Gustav Meyrink and the Rosicrucians: Rosicrucian imagery in Der weiße Dominikaner and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster
by Theodor Harmsen
December 17, 2012
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Erwin Tintner’s cover illustration for Der weiße Dominikaner (1921)
In 1890 a significant turn of events changed the life of the struggling banker Gustav Meyer (1868-1932). Already before his bankruptcy and a brief span in a Prague prison Meyer had begun to occupy himself increasingly with theosophy, magic and occultism. [1] At the same time the young dandy began moving in artistic circles in Prague, and later also in Vienna and Munich. The literary career of Gustav Meyrink, as he now styled himself, was launched with the publication of a series of successful satirical and occult short stories for the well-known cultural-satirical journal Simplicissimus. Meyrink was much interested in the modern art scene, the dramatic arts, dance, music, pantomime, puppet theatre, wax museums and cinema and all these interests can be traced in the stories. Contemporary relations with artists and illustrators stem mostly from a year spent in Vienna (1904), when Meyrink worked as chief editor of Der liebe Augustin, a magazine filled with short stories, poems and art work similar to Simplicissimus. Contacts with artists who contributed to both periodicals lasted for a lifetime. Hugo Steiner-Prag illustrated Meyrink’s bestseller Der Golem with a now famous series of lithographs which were also published independently. Fritz Schwimbeck illustrated both Der Golem and Das grüne Gesicht and Emil Preetorius was responsible for most of Meyrink’s book designs published by Kurt Wolff Verlag, from Der Golem to Walpurgisnacht and the Gesammelte Werke. At the outset of his writing career Meyrink became friends with the artist Alfred Kubin, possibly through the author Oscar A.H. Schmitz who married Kubin’s sister and stimulated Meyrink to pursue an artistic career. Mutual artist friends inspired Meyrink to write stories incorporating some of their more remarkable character traits. Thus amongst others Alfred Kubin, Richard Teschner and Franz Sedlacek figure in several of Meyrink’s novels and stories. A number of Sedlacek’s fantastical paintings appear to have been inspired in turn by Meyrink’s stories. [2]
Though many beautifully illustrated editions of Meyrink’s novels appeared over the years, the two last novels, Der weiße Dominikaner and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster, were not illustrated nor were they reprinted so often as his other works. Their book covers, however, do have interesting stories to tell. Crucial passages in the respective novels will illustrate the main argument of this essay that Meyrink superimposed his ideas about a Rosicrucian Order, at first developed for Der weiße Dominikaner, on the English magical tradition described in his last published novel Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster. Meyrink’s Brotherhood was loosely modelled after the seventeenth-century fictional Brotherhood presented in the Fama Fraternitatis as well as the historical Order of the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer of the late eighteenth century. Contemporary German as well as English modern theosophists and Rosicrucians were trying to find their roots in these movements as well.
As an editor and a translator, Meyrink published a series of magical works entitled “Romane und Bücher der Magie”. These neatly published little volumes were known also for their interesting cover designs by the Austrian artist and illustrator Erwin Tintner (1885-1957). The series was published by Rikola Verlag, the publishing house founded by the influential Austrian businessman Richard Kola in Vienna in 1920 with the idea to make modern works of fantastical literature available in affordable editions at a time afflicted by inflation and general economic malaise. This situation was to last through the next decade when the book trade more or less collapsed completely. Still, Kola’s publications included many interesting titles by such writers as Otto Soyka, Paul Busson, Leo Perutz and Karl Hans Strobl. The economic crisis in 1923-1924 is likely to have caused the demise of Meyrink’s series of magical books as well. Rikola Verlag was to survive until 1926 but liquidation followed in 1929.
The series edited by Meyrink was published in the early twenties after the publication of Der weiße Dominikaner (1921), one of the first books published by Rikola, again with a cover illustration by Tintner. The series comprised fictional works by Franz Spunda and Paschal Beverly Randolph (1825-1875), and a study on Eliphas Levi by R.H. Laarss (Richard Hummel 1870-1938). Dhoula Bel, the Rosicrucian novel by P.B. Randolph (1922) may have influenced the writing of Der weiße Dominikaner, Meyrink’s first modern Rosicrucian novel. Even though he published his novel two years before the Dhoula Bel edition, Meyrink had long pursued his interest in Randolph and his works through the English occultist and Rosicrucian John Yarker (1833-1913), a member of S.R.I.A. and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Some ideas surrounding Randolph and his working with magical mirrors may also have gone into Meyrink’s novel Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster. The American Randolph as well as English members of S.R.I.A. and the Golden Dawn such as John Yarker and Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) have been regarded as occultists working in the Enochian magical tradition of the Renaissance magus John Dee, the subject of Meyrink’s last novel. [3]
Der weiße Dominikaner came out with two variant book covers. One depicts what looks like a Dominican monk spreading out his arms, while the other simply features the title, in German Gothic type. Erwin Tintner’s figurative design could, however, be seen to merge the image of the white-robed Dominican with that of the Rosicrucian brother, the initiated father of the main character Christopher Taubenschlag – the father in turn is conceived as a mirror image or symbol of the son. In the first instance, the novel’s white Dominican is (loosely) based on the legendary character of Raimund de Pennaforte, builder of the local church in the forgotten nameless town of the novel (identified as Wasserburg) who would finally return as the final Pope under the name “Flos florum”. The image also focuses on the troubled relationship between the Catholic Church and esoteric spirituality, the dominant theme of the novel. Rosicrucian elements in the novel have been traced by Eduard Frank and Ralf Reiter. [4] The revelatory image – presented in contradistinction to the legendary Pennaforte and the chaplain’s confusions about his significance – is that of the initiation into the Brotherhood of Christopher Taubenschlag, and it is this moment of initiation that is also hinted at in Tintner’s design.
The Rosicrucian image of the chain of connected Brethren of the Order is first presented in chapter seven, where it is combined with elements from Taoism, magic and alchemy. The Taoist and magical aspects of this complex image appear to be partly inspired by the Taoist studies of a leading nineteenth-century German orientalist scholar, August Pfizmaier:
Wer die Grenzscheide überschritten hat, der ist ein Glied in einer Kette geworden, – einer Kette, gebildet aus Unsichtbaren Händen, die einander nicht mehr loslassen bis ans Ende der Tage: er gehört hinfort einer Gemeinschaft an, in der jeder Einzelne eine nur für ihn bestimmte Mission hat. – Nicht sind auch nur Zwei in ihr die da einander gleich waren, so wie schon unter der Menschentieren der Erde nicht zwei sind, die dasselbe Schicksal hätten. Der Geist dieser Gemeinschaft durchdringt unsere ganze Erde: er ist ihr jederzeit allgegenwärtig er ist der Lebensgeist im großen Holunderbaum. Aus ihm sind die Religionen aller Zeiten und Völker entsprossen sie wandeln sich, aber er wandelt sich nie. Wer ein Wipfel geworden ist und die Wurzel ‚Ur’ bewusst in sich trägt, der tritt unbewusst in diese Gemeinschaft ein durch das Erleben des Mysteriums, das da heißt „die Lösung mit Leichnam und Schwert“. (Der weiße Dominikaner, Kapitel 7, „Das mennigrote Buch“, esp. p. 151)
The Meyrink collector and occultist Lambert Binder was one of the first commentators to discuss this Taoist image in his essay “Die Lösung der Leichname”. [5] For Meyrink, the Taoist way to spiritual enlightenment through schi kiai (die Lösung der Leichname) and kieu kiai (die Lösung der Schwerter) was a kind of transformation from the physical body to a spiritual body and this could be seen to parallel the physical-alchemical process of transmutation, guided the adept towards the Philosopher’s Stone and spiritual change. This theosophical-alchemical orientation was also dominant in the Rosicrucianism from the seventeenth century onwards. In Der weiße Dominikaner, in the chapter entitled “Einsamkeit”, the alchemical process is explained. Taubenschlag, looking for his Ophelia, turns to the author of the introduction. Taubenschlag, we are reminded, is not the character dreamed up by his “author” when he started writing his fictional tale, but an invisible entity (a symbol even, p. 11), a doubled spiritual guide or a metaphysical or divine aspect of the self that has taken over his narrative expressed in the diary of an invisible one (“Tagebuch eines Unsichtbaren”):
Das tiefste Geheimnis aller Geheimnisse und das verborgenste Rätsel aller Rätsel ist die alchemistische Verwandlung der – Form. Das sage ich dir, der du mir die Hand leihest, zum Danke dafür, daß du für mich schreibst! Der verborgene Weg zur Wiedergeburt im Geiste, von dem in der Bibel steht, ist eine Verwandlung des Körpers und nicht des Geistes. […] Die Formveränderung, die ich meine, wird für das äußere Auge erst sichtbar, wenn der alchemistische Prozess der Umwandlung seinem Ende zugeht; im Verborgenen nimmt er seinen Anfang: in den magnetischen Strömungen, die das Achsensystem des Körperbaues bestimmen, – die Denkart des Menschen, seine Neigungen und Triebe wandeln sich zuerst, ihnen folgt die Wandlung des Tuns und mit ihm die Verwandlung der Form, bis diese der Auferstehungsleib des Evangeliums wird (pp. 194-195).
In chapter 12, the crucial chapter on death and spiritual rebirth entitled “Jener muss wachsen, ich aber schwinden”, his dying father tells Christopher of the secret order but not without warning him about the dangers of occultist and magical entities (pp. 240-241):
Er faßte mich an der Hand und verflocht seine Finger auf eine besondere Weise mit den meinigen. „Auf diese Art“, setzte er leise hinzu, und ich hörte, daß sein Atem wieder zu stocken begann, „hängen die Glieder der großen unsichtbaren Kette zusammen; ohne sie vermagst du wenig; bist du aber eingeschaltet, so kann dir nichts widerstehen, denn bis in die fernsten Räume des Weltalls helfen dir die Mächte unseres Ordens. Höre mich an: Mißtraue allen Gestalten, die dir entgegentreten im Reiche der Magie! Jegliche Form können die Mächte der Finsternis vortäuschen, sogar die unseres Meisters; auch den Griff, den ich dir gezeigt habe, können sie äußerlich nachahmen, um dich irre zu führen, aber zugleich unsichtbar bleiben – das können sie nicht. […] „Merke dir ihn gut, den Griff! Wenn sich dir eine Erscheinung aus der andern Welt naht, und solltest du sogar glauben, ich sei es: immer verlange den Griff! Die Welt der Magie ist voll von Gefahren.“
This is followed in chapter 14, “Die Auferstehung des Schwertes”, by a misleading apparition of an old man who invites Taubenschlag to join his father’s order (pp. 274-275). But when the old man requires blind obedience (which may, incidentally be a critical reference to an important tenet of the Gold- und Rosenkreuzer), Christopher remembers to ask for the handshake his father told him about. The grey apparition is not what he appears to be but rather advocates an occult and treacherous perversion of spiritual truth. The image finally reveals itself in the shape of a demon impersonating John the Baptist (pp. 277-282).
In the last chapter Christopher Taubenschlag experiences the spiritual change of his body:
Ich breite die Arme aus: unsichtbare Hände fassen die meinen mit dem „Griff“ des Ordens, gliedern mich ein in die lebendige Kette, die in die Unendlichkeit reicht. Verbrannt ist in mir das Verwesliche, durch den Tod in eine Flamme des Lebens verwandelt. Aufrecht stehe ich im purpurnen Gewand des Feuers, gegürtet mit der Waffe aus Blutstein. Gelöst bin ich für immer mit Leichnam und Schwert.
(Der weiße Dominikaner, Kapitel 15, „Das Nessoshemd“)
Heinrich Hussmann: cover and illustration (on pastedown and flyleaf) to Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (1927)
Meyrink’s second and last Rosicrucian novel, Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster, also came out with two variant cover designs, the first a pen drawing of a young girl’s portrait in green ink designed by the graphical artist and illustrator Heinrich Hussmann (1899-1982). Friedrich Alfred Schmid Noerr, Meyrink’s co-author for this novel, was not at all appreciative of the design, as appears from his copy of the book now in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. Schmid Noerr cancelled the cover of his copy by drawing a red line across it and adding the comment “Pfui!” Did he perhaps object to it for other than aesthetic reasons? We know that Schmid Noerr and Meyrink used other working titles for the novel (John Dee and Baphomet); both men disliked the final title chosen by the publisher. The title Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster was clearly drawn from the crucial first appearance of the little girl and the green angel to John Dee and Edward Kelley. Thus the image refers to the relevant passage in Meric Casaubon’s edition of Dee and Kelley’s angel conversations.
Meyrink and Schmid Noerr’s first source was the booklet which the German theosophist and occultist Carl Kiesewetter (1854-1895) wrote on Dee. In a later account of their literary cooperation Schmid Noerr remembered picking it up and handing it to Meyrink as possible material for a new novel. Kiesewetter consulted Meric Casaubon’s edition of John Dee, A true and faithful relation of what passed for many years between Dr. John Dee and some spirits (1659) as well as the biography of Dee (1707) by the English Nonjuring scholar and librarian Thomas Smith (1638-1710). Apart from Kiesewetter, Casaubon and Smith, no other sources (apart from such alchemical reference works such as Schmieder’s Geschichte der Alchemie, 1832) were easily available to Schmid Noerr and Meyrink when they were looking for materials on the lives of Dee and Kelley. A modern English monograph by Charlotte Fell Smith had appeared in 1909 but it is not clear whether this work was known to the novelists. [6]
Even though they owe a lot to Kiesewetter’s use of both Casaubon and Smith, the novelists obviously did not need to follow the (legendary) history and the characters of Dee and Kelley. In the end the characters in the novel are part of the thematic structure and fictional reality of the novel. The angel in the novel appears in the wake of a seven-year-old girl. The child’s name, Madini (or Madimi) refers to the first (female) angel appearance in Casaubon’s edition of Dee’s angel conversations. The following vision occurred in May 1583:
Suddenly, there seemed to come out of my Oratory a Spirituall creature, like a pretty girle of 7 or 9 yeares of age, attired on her head with her hair rowled up before, and hanging down very long behind, with a gown of Sey […] changeable green and red, and with a train she seemed to play up and down […] like, and seemed to go in and out behind my books, lying on heaps, the biggest […] and as she should ever go between them, the books seemed to give place sufficiently. [7]
Thomas Smith, Vitae quorundam eruditissimorum et illustrium virorum, London [Amsterdam] 1702, including the “Vita Joannis Dee, Mathematici Angli”
Another relevant passage, in which the angel presents Dee with the scrying stone in the west window was not published in Casaubon’s edition. Kiesewetter could only have found the reference in Thomas Smith’s biography of John Dee. Smith had access to Dee’s unpublished diaries for this information and referred to a male angel (a young boy). Kiesewetter worked Smith’s note on this event into his main narrative. Information about the event was originally taken by Smith from Dee’s diaries. [8] From Smith’s note in his Vita it appears that he consulted the original “Mysteriorum libri” recovered by Elias Ashmole, though he does not explicitly list these unpublished diaries in his bibliography at the end of his book. This is Dee’s description of the event (1582) in Book IV:
Thow shalt preuayle with it, with Kings, and with all Creatures of the world. Whose beauty (in virtue) shall be more worth then the Kingdomes of the earth. Loke, if thow see it: But styr not, for the Angel of his power is present. E[dward] K[elley] loked toward my west window, and saw there first uppon the matts by my bokes a thing, (to his thinking) as bigg as an egg: most bright, clere, and glorious: and an angel of the heath of a little chylde holding up the same thing in his hand toward me: and that Angel had a feyrey sword in his hand &c. [In margin: An angel holding up the stone.] …
I went toward the place, which EK pointed to: and tyll I cam within two fote of it, I saw nothing: and then I saw like a shaddow on the grownd or matts hard by my bokes under the west window. The shaddow was rowndysh, and less then the palm of my hand. I put my hand down uppon it, and I felt a thing cold and hard which, (taking up, I) perceyued to be the stone before mentioned. [9]
The German occultist Kiesewetter also noted that the boy was four years old, a detail that is not in the original manuscript nor in Smith’s account. This boy-angel appeared to Dee and Kelley about half a year earlier in 1582. In the novel, the apparition of the angel in the west window subsequently takes on huge dimensions, and this angel is identified as Il, “der Bote vom westlichen Tor” (p. 186). Later descriptions of the angel’s appearance, bedecked with gold and jewels, also owes to the description of Dee’s female angel Galvah who is associated with precious stones (and at one time also appears in the west window). In the novel the sexual identity of the angel in the west window is left undetermined, whereas in Dee’s conversations Madini and especially Galvah focus on the aspect of gender in relation to moral and spiritual (angelic or demonic) wisdom. Dee’s texts contain references to the magical works by Johann Trithemius, one of Dee’s most important sources.
The angel then disturbingly commands Dee and Kelley to sleep with each other’s wives both in the published angel conversations and in the novel. Even though issues of gender, Christian morality and sexuality (including the cross-matching) certainly play a part in the novel, this cross-matching is only briefly referred to and not fully worked into the novel’s overall structure. Issues of sexuality concentrate rather on sexual magic and are reflected more emphatically and explicitly in the person of Fürstin Chotokalungin, a magical figure of sexual temptation resembling a modern decadent femme fatale (cf. Aglaja, wife of Adonis Mutschelknaus, in Der weiße Dominikaner) and in the cult of Isaïs. The doubled character of Dee / Baron Müller will have to overcome this sexual temptation on the way to his spiritual initiation, which is the final resolution of the novel.
In this scheme the enigmatic and unreliable Lipotin can to some extent be regarded as Kelley’s modern double (though he is mostly paired with Mascee). Many issues and themes are woven into the complex structure of the novel to address questions of the meaning of human life and death, human consciousness, time and timelessness, reality and immortality, hatred, hope, love, morality, sexuality, magic, spirituality and fate. Towards the end of the novel, the cynical Lipotin identifies himself as an enigmatic and untrustworthy Tibetan Dugpa monk (cf. the equally untrustworthy vision of the old man in Der weiße Dominikaner). Further associations with dehumanising Tibetan sexual magic follow: Vajroli Tantra, Yoga and Vajroli Mudra and related magical practices are associated with Dee and Kelley’s search for the Philosopher’s stone. Finally, Dee / Müller appears to have survived the poison of Tibetan magic that Kelley / Lipotin brought to him. [10]
British theosophists and occultists took an interest in Smith’s biography of Dee. The British theosophist, alchemist and a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, William Alexander Ayton (1816-1909), produced a biography of John Dee in 1908, in fact a translation of Thomas Smith’s Latin text. [11] Ayton knew H.P. Blavatsky when she was in London and Meyrink corresponded with English theosophists such as George Mead, Blavatsky’s secretary, as well as Rosicrucians and members of the Golden Dawn. Meyrink exchanged many letters with John Yarker about the writings of the American Rosicrucian and sex magician P.B. Randolph as well as about Yarker’s involvement in secret societies, their rituals and their organization. Through his interest in Randolph, Meyrink might also have known about Ayton, who was an important figure in the English Rosicrucian movement. Be that as it may, considering Ayton’s foreword to his translation of Smith’s text, his approach to the occult experiences of Dee and Kelley was quite similar to Meyrink’s and Schmid Noerr’s when they were preparing their novel. Modern and practical occultists, especially members of S.R.I.A. and the Golden Dawn, were highly intrigued by angelology and demonology, while they were perhaps not always as conscientious as Dee’s biographer Thomas Smith in evaluating the historical importance of the scholar and political adviser Dee. They were rather more interested in the magus’s practice of Enochian magic. [12]
Whether Meyrink in any way meant to reflect the practice of Enochian and/or sexual magic in occult movements of his day such as the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) of Theodor Reuß and Aleister Crowley is an interesting question. [13] During the 1920s Crowley apparently tried to contact Meyrink but whether they ever met in person is not clear. Meyrink may have heard about Crowley through such esoteric writers and contacts as Henry Birven or Heinrich Tränker (1880-1956). Meyrink was aware of Crowley’s attempt in Thüringen in 1925 to take over Tränker’s Rosicrucian Pansophia movement (or to incorporate it into his Astrum Argenteum Order) which had been founded in Munich in 1923. [14] In a letter to his friend, the Prague publisher Oldrich Neubert, Meyrink was very cricital of Tränker’s Collegium Pansophicum, whose members he regarded as “fürchterliche Kleinkram-Spiessbürger”. His attitude to the controversial Crowley, who resided mostly in Sicily and in Paris in those years, remained ambivalent: “Dass Crowley ein unmoralischer Mensch ist, will ich gern glauben, aber das ist öfter als man denkt kein Hindernis – am Anfang – des Weges zur Hochmagie, besonders wenn man damit vergleicht, dass sehr hohe Moralität durchaus nicht davor schützt, dass man ein unbewusstes Werkzeug schwarzmagischer Kräfte wird.“ Meyrink was aware of Crowley’s publications and regarded him as an authority on the practice of yoga. Richard Deacon discusses the influence of Dee’s and especially Kelley’s magical practices on the modern magician Crowley who adopted Dee’s Enochian magic and identified himself with Kelley. Crowley published his experiences with Dee’s magical system in his periodical The Equinox in 1911. [15] One wonders whether Meyrink and Schmid Noerr did not also have Crowley in mind when they wrote Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster.
It was never Meyrink’s or Schmid Noerr’s intention, despite the latter’s historical research on the Elizabethan period and John Dee’s biography in preparation of the book, to write a biographically or historically accurate novel. The main interest in the novel is not the sixteenth century as such but the continuity of a spiritual quest and the dangers which beset the undertaking, which is both human and universal. Structure, characterization, imagery and plot of Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster are consistently dualistic. This duality also required that the Elizabethan Empire and all its colonial ambition, its science and natural philosophy, its politics and ideology, its need of religious reform as well as its rather urgent sense of the apocalypse be quite deliberately reflected in the dangerously occult mirror of western Renaissance occultism and Tibetan black magic. The mirroring served to reveal something of the poisonous state which Europe found itself in, politically, economically, socially, in the late twenties of the twentieth century. [16] However, much of this mirroring of worlds is subservient to the final resolution of the novel.
The image of the Dominican spreading out his arms reappears as a revelatory image in the Rosicrucian resolution to Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster:
Vor mir steht Theodor Gärtner wieder und nennt mich: Bruder. Ich höre ihn sprechen, und wenn auch viele Worte untergehen in dem Brausen des Jubels, der in mir ist, so verstehe ich doch alles, was er sagt und befiehlt. – Ich fühle: von mir dehnt sich die güldene Kette von Wesen des Lichts, und ein Glied wird gelöst, um mich, das neue Glied, einzufügen. Ich weiß auch: es ist kein symbolischer Ritus, wie er als Abglanz von den Menschen des irdischen Schattenreichs da und dort in Konventikeln als „Mysterium“ vollzogen wird, sondern es ist ein wirkendes, lebendiges, lebenspendendes Begebnis in einer andern Welt.
– – „Aufgenommen, berufen, erwählt wirst du sein, John Dee!“ – so schlagen im ruhigen Gesang meines Blutes die Pulse. – – –
„Breite die Arme aus, Aufrechtstehender!“
Ich breitete die Arme waagrecht.
Gleich darauf sind Hände da, von rechts und von links, die nach den meinen fassen, und ich spüre mit hohem Glück, wie die sichere Kette sich schließt. Zugleich mit diesem Glücksgefühl erfahre ich tief im innersten Gewissen seinen Grund: wer in dieser Kette steht, ist unverletzbar; ihn trifft kein Hieb, ihn drängt keine Not, daß nicht Ungezählte in der Kette von diesem Hieb und von dieser Not mitgetroffen würden. […] Weiße Gewänder umhüllen mich. Ein Lichtstrahl trifft von unten her auf meinen gesenkten Blick: auch mein Gewand trägt auf der Stelle der Brust die golden blitzende Rose. Freund Gardener ist bei mir, und ringsum in dem geisterhaft hohen Saal ist ein leises Summen wie von Bienenschwärmen. Weißleuchtende Gestalten umziehen mich, von der Ferne näherdringend. Deutlicher, rhythmischer, tönender wird das Summen und Rauschen im Raum. Dunkler Gesang wird Stimme und Chor. (ed. 1995, pp. 510-11)
After his Rosicrucian alchemical wedding with Queen Elizabeth, Dee / Müller has become a member of the chain of the spiritual Brotherhood and, like Dee, he is regarded as a helper of humanity. His wife Jane, however, through her sacrifice has reached the realm of eternal life. After a long spiritual quest in a doubled world as well as in a doubled state of being, the character of Dee / Baron Müller is taken up into this mystical brotherhood and initiated into a spiritual life, where the historical Dee and Kelley had failed (also in the context of the novel). Their relations with the angel from the west window, who turns out to be a harbinger from the western realms of fear and death, finally come to an end. It would be better for humanity if no such angel ever materialised again.
The denouement takes the novel into Rosicrucian spheres. The historical association of Dee and the classical Rosicrucian reform movement in Germany, as argued (mistakenly) by Frances Yates, cannot be considered to be relevant here. In fact it is much more difficult to see how the complex of John Dee’s life and magic is combined (contrasted) or doubled with the modern occult world and the Rosicrucian resolution of the novel. [17] An eighteenth- and nineteenth-century context for Rosicrucianism and especially the combination of alchemical and Christian Hermetic ideas of this historical phenomenon as well as Meyrink’s personal awareness of modern Rosicrucian and theosophical thought as published amongst others by Franz Hartmann, G.W. Surya, Rudolf Steiner, Heinrich Tränker, Willy Schrödter and Max Heindel appear to offer the relevant context here. Possibly Carl Kiesewetter’s Rosicrucian affiliation – this influential occultist owned his great grandfather’s collection of manuscripts – and his early work on the Rosicrucians were also relevant. [18] The works of physicians and alchemical practitioners such as Alexander von Bernus, Franz Freudenberg, Ernst Kurtzahn, Alfred Müller-Edler and Ferdinand Maack provide a cultural context for Meyrink’s fictional as well as practical-alchemical pursuits. Of these, Von Bernus, Müller-Edler and Meyrink were close friends. Kurtzahn published his study Der Tarot (Leipzig 1920) which he dedicated to Meyrink. Maack was an independent esoteric writer and the founder of a Rosicrucian order in Hamburg in 1923. Their interest in the eighteenth-century Gold-und Rosenkreuzer can be traced in several of their publications fairly easily. [19]
The Rosicrucian theme, like the interest in Taoism and in hatha yoga, had already been introduced in Der weiße Dominikaner (especially chapters 7 and 15) and the two novels are closely related both in this thematic sense and in their use of imagery. This time major images and motifs are the (christian-cabbalistic) tree of life, the rose garden, the interconnected chain of spiritual beings or guides, the ancestors (the tree of forebears: the Jöcher family and John Dee’s Welsh forebears), the magical and theo-alchemical marriage, a mystical union, and finally the formation of the invisible brotherhood. The fictional “Brotherhood of the Golden Rose” in Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster and one of its members, the novelistic double figure of Robert Gardener / Theodor Gärtner as well as the spiritual resolution of the novel have significant theo-alchemical and modern (18th-19th-century) Rosicrucian connotations.
The overall Rosicrucian scheme and resolution of the novels Der weiße Dominikaner and Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (as identified before by Eduard Frank and Ralf Reiter) were not developed from the materials on John Dee but must in the end be attributed mainly to Meyrink’s and possibly to a lesser extent also Schmid Noerr’s more general reading of alchemical and Rosicrucian texts available to them. [20] In a sense the crisis of John Dee and Edward Kelley overcome in the novel by the double character of Dee / Baron Müller, is also the crisis of the novel, the point where the reader is either convinced by the success of the mystical novel or where he/she feels the communication of author(s) and reader is lost in an esoteric vision superimposed on the fantasy of the English Renaissance alchemical magicians Dee and Kelley. This crisis and its complex imagery as realized in the structural concept of the novel evidently point to Meyrink’s literary and esoteric concerns rather than to the medieval and mystical orientation of Schmid Noerr in the novels he published later under his own name.
It is likely, therefore, that Schmid Noerr’s considerable contribution lay in the workmanship, i.e. in the preparation and adaptation of the historical sources and the composition of text for the novel. On the other hand, Schmid Noerr’s mystical preoccupations, e.g. with the mystical self (Ich) could easily have merged with Meyrink’s theme. It would require much more study to fully work out the history of the composition of Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster but an understanding of the mythological, occult, theosophical, Christian-Hermetic, Rosicrucian and fantastical thought of both authors would be a prerequisite for such a history, apart from the long overdue analysis of the extant working manuscript of the novel (in Schmid Noerr’s hand), Schmid Noerr’s scheme (Exposé) and the many notes for the novel now in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. In the end such an exercise would be useful for the interpretation of the novel as written by both novelists. [21]
Meyrink’s similar resolution for both of his novels is worked out by means of the concept of a Rosicrucian Brotherhood, a brotherhood of invisible true Rosicrucians working for the spiritual initiation of those individuals that were called upon to join independent of the actual realisations of Rosicrucian or Masonic societies that were visible in the world as we know it. The imagery connected with his theme could be linked to the related English magical tradition from Dee and Kelley to the magical practitioners of the Golden Dawn. English Rosicrucians based the organization of their order as well as their degrees of initiation on the eighteenth-century German Gold- und Rosenkreuzer but also worked in the tradition of English occultism from Roger Bacon via John Dee, Edward Kelley and Elias Ashmole to their own modern (Enochian) systems of magic. Meyrink’s imagery was indebted rather to the German tradition of theosophical Rosicrucianism. In this tradition, ever since Blavatsky’s foundation of the Theosophical Society, English-German relations were central as theosophy and occultism initially moved from the United States and England to the German-language area of central Europe. German theosophists merged the new theosophy with Rosicrucian ideas and became known as “Moderne Rosenkreuzer”. In this respect Meyrink, working in a modern German theosophical and Rosicrucian context, was finally responsible for the theme and resolution of Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster.