CHAPTER FOUR: Fin-de-Siecle Occultism and Promises of RebirthTHE VAST MAJORITY of fin-de-siecle persons seeking spiritual renewal that they could not find in Judaism or Christianity, in millenarian political movements such as Marxism or anarchism or volkisch utopian movements (such as Pan-Germanism, Pan- Slavism, or Zionism), or in secular movements such as Haeckel's and Freud's, became involved in occultism. [1] Although one could be "magnetized" by a professional mesmerist or undergo diagnosis and treatment by one of the dwindling number of phrenologists still in clinical practice, be manipulated by an osteopath, aligned by a homeopath, or submit to the medical therapeutics of "nerve specialists" such as hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, or rest cures and a high-fat diet, [2] these methods were the result of a relationship between an individual patient and an individual professional healer and were largely dissociated from ongoing communities with totalizing philosophies of life and networks of reinforcing social support. The sense of belonging to a community with shared goals and shared iconographies of the transcendent was the key element drawing millions to occultism. Each occult group could be distinguished by its unique image of the great chain of being and each designed its social norms and guided its economic activities accordingly. Furthermore, except for a few noted occult elites (such as the Order of the Golden Dawn in England in the 1880s, etc.), the larger occult movements were egalitarian. One did not have to be an artist, a writer, an appreciator of Wagnerian opera, the holder of a college degree, one of the wealthy, or an Oscar Wilde-like "aesthete" of any type to participate in most widespread occult movements. All that one needed was faith in the occult doctrine.
Outside of politics (which was still largely the occupation of men, except for radical groups that had substantial female membership, such as the anarchists or Marxists or groups that comprised the proto-women's movement), occultism was the most readily available vehicle of self-transformation open to the average fin-de-siecle individual of either gender, but it was particularly valuable for women. Participation in occult organizations, often at the highest levels, was a way for women in particular to experience social status and power denied them in other religious contexts, and to express gender-related social concerns and thereby influence society as a whole. [3]
Interestingly, a similar sociological dynamic may have been instrumental in the rise of the Christ cult in the polytheistic Roman Empire, for both the pagan apologist Celsus and the Christian apologist Origen of the third century C.E. specifically cite the leading role of women of the upper classes in the development of Christianity. [4] Such intelligent, wealthy women were also instrumental in the development of the social organizations surrounding the cults of the saints, whose widely distributed cult sanctuaries were the object of pilgrimages throughout the Roman world of late antiquity. Tombs, shrines, and their sacred relics generated enormous income for early Church organizations and bishoprics from fee-paying pilgrims seeking transformative experiences while praying and fasting in the presence of the decaying body part or former personal possession of a Christian saint or martyr. [5] However, once the bureaucratic organs of Christian authority began to ossify in the fourth and fifth centuries, unlike their pagan predecessors, "only among Christians is women's religious leadership an issue. Only Christians both attempt, sometimes successfully, to exclude women from religious office and community authority and argue about it." [6]
Of the many occultist movements of the nineteenth century, the intimately connected spiritualist movement and one of its offshoots, the Theosophical Society, deserve special comment as both were influential in very different ways on the life and work of Jung. An additional movement with mystical or occultist elements, Wagnerism, also deserves some comment, as does the broader volkisch movement that sprang up in German Europe at the turn of the century. These, too, as we shall see, were significant influences on Jung.
The fin-de-siecle trend towards extra- or anti-Christian movements that advocated personal religion was commented on by sociologists other than Germans such as Tonnies and Weber. In France, Emilie Durkheim (1858-1917) observed early in his seminal work, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912), that, "Not only are these individual religions very frequent in history, but nowadays many are asking if they are not destined to be the pre-eminent form of the religious life, and if the day will not come when there will be no other cult than that which each man will freely perform within himself." [7]
Addressing this same issue in a 1974 essay on "The Occult and the Modern World," the eminent historian of religion Mircea Eliade discusses the personal religious practices of the occult revival of the 1960s and 1970s with reference to its similarities to the occult revivals of the nineteenth century. At issue in both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century occult revivals is not just a rejection of the Christian myth, but a desire to return to the example provided by the ancient mystery cults of the Hellenistic world:
What is more general is a rejection of Christian tradition in the name of a supposedly broader and more efficient method for achieving an individual and, by the same stroke, a collective renovatio. Even when these ideas are naively or even ludicrously expressed, there is always the tacit conviction that a way out of the chaos and meaninglessness of modern life and that this way out implies an initiation into, and consequentially the revelation of, old and venerable secrets. It is primarily the attraction of a personal initiation that explains the craze for the occult. As is well known, Christianity rejected the mystery-religion type of secret initiation. The Christian "mystery" was open to all; it was "proclaimed upon the housetops," and Gnostics were persecuted because of their secret rituals of initiation. In the contemporary occult explosion, the "initiation" -- however the participant may understand this term -- has a capital function: it confers a new status on the adept; he feels that he is somehow "elected," singled out from the anonymous and lonely crowd. Moreover, in most of the occult circles, initiation also has a superpersonal function, for every new adept is supposed to contribute to the renovatio of the world. [8]
The membership of these various groups overlapped considerably, as their common promise of renovatio (renewal or rebirth) was the main attraction. Many individuals had con temporaneous involvement in two or more occultist movements and would drift in and out as desired. What could not be found in one organization could perhaps be found in another. There were several fin-de-siecle movements of renovatio through secret initiation into "old and venerable secrets" that were well known to Jung and the classical scholars of his day.
SPIRITUALISMIt appears that in all eras of human history, and at all levels of societal complexity, there have always been individuals who have been regarded as specialists in communicating with the gods -- or, more prevalently, with the dead. These mediums between the sacred and the profane traditionally enter altered states of consciousness in which they engage in direct dialogue with extra mundane entities or in which they seem to become possessed by such entities, thereby allowing the otherworldly being to speak through the body and voice of the medium. This form of religious activity is prevalent even today. [9]
In pagan antiquity, the average individual in the Greco- Roman world would be very familiar with the entranced female oracle of Delphi, the Pythia, and a teeming multitude of soothsayers, diviners, exorcists, and others who claimed to receive special messages from beyond, which-for a fee-could be imparted to those seeking counsel. [10] It has been argued that there is evidence that the pagan world primarily considered Jesus of Nazareth a magician (magus) with special powers to command spirits and heal others through exorcisms (much like shamans in traditional societies), but that these images of Jesus were deliberately destroyed by the early Christian Church. [11] Since most early Christians were converted from Greco-Roman paganism, there is evidence that the induction of altered states of consciousness ("trances"), so characteristic of some Hellenistic oracular traditions, also played a role among some early Christian prophets. [12] This occult underworld of mediumship, possession, and exorcism has always existed in Europe despite attempts in various epochs (primarily by orthodox Christian and Communist elites) to eradicate it.
The loosening of the bonds of orthodox ecclesiastical authority in Europe following the Enlightenment allowed for more implicit tolerance of ecstatic or charismatic Christian activity from this "occult underground" [13] as long as the authority of organized Christian churches was not directly threatened. [14] The belief in the Christian afterlife remained strong among the majority of nineteenth-century individuals, and with the vicissitudes of numerous wars, incurable diseases, and high infant, child, and maternal mortality rates, there was a great hunger to maintain relationships with the deceased despite the barrier of physical death.
Given the weakening of traditional ecclesiastical authority and the greater emphasis on personal decision making and individual action so typical of the Protestant ethic, it is no coincidence that the spiritualist movement arose in a largely Protestant America, a "Protestant Empire," to use historian Sydney Ahlstrom's metaphor, whose increasingly distant ties with the Old World made the spirit world seem so accessible-especially since it did not require clerical intercessors. [15]
The spiritualist movement traces its origins to the rappings and other phenomena attributed to spirits of the dead in the house of the Fox sisters of Hydesville (near Rochester), New York, in 1848. Once the Fox sisters determined that the rapping noises emanating from the walls and floors of their house were a kind of Morse code (the telegraph was a relatively new phenomenon at that tine), they began what the early historian of modern American spiritualism Emma Hardinge referred to in 1869 as "the achievement of a telegraphic communication between the visible and invisible worlds." [16] Once word spread that there was an easy method of contacting the dead, others attempted the same telegraphic method used by the Fox sisters and subsequently developed innovations (automatic writing, crystal gazing, possession trances, etc.) that led to new social and economic elites. A new social role emerged -- that of the medium -- who could dissociate and allow the spirits to speak directly through their vocal apparatus (the "mental medium") or induce spirits of the dead to write on slates, move planchettes, levitate furniture, or play accordions in the presence of flabbergasted clients (the "physical medium"). The most charismatic of this new class of mediums could in many instances attract a large following and become quite wealthy. By 1850 there were spiritualist circles surrounding mediums throughout New England and in other parts of the United States. By the early 1860s, spiritualism had become prominent in the parlors and salons of Europe. The horrific casualties of the American Civil War (1861-1865) stimulated the spiritualist movement in the United States, so that by the fin de siecle perhaps millions of individuals had, at one time or another, participated in such circles.
The allure of spiritualism was its simplicity and egalitarianism: almost anyone could attempt, with some margin of success, direct communication with the dead, and spiritualist circles and (later) organizations and "churches" (with Christian-oriented services) were open to anyone with "the will to believe," to use the words of William James (1842-1910), a student and explorer of the phenomena of spiritualism. [17] Seances could be held right in your own home at any time. The bureaucracy of Christianity, with its layers upon layers of mediators and its official discouragement of direct mystical experience, could thus be circumvented. Christianity supplied the theory; spiritualism provided the praxis, with technical assistance from Mesmerism, which taught hypnotic-induction techniques that could be used by aspiring mediums for entering trances.18 Jung, as is well known, had a very early interest in spiritualism and attended many seances throughout his life. Jung used such hypnotic induction procedures to place his cousin Helene Preiswerk into mediumistic trances during the seances he attended with her in the 1890s.
Women rose to positions of significant influence in spiritualist circles. It was there that they could assume spiritual leadership roles denied them by the patriarchal structure of the Roman Catholic and Protestant churches. Women not only comprised the majority of the most gifted mental and physical mediums, but they provided the organizational and financial support of the movement as well. Perhaps the single most influential woman in occultist circles in the nineteenth century (and in many ways, arguably the most influential woman in Europe and America at the time), was a Russian emigre to the United States, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831-1891), spiritualist medium and the founder of the Theosophical movement.
BLAVATSKY AND THEOSOPHYLittle is known of the first four decades of Blavatsky's life, although several biographers have attempted to fill in the gaps.19 She arrived in New York in the summer of 1873, apparently penniless, traveling steerage from France. Blavatsky was, by all accounts, a highly intelligent and canny individual, and before long she had secured an apartment on Irving Place in ew York where she conducted spiritualist seances as a source of income. She produced both physical and mental phenomena: levitation, materializations, and messages from the deceased. Like most mediums, she had a "control" or "spirit guide," whom she met while in her trances and who supplied her with information from the beyond. Her first control was named John King, and she often referred to him as her "Holy Guardian Angel." Later, whenever she entered trances she began to have more frequent contact with a collection of guru-like "ascended masters," known as the "brothers" who were spiritual beings that existed in their sanctuary in Tibet. She became their disciple, their tulku, and began to dispense their teachings to her clients.
By 1875, after a glowing report on her mediumistic powers in the New York Daily Graphic by investigative journalist Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, her circle grew enormously popular. In addition to her seances, her salon hosted lectures by experts on archaeology and on various world religions and mystical traditions (including the ancient Hellenistic ll'\ystery cults). Aided by Olcott (whom she had won over as a loyal disciple) and W. Q. Judge, Blavatsky decided to found an organization that would promote her ideas. She chose the name theosophy ("knowledge of God" or "divine wisdom") for her doctrine, which was based on the idea that all of the world religions and spiritual traditions down through history were derived from a long-lost "secret doctrine" that had been revealed to her by these divine beings. The secret doctrine included detailed explanations of the karmic rules of reincarnation, of the cosmic memory bank known as the "Akashic records" that could be consulted by those suitably trained to learn the history of an individual soul or the arcane history of the human race (the lost continents of Lemuria, Atlantis, and the "root races" of mankind, which prominently described the "Aryan race"). The organization developed into a densely hierarchical secret society that required initiations into mysteries that at each level provided the "keys" for understanding more and more of the essence of life: the secret doctrine itself. Initiates into Theosophy were trained to develop their powers of clairvoyance, telepathy, teleportation, mediumship, and other psychic powers. At the highest levels of initiation they were trained to enter visionary trances to commune with spiritual beings who acted as spirit guides or gurus.
In this same year -- 1875 -- in New York, Blavatsky formed the first of many branches of the Theosophical Society that by 1900, would be spread throughout North America, Europe, and especially India, where large ashrams housed thousands of Theosophists engaged in spiritual practices and served as a world headquarters for the Theosophical Society. Exact numbers are impossible to determine with accuracy, but it would be safe to say that at its height, during the period of Annie Besant's leadership following the death of Blavatsky in 1891, the Theosophical movement directly involved hundreds of thousands, if not peripherally millions, of individuals. [20] Prominent among these were poets Lord Tennyson and W. B. Yeats; the young Mahatma Gandhi; the Goethe scholar, spiritualist medium, and founder (in 1913) of the rival occultist tradition Anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner; and Thomas Edison, who was busy in the 1890s trying to invent a phonograph-like device to speak to the spirit world. (The Theosophical Society continues to thrive today, but with nowhere near the widespread cultural influence it wielded circa 1900.)
After founding the Theosophical Society in 1875, Blavatsky began writing her first Theosophical work, Isis Unveiled, which was published in New York in 1877. This work is not strictly an outline of Theosophical doctrine, which was still in its formative stages, but instead a survey of the Western occult traditions of alchemy, astrology, ritual magic, and witchcraft, and also Eastern philosophies. In this work she first puts forth the core Theosophical concept that a secret spiritual science and doctrine was known to the ancients but largely lost to us except in its diluted form in the teachings of the world's great religions. However, a secret spiritual brotherhood of adepts would transmit this doctrine to select individuals to translate for the masses of their respective ages. Such enlightened initiates, according to Blavatsky, included Jesus, the Buddha, Confucius, Zoroaster, Mohammed, and, of course, Blavatsky herself. Blavatsky claimed to be in trance-communication with these ascended masters who, indeed, were kind enough to write whole pages of Isis Unveiled for her while she slept(!). Blavatsky was well aware of the ancient Hellenistic mystery cult of Isis, and with the help of one of her spiritual gurus, she was initiated into these mysteries through a trance that allows Isis to merge with her and inspire her automatic writing. Automatic writing was also implicated in her more mature work, the two-volume Theosophical masterpiece, The Secret Doctrine (1888), which is her contribution (as she states in her preface) to the occultist tradition of "the great Adepts of the Aryan Race." This is how Blavatsky describes her method for writing Isis Unveiled:
I am solely occupied, not with writing Isis, but with Isis herself. I live in a kind of permanent enchantment, a life of visions and sights, with open eyes, and no chance whatever to deceive my senses! I sit and watch the fair good goddess constantly. And as she displays before ITlethe secret meaning of her long-lost secrets, and the veil, becoming with every hour thinner and more transparent, gradually falls off before my eyes. I hold my breath and can hardly trust to my senses! ... Night and day the images of the past are marshalled before my inner eyes. Slowly, and gliding silently like images in an enchanted panorama, centuries after centuries appear before me ... I certainly refuse point-blank to attribute it to my own knowledge or memory. I tell you seriously I am helped. And he who helps me is my Guru. [21]
Blavatsky's refusal to attribute her "images of the past" to previously learned material in her personal memory is a pivotal issue that concerned Jung as well. Cryptomnesia-"hidden memories" that one is not even aware of-was a lifelong problem for his hypothesis of a collective unconscious. Like Blavatsky and her two "mahatmas" or spiritual masters, Jung, too, would undergo visionary time travel to antiquity and be assisted by a series of imaginal figures, most notably his spiritual guru Philemon. These issues will be discussed in detail below.
It is commonly suggested that Jung's assistant and intimate companion Antonia Wolff (1888-1953), who first entered Jung's life in 1911, was the one who introduced him to Eastern philosophies and astrology. Although this suggested influence may be overstated, her sources of information on these subjects probably came from these ubiquitous Theosophical publications.
Part of the story of Theosophy's rapid spread throughout the fin-de-siecle world is due to the technological advances in printing that began to bear fruit by the 1880s, just at the time that the Theosophical Society came together as an active, purposeful organization. In 1846 the rotary press was invented (and with it the linotype machine, automatic paper feeders and cutters, cheap newsprint and paper, and the halftone process for reproducing photographs). Publications such as daily newspapers that could only manage say, a 25,000-copy circulation in the 1850s found themselves with manageable circulations of more than a million by the 1890s. [22] Both popular science and occultist publications became especially common and readily available in all urban areas of Europe by the end of the century.
The Theosophical Society played a key role in the dissemination of occultist doctrines at the turn of the century through its numerous local societies in America, England, Germany, Austria (Vienna), Switzerland (Zurich), and even Russia. [23] These local groups sponsored lecture series, classes, and especially distributed the numerous publications of the Theosophical Publishing Society based in London and Benares, India. Starting in the 1880s (and continuing today), any clerk, waiter, businessman, high-society maven, domestic servant, housewife, university professor, politician, institutionalized mental patient, indeed anyone, could easily find the ubiquitous Theosophical publications that summarized in plain language (but with a Theosophical slant) the ideas of Hinduism, Jainism, Islam, Buddhism, Western European philosophy, astrology, Neoplatonism, Egyptian religion, vegetarianism, the New Testament gospels and apocrypha, astral projection, clairvoyance and telepathy, polytheistic Greco-Roman religions, the Greek magical papyri (including the "Mithraic Liturgy"), Gnosticism, alchemy, Hermeticism, and the various Hellenistic mystery cults -- just to name a few of the many topics covered in these productions.
The great philosophies of the East were distilled and marketed en masse to Western civilization to a greater extent than had ever been possible at any previous time in history. The enormous Theosophical publishing machine thus set the stage for the familiar countercultural fascination with these topics, beginning in Ascona, Switzerland and Munich circa 1900, and continuing through the beatniks, hippies, Greens, and New Agers of more recent times. [24]
In German Europe, Theosophical books, pamphlets, and especially periodicals began to appear in abundance in the late 1880s in original German editions. Die Sphinx began publication as a monthly in Leipzig in 1886. Theosophisches Leben, a monthly periodical, was published in Berlin between 1898 and 1920. Other prominent Theosophical periodicals that were widely available were Die Gnosis (Vienna, 1903); Der theosophische Wegweiser (Leipzig, 1898); Lotusbluthen (Leipzig, 1892, under the editorship of Franz Hartmann); Metaphysische Rundschall (Gross-Lichterfelde, 1896); Prana (Leipzig, 1909); Theosophie (Leipzig, 1910); Der Wanderer (Leipzig, 1906); and Zentralblatt fur Okkultismus (Leipzig, 1907).
Additionally, from 1896 to 1904, the "Eugen Diederichs Verlag: Publishing House for Modern Endeavors in Literature, Natural Science, and Theosophy" was in full operation in Leipzig under the direction of the volkisch pantheist Eugen Diederichs. After moving to Jena in 1904, Diederichs played an important role in the dissemination of occult, mythological, and volkisch literature as well as the finest examples of German "high culture." Diederichs will be discussed at length in a later chapter.
In 1910 the Theosophical Publishing Society began publishing an enormous number of books on astrology, making such works available to the German-speaking public on a mass scale that was unprecedented. Interestingly, Jung's first mention of his study of astrology is in a 12 June 1911 letter to Freud. [25] By 1916 Jung could remark, "The truth is that astrology flourishes as never before. There is a regular library of astrological books and magazines that sell for far better than the best scientific works." [26] Jung is perhaps referring here to these very Theosophical publications. A superb bibliography of these obscure Theosophical and other (especially volkisch) books, journals, and pamphlets that appeared in German during this period can be found in a recent book by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke. [27]
Although much of the information in these Theosophical works was based on mere fluff, a more valuable portion of it had previously existed only in dry, obscure scholarly volumes weighted down with footnote apparatus containing untranslated citations in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and other forbidding languages. Besides the occultist mishmash of this more serious material in the journals, certain gifted Theosophical authors could produce scholarly works on archaeological, mythological, religious, or occultist subjects that were still accessible to the common individual without a university education who sought extra-Christian sources of spiritual inspiration. Such a talented scholar and writer was G.R.S. Mead (1863-1933).
Mead remains an enormous -- but still unacknowledged -- influence on Jung. Jung's personal library contains no fewer than eighteen different scholarly studies written by Mead, all published by the Theosophical Publishing Society. [28] Many of these were volumes in the Theosophical Society's Echoes from the Gnosis series, and thus Mead was Jung's "stepping-stone to higher things." [29] Mead was a true Theosophist and viewed his impressive scholarly work as a personal path to spiritual renewal and wisdom (gnosis). All of his writings are focused on bringing the reader closer to his or her own personal mystical experience of gnosis through the study of the ideas of the ancient adepts. For Mead, as for Jung, scholarship was holy work. Jung's post-Freudian work (after 1912), especially his theories of the collective unconscious and the archetypes, could not have been constructed without the works of Mead on Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and the Mithraic Liturgy. These works were primarily responsible for giving Jung the key to the importance of Gnosticism and Hermeticism for his historical study of the unconscious. Jung cites Mead regularly in his works starting in 1911, and continues to throughout his entire lifetime. Near the end of his life Mead made several trips to Kusnacht-Zurich to visit with Jung. However, documents concerning the nature of their personal relationship have not yet come to light.
WAGNER AND WAGNERISMIt is difficult for those of us living in the 1990s to understand the tremendous cultural, musical, political, and religious impact that Richard Wagner (1813-1883) had on the entire Western world in the late nineteenth century. The German composer's influence extended far beyond just the musical innovations in his various operas (most notably the Ring Cycle and Parsifal). Wagner was a learned man and was greatly influenced by the philosophical works of Schopenhauer, the ancient Greek tragedists, and especially the nineteenth-century literature on Teutonic or Germanic myths and legends ("German antiquity," as he referred to it), which made up the bulk of the titles in his private library in Dresden early in his creative career, and which are now in the museum of his former house, Wahnfried, in Bayreuth. [30] His numerous essays and commentaries on a wide variety of social, political, cultural, philosophical, and racial issues are contained in a sixteen-volume collection that rivals the size and scope of Jung's Collected Works or Freud's Standard Edition. [31] Generations of disciples and cultural historians have generated an immense secondary literature of scholarship and pseudo-scholarship on the life and work of this remarkable man, [32] who may be said to rank with Darwin and Marx in terms of the pervasiveness of his contemporary influence on Western culture. [33]
Wagner deliberately lived out the Romantic fantasy of a "philosopher- genius." He envisioned the operatic spectacles of his later decades as great Teutonic mystery-plays, and he sought to unite the soul of the German peoples through his music and Germanic mythological themes. Thus, after the Prussian unification of Germany in 1871 under the iron fist of Bismarck, Wagner found a national climate fanatically supportive of his Pan-Germanic utopian dreams. For years he petitioned various prospective patrons for the money to build a special Festspielhaus in which to exclusively produce his grand operas. A town between Bavaria and Prussia was decided upon, and after four years of construction Wagner's theater-temple of the German nation had its inaugural festival in the summer of 1876.
Bayreuth became the only place to witness "the Master" in performance. Like Eleusis in ancient Greece, which was the only place in the pagan world to experience the mysteries of the Two Goddesses (Demeter and Persephone) and therefore unlike all other mystery cults with their multiple initiation sites, Bayreuth became the place -- especially if you were of Germanic heritage -- to be reborn. Nowhere was this idea more clearly stated than in a book by an Indologist from Vienna University, Leopold von Schroder, entitled Die Vollendung des arischen Mysteriums in Bayreuth (Fulfillment of the Aryan Mystery at Bayreuth) published in Munich in 1911. As von Schroder exuberantly explains:
After a separation of more than five thousand years, the Aryan tribes can meet together for the first time in a designated place to contemplate the ancient mysteries fulfilled in a new form. Thanks to Wagner, Bayreuth has become the center of all the Aryan peoples, and this very fact guarantees an astonishing supremacy to Germany and the Germans. [34]
The fantasy was that one could emerge from Wagner's Festspielhaus and feel totally transformed, indeed as if a stranger to oneself, and many persons could attest that this did indeed happen. Wagner and his theater-temple performances became the center of a mystery cult with mystical overtones. People from all over the Western world made pilgrimages to Bayreuth, and during the annual festivals when the Ring Cycle would be repeatedly performed, Bayreuth took on the aura of a sacred shrine. Mark Twain irreverently recounted his 1891 visit to "the shrine of St. Wagner," feeling at times "like a sane person in the community of the mad" in Bayreuth, but he was not immune to its transformative mystical effects. Twain described it as "one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.... I have never seen anything so fine and real as this devotion." [35]
Wagner, and especially the small Bayreuth Circle of zealous disciples after his death, distinguished between mere Wagnerites who came to his performances just to be seen or to hear the music, and then true Bayreuthers who were informed listeners and who constantly strove for an intellectual and spiritual understanding of its underlying philosophical and artistic meaning. Wagnerism soon became a worldwide phenomenon with hundreds of local chapters and associations throughout Europe and the United States. At the turn of the century, all the major universities in German-speaking countries (including Basel University, where Jung was studying) maintained Wagner associations of students, many of which were based on Pan-Germanic sentiments and its increasing association with anti-Semitism. Periodicals appeared such as the esteemed Bayreuther Blatter, which Wagner himself contributed to, or England's The Meister, in which the social, political, and especially the hidden mystical meanings in Wagner's literary and musical works were analyzed. Theosophists read between the lines of libretto or bars of music for elements of the eternal secret doctrine, for was not Wagner one of the true initiates along with Jesus, the Buddha, and Blavatsky? Nationalistic Germans sought cleansing and transcendence through his Bayreuth festival mystery initiations and were inspired by Wagner's essays advocating Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism. In his commentary on Wagner's Ring Cycle designed to raise the level of consciousness of the average Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw spoke of Wagnerism in Theosophical or mystery-cult language that appeals to the vanity of spiritual elitism:
It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophic and social significance. I profess to be such a superior person; and I write this pamphlet for the assistance of those who wish to be introduced to the work on equal terms with that inner circle of adepts. [36]
Wagnerism became an influential social and political movement and a modern mystery cult based on the idealized image of Wagner and his life, and on his home and sacred theater-temple site in Bayreuth. For many, Wagnerism became a form of personal religion with a totalizing world view and promise of transformation. [37] Even Cosima Wagner, his long-time mistress and then wife could repeatedly feel the numinous element in Wagner, revealing in her diaries, "That it is his art which found the note for the mystery of faith which possesses me, and that the wordless fervor of my soul sings through him -- oh, what bliss, what grace!" [38]
In the twentieth century the elite Bayreuth Circle led by Cosima Wagner had become so openly anti-Jewish and nationalistic that in the 1920s Adolf Hitler, then the leader of the National Socialists, would make several pilgrimages to Bayreuth and kiss the dying hand of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), next to Cosima Wagner the dominant figure in Bayreuth after Wagner's death. When Hitler came to power in January 1933 he elevated Bayreuth to the position of an officially funded sacred national shrine and attended the annual festivities. [39] In 1923, after viewing Wagner's grave, an emotionally overwhelmed Hitler vowed to Cosima, Siegfried Wagner (her son by Wagner), and Siegfried's wife, Winifred, "Out of Parsifal I will make a religion!" [40] Thus during the 1930s, the Bayreuth festivals had become the mysteries of the Nazi state.
We have no concrete evidence, but given his frequent travels to Germany from neighboring Switzerland, it is quite probable that Jung visited Bayreuth. What is certain is that Jung was a Wagnerite and was smitten with Wagnerismus early in his psychiatric career and perhaps throughout his life. In a 13 June 1909 entry in her diaries, Jung's former patient, psychiatric assistant, and intimate companion Sabina Spielrein describes an intimate moment with Jung in 1907 or 1908 in which Jung's eyes "fill with tears" of understanding as she excitedly describes the "psychological" nature of Wagner's music. She says that both she and Jung found that they liked the opera Das RheingoLd the best, and that this common love for Wagner was evidence that their "souls were profoundly akin." [41] Trigant Burrow, an American psychiatrist who trained with Jung for a year (1909-1910) in Kusnacht-Zurich, delightedly "sitting at the feet of this Swiss Seer" as he puts it, reveals in an 11 December 1909 letter to his mother that he attended a performance of Wagner's Der fliegende Hollander (The Flying Dutchman) with Jung. [42] Jung's friend, colleague, and biographer Laurens van der Post speaks of "Wagner's equinoxial music, which Jung himself, insofar as he allowed himself music, preferred." [43]
Wagner's selective treatment of Germanic mythology in his later operas often focused on the heroic figure of Siegfried, a symbol that became dominant in Jung's personal and professional lives. During a critical period at the beginning of his "confrontation with the unconscious," Jung has dreams of the murder of Siegfried that parallel events in the last opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle, Gotterdammerung. Jung personalizes this Wagnerian material in the self-analysis of his dream. [44] Siegfried as a "sun hero," a reborn son/sun like the Egyptian Horus (represented by a solar disk) is analyzed in his 1912 book, Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. [45] A more intimate connection is, again, to be found in the diaries of Spielrein, who is, on and off, deeply in love with Jung and fantasizes about giving birth to a male Germanic child named Siegfried. Jung and Spielrein discuss this Siegfried fantasy of a common love-child in letters to each other dated as late as January 1918, long after they parted company, in which Spielrein refers to "my Siegfried problem." [46] Although Wagner had sired two daughters with Cosima while they were both married to others, Siegfried Wagner (1869-1930) was also conceived during this extramarital affair. By 1907 or so, this was the sort of well-known "celebrity gossip" that the average person knew about Wagner, and such a fantasy of the eventual heroic triumph of the genius to win his mistress and sire a Siegfried seems to have been one of the scripts through which Jung and Spielrein enacted their relationship. After becoming famous for his own theories and his own movement after World War I, Jung's home in Kusnacht-Zurich very much became the Bayreuth of the Jungians, the only place to experience the master in performance. Such was the impact of Wagner on the mnemonic consciousness of his initiates that his dramatic brand of Germanic mythology could be played out in the lives, dreams, and souls of individuals such as Jung and especially Spielrein, who was of Jewish descent.
Wagnerism was only one of the paths to volkisch renovatio. Others are outlined in the chapter that follows.