English readership. Most people know Hoffmann today, if at all, in a form that would have pleased him: as the inspiration for Offenbach's light opera The Tales of Hoffmann, and for Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Nutcracker. Yet Hoffmann's weird tales of magical initiation, alchemy, strange states of consciousness and other occult themes display a psychological insight comparable to Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky, and Kafka.

Ernst Theodore Wilhelm Hoffmann was born in Konigs- berg in 1776; later he adopted the name Amadeus in honour of his beloved Mozart. He had an unhappy childhood, and the neglect he suffered at the hands of his parents was exacerbated by their early separation and divorce. Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by strict relatives in a household made up of a grandmother, three aunts and a puritanical uncle. Perhaps the sudden loss of his parents and the absence of a personal golden age led to his love of music and its promise of an `ideal' realm. At any rate, his fascination with it began early, and an encounter with Mozart's Magic Flute set the stage for his later creations. Mozart's musical Masonic fairy tale of initiation and the eternal war between good and evil, symbolized by the magus Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, became the blueprint for Hoffmann's own tales. All of Hoffmann's stories engage this archetypal theme, which is the romantic conundrum par excellence: the clash between the dull world of routine necessity, and the pressing claims of the imagination. Hoffmann, who had a foot in both worlds, felt the stress and friction between them throughout his life, and it took its toll; he was known for his sudden shifts in temperament, plunging from childlike gaiety into dark introversion, from warm conviviality into silent isolation. He was a man of masks, of fragments and unsettling inconsistencies. It would be trendy to speak of him as postmodern, but it's obvious that the kind of all-embracing unity that a Goethe managed to effect was denied him.

Whether it was fate, his unconscious, immaturity, or Poe's `imp of the perverse', throughout his life, Hoffmann seemed to create a crisis whenever things ran too smoothly for him, and the claims of routine and normality threatened to submerge too deeply the longings for the other world. As Government Assessor in Posen, he jeopardized a comfortable position by drawing caricatures of local dignitaries; his excellent graphic work had him exiled to Plock, an unspeakably dull provincial town, where he had little to do but regret his rashness. Years later, in Berlin, the pattern was repeated when he satirized the Director of the Police Commission in his last novel, Master Flea. Hoffmann spoke of his intentions, and word of his acid wit got around; proceedings were begun against him. The book was eventually published with the offending parts excised.