The Dedalus Meyrink Reader

by Gustav Meyrink

  When the light stood before me as I described it, I asked myself, ‘What can this mean? What is it supposed to be telling me?’ It never for a moment occurred to me to immerse myself in it as an uplifting sight, as a religious person might have done. Immediately the answer came to me in a ‘thought’ — I call it a thought because I can think of no other expression, in fact it was almost like hearing a voice, which informed me, ‘The anchor means holding fast or hoping; the three prongs mean three days.’

  Three days later something happened that was so strange I can scarcely bring myself to write it down for fear people might think I am fabricating it and making fun of all those who are reading what I have written. Must I insist that that is not the case? You can believe me or not, as you like. On the third morning after that night, I went to my business, a bureau de change in Prague. The servant was just sweeping out the office; none of the other staff was there. I was a little surprised to see, despite the early hour, a gentleman sitting in the waiting room and so asked him what he wanted. He was well-dressed, middle-aged, wearing glasses and had a squint. In reply he muttered a few incomprehensible words then pulled himself together and said with somewhat forced determination, ‘I want nothing from you. I thought you wanted something from me.’ I immediately recalled: ‘Wait three days,’ the words that had come to mind when I saw the anchor. From the conversation with the stranger that quickly followed, I learnt that he was called O. K., that he had spent a long time as a professor or teacher of chemistry in Japan, that he had been living for some time now in Dresden and was a spiritualist. But not a spiritualist in the usual sense, rather a ‘pious’ man, a kind of Christian bhakta yogi. He had possessed the gift of automatic writing since he was a child, he told me; however, it wasn’t ‘spirits’ that spoke through his writing but none other than Jesus Christ Himself. I listened patiently and soon realised that I wasn’t dealing with a swindler, as had often been the case, but at worst with a religious fanatic. I must point out that, despite my young years, I was even then an uncommonly sharp judge of character and perfectly capable of distinguishing lies from truth. Which was hardly surprising. Anyone who, like me, has entered the banking profession at a young age very quickly learns to read other people like an open book.

  I invited Professor K. to go with me to my apartment, since a bureau de change did not seem the right place for a discussion of the occult, yoga and prophecy. Once there, Herr K. told me that three days ago — the time corresponded exactly to that of my vision! —he had as usual been occupied with automatic writing when suddenly his hand had refused to finish the sentence he had begun and had instead written a new sentence: Go to Prague to see a banker by the name of M. (me, that is) so that you can be with him early on the morning of the third day.

  K. assured me he had never heard my name before. He had travelled to Prague to see what he might find and had sought me out. When I asked what he had to tell me, he said he didn’t exactly know but he had the feeling I was in great danger and it was up to him to save me. He suspected I had fallen into the hands of ‘Asiatic devils’. (Up to that point I had not even hinted to him that I practised yoga.) I spent the whole day with K. listening to his strange, I might almost say rapt, discourse. He said there was only one way to change oneself from a dull normal person into a spiritually more valuable one and that was the path of revelation, which was granted to a person if they followed certain instructions, apocryphal and pious in the Christian sense, which could be most appropriately described as Rosicrucian, since they were alien to both the Protestant and Catholic churches. He gave me some of these instructions. Since he had an incredible store of knowledge and was a scholar in the best sense of the word, I gradually — I was considerably younger than him and therefore less self-assured than I might have been — fell under his spell. Even today it doesn’t surprise me; theism is in the blood of every person who has had a Christian upbringing. In people who do not concern themselves with spiritual matters in their later life, theism is replaced with something that looks like atheism. I suspect, however, that such atheism is seldom genuine; mostly it is theism that has been buried beneath other debris. As K. talked, the theism of my childhood years was aroused and became even more alive within me as the memory of the vision of the man with his head cut off suddenly seemed to take on a deeper meaning: it struck me as if it were a similar experience, if on a small scale, to that of St Paul on the road to Damascus.

  K. told me of a number of books which would be particularly fruitful for me, above all, the works of a certain Jakob Lorber. I acquired them straight away and read them conscientiously. If ever a man felt sick, it was me reading those books. But, with a perseverance I cannot understand today, I managed to delude myself into believing that what was written there in sugary rosewater was the quintessence of salvation. But if my meeting with Professor K. had ended with nothing more than a recommendation to read the godly Jakob Lorber, the result would have been bearable. I would probably not have understood the meaning of the apparition of the ‘headless’ man later on, but I would have been spared years of suffering. Thirteen years of suffering to be precise. His visit finished as follows: K. had already boarded the afternoon train to Dresden when he suddenly turned round and said, ‘Oh yes, I have just remembered the most important thing I have to tell you. There is a man, Herr X., who lives in Vienna. He and many other former Theosophists, Germans and English, even an Indian Brahmin called Babajee, are the disciples of a genuine Rosicrucian who is said to be a simple craftsman living somewhere in Hesse. He knows and teaches the true yoga, on which the New Testament is secretly based.’

  It was like a sudden flash of revelation. The Herr X. in Vienna he mentioned had been a friend of mine for some time. Moreover I knew a certain Dr Franz Hartmann, whom K. had also mentioned in connection with X. and who, as I knew or, rather, had been told by the Theosophists, was among the most profoundly initiated of the ‘initiates’ in yoga. If he and X. and others, whose names I prefer not to mention here, were disciples of the Rosicrucian O. K. had talked of, then I had finally found my guru, as the prophecy of the ‘Inner Circle’ of the Th. S. had said I would! I immediately went to Vienna to see my friend. He had a guest staying with him, an Englishman called G. R. S Mead who, as I knew, was secretary of the Theosophical Society in Adyar in India. By a sign he gave with his hand he indicated that he, too, was a member of the ‘Eastern School’ (the ‘Inner Circle’). I said I had recently had a certain experience and asked if I could speak openly before X. Mead nodded. I started by describing the apparition of the man with no head. Suddenly Mead asked whether the man had not been wearing a white Brahmin thread. I said yes. Had I noticed that it was tied in a knot? I closed my eyes, called up the image, immediately saw the knot clearly and described the way it was tied. Mead stood up, touched his forehead and said, ‘T’was the Master.’ I looked across at X. out of the corner of my eye; he appeared to be suppressing a mocking smile.

  When I then started to describe my meeting with Prof. K., X. became more and more serious. When I mentioned his last words, his remarks about the Rosicrucian guru, he quickly placed his finger on his lips as a sign that I should stop speaking at once. I concluded the sentence with a few more words. Later he took me to one side and told me things about the Theosophical Society which horrified me. I believed them! The evasive answers Mrs Besant gave to my questions about yoga, the awful kitsch the Theosophical siftings sometimes contained — that and other things seemed to confirm my assumption that everything X. told me was true. On top of that I had, a short time before, received a letter from William Judge in New York (he was regarded as one who had been initiated directly by the so-called Mahatmas of Tibet), saying that the ‘Masters’ in no way recognised Mrs Besant as president of the Society and had specifically authorised him to inform all the members of the ‘Eastern School’ of that.

  Everything I had so far believed now appeared uncertain. I spent the whole night in meditation exercises — no images appeared to give me a sign.
The ‘Masked Figure’ seemed to have abandoned me. Professor K. had ‘inoculated’ me and the rash appeared: the next day I told my friend X. that I was prepared to recognise the ‘Rosicrucian’ (I was given his name) as my guide. X. listened very attentively to what I said, then showed me a telegram he claimed to have received shortly beforehand. It said that I had already been taken on by the guru a few days previously (the date coincided with that of my vision of the anchor). X. assured me that the Rosicrucian was clairvoyant in spiritual matters, sometimes in physical matters as well, and I could rest assured that the ‘new disciple’ meant me and no one else.

  Full of rejoicing, I wrote to Annie Besant that, in accordance with the prophecy she had given me at the very start, I had found the man who must presumably be taken as the one behind the title of ‘guru’. Mrs Besant’s answer: ‘The snakes of Mara are many’— which I have already mentioned — came straight back. I immediately thought of the man without a head. Who is this suspicious ‘person’ with no head? I asked myself. A symbol of course, what else! But what did the symbol want to tell me? That disaster was approaching, I sensed. But what was the point of the warning if it did not tell me the way to escape the danger? What was the masked guide of my destiny trying to warn me of by letting me see the apparition of the headless Brahmin? I asked myself over and over again. But couldn’t find the answer. Was the ‘Eastern School’ the headless man? Was it the Rosicrucian guide I had just found? I wavered from one interpretation to another and back again. In the thirteen years of torment along the thorny path that followed I asked myself again and again. Asked without getting an answer, at least not the answer I wanted: a clear answer with no possibility of misunderstanding. I did of course get ‘answers’, but delphic ones, now they would say one thing, now the opposite.

  Only today, years after these events, do I know precisely what the man with his head cut off meant. Anyone who thinks about it can easily work it out, but I am unwilling to spell it out myself. For reasons which anyone who has paid attention to what I have just written can guess.

  A few weeks later I went to the place in Hesse where the Rosicrucian lived. He had been a weaver, could neither read nor write and had had strange experiences in the area of spiritualism, which he called the preparatory stage for acquiring true knowledge, which came solely from the heart, and nowhere else, when it began to speak. This speaking of the heart he called the ‘inner word’; it awoke gradually, he said, and was granted through ‘grace’ in the Christian sense. He showed his numerous disciples the way to this by giving them phrases, which he said he received from his inner voice for each one individually, to murmur to themselves. This murmuring-to-oneself, he said, would arouse our own heart’s ability to speak and, moreover, a certain alteration would take place in our bodies until at the end of the way Christ’s immortal body would be instilled in the disciple and with it Life Immortal. In his opinion one had to start with the body. Piety in the ecclesiastical sense was something he had little or no time for if it was not accompanied by this alteration of the body. If the only thing I had learnt from this man was that the body must be included in the transformation of the person through yoga, he would have earned my lifelong gratitude for that insight alone. It was, he said, completely impossible to achieve this alteration of the body through one’s own rational knowledge and by one’s own efforts.

  He was right about that as well. ‘Something extra must come from above to bring about the change,’ was the way he put it. By ‘from above’ he of course meant Jesus Christ, the risen Christ who had overcome death and was with us day by day, and not the crucified Christ. For anyone who constantly visualised the crucified Christ, as did Catholic monks, especially the Jesuits, and not the living, risen Lord, would ‘have their bones broken’ or they would remain hanging on the cross. As an example he most often gave Katharina Emmerich, the nun who died in 1824 and who was reported to display the stigmata every Friday. His teaching regarding the transformation of the body was uncommonly profound and strange; it often reminded me of the Gnostics and their claims. He said that one had to experience everything from Christ’s life — baptism, the washing of His feet, the Last Supper, as well as the crucifixion — literally, in one’s own body, in the exact way it was written in the Gospels, otherwise it would remain pure theory, things one had heard or read, and would be no more than Christian edification. I came to know many of his 54 disciples and there was not one of them, with the possible exception of an old lady, whom I could call exaggeratedly pious. Apart from a few ordinary artisans, they were mostly elegant, genteel people. None, neither the ‘guide’ nor any of his disciples, showed a trace of asceticism or anything like that. Even stranger was the fact that with time almost all of us experienced in ourselves the ‘reactions’ which ‘J…’ — as we all called our guide — considered so important. Not only in visions, or mostly in dreams, but also on our own bodies, and that even though no one knew what phenomena would occur, since we were all strictly forbidden to tell the others what we had experienced, in order to exclude the possibility of autosuggestion. I will describe just one such reaction here: it consisted of letters appearing on one’s skin. (Medical science calls it ‘dermography’ and attributes it to hysteria, without of course knowing what hysteria actually is.) Each of these letters had a particular meaning and indicated the stage of development the person in question had reached.

  A layman could easily incline to the superficial view that it was all just worthless religious emotionalism. That would be quite wrong! On the contrary, I can assure you that the ‘guide’s’ teaching method aroused an inner life the richness and worth of which no one who has not experienced something similar themself can imagine. This period of apprenticeship also included the transformation of the blood which compelled me to become a writer, not to mention other transformations which I cannot go into here. The first ‘loosening-up’ of my inner being, however, was brought about by the ‘eye-opening’ experience on the bench by the Moldau in Prague.

  Here is an incident to illustrate the effect murmuring a phrase can have on a person and how profoundly it can change their character. One day Dr Franz Hartmann, who is well known in the history of the Theosophical Society and who was one of my co-disciples, came to the guide and asked him to take on a young man as a disciple, saying that he had seldom met anyone who seemed more suited to receive his teaching. For years, he went on, he had lived the life of an ascetic following the strictest rule, withdrawn from the world like a saint. The guide thought for a while, apparently listening to his inner voice, and then said in very certain tones, ‘You’re wrong, Fränzle’ — he was Swabian — ‘the man isn’t genuine, he just thinks he is.’ Dr Hartmann assured him he knew the young man very well; it was wrong to say he wasn’t genuine. ‘Then I’ll give him an exercise so you can see how things are in his heart of hearts,’ J… replied. Six months later Hartmann encountered the young man in a city, transformed into an elegant dandy. Greatly astonished, he asked what had happened. ‘Oh, I had only done the exercise you gave me from that Swabian fool for a few days,’ he said with a beaming smile, ‘when I had a kind of revelation and ditched all that mystical nonsense.’ A few months later he died from syphilis. ‘You see,’ J… said reflectively, when Hartmann told him, ‘he’s been revealed. Pity I couldn’t help him.’

  Of the numerous disciples the guide had, only two experienced as good as no reactions. One was my friend L. — and the other myself. L. has now died, at a grand old age and with the composure of a saint. It will remain a mystery to me why he, who was a devout Christian, never experienced anything of that kind, even though the guide always called him his favourite disciple. As far as I was concerned, it is fairly understandable for, despite the crazy efforts I made to to feel at home, to delude myself into thinking I felt at home with J…’s ideas, I was never transformed from a Saul into a Paul.

  For thirteen years I spent eight hours every day, without leaving out a single one — how often I put off the most important action
s external life demanded of me! — repeating the mantras. Not a single reaction occurred. Whenever I poured out my distress to my ‘guide’, he gave me a long, earnest look and said, ‘You must be patient.’ The only thing I experienced were strange, piercing sensations in the palms of my hands and soles of my feet, the first, mild signs of stigmata. In others they were much clearer, some even had the marks, circular red spots. ‘The pains of crucifixion,’ our ‘guide’ called them, signs of the change of the blood. None of my co-disciples experienced states of ecstasy; if they had, our guide would have expressed extreme disapproval, for the main point of his teaching was that our waking consciousness should be sharpened and neither split nor weakened. And this remaining in one’s body, in contrast to ‘going out of oneself’, as was taught in the mysteries of the Ancient Greeks, is a further foundation stone, which is of greater value on the road to true yoga than anything else; by laying it inside me, the ‘guide’ gave me a jewel to take with me through my whole life. The fact is that there is a particular method of ‘leaving one’s body while still alive’ (a standard expression among trained occultists, though the process strikes me as different, not so coarsely sensual) and it is regarded as an initiation; in reality, it is the worst kind of schizophrenia imaginable. Sooner or later it results in mediumism — incurable schizophrenia. Thus, strange as it may sound, in their mysteries the Ancient Greeks were no other than victims of an illness. The exceptions are those who were able to leap over the chasm of: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The teaching of that simple man from Hesse culminated in the assertion that a person’s soul does not live in their body in order to leave it, in the way someone will turn back when they realise they are in a cul de sac, but in order to transform its physical matter. In many of his experiences he resembled Jakob Böhme, whom every educated person today knows as a wonderful man; as a clairvoyant he was superior to him in some degree, but he was far, far superior to him in this insight that it is wrong to turn away from the world, however sublime withdrawal from the world might seem.