Melton Prior Institute

Amar Priganica´s Sound Archive explores the acoustic vibrations of the sacred – from organ drones and sound experiments to recordings in religious spaces. It gathers works where resonance becomes both a spiritual and corporeal experience. The pipe organ stands as a unique phenomenon in the history of music, uniting sound, religion, and technology in ways that demand renewed aesthetic reflection. Far more than a relic of liturgical tradition, the organ persists as a vital force in the contemporary sonic imagination. Long celebrated for its majestic timbre—famously hailed by Mozart as the “King/Queen of Instruments”—the organ also bears a complex past, rich in metaphysical symbolism and marked by striking contradictions. Central to this examination is the organ’s transformation from an instrument of imperial spectacle to one of spiritual resonance. The notion of an “acoustic theology,” in which the resonance of architecture itself evokes the voice of the divine, further highlights how musical modes and drones have shaped emotional, spiritual, and political dynamics throughout history. This inquiry traces the organ’s path from the technological ingenuity of ancient Alexandria to the reverberant spaces of Gothic cathedrals, encompassing philosophical debates in Plato’s academy, the mystical works of Hildegard von Bingen, biblical narratives, and contemporary sound experiments. By considering the organ not merely as an instrument, but as a philosophical and theological idea, this discussion addresses megaphonic power, religious ecstasy, immersive soundscapes, and the complexities of sacred violence. The exploration culminates in the presentation of an original organ composition, Virgo, which synthesizes these historical and conceptual strands in a contemporary artistic context. The story of the organ begins not in a church at all, but in the bustling, Hellenistic workshops of 3rd-century BC Alexandria. There, it is said that the engineer Ctesibius of Alexandria invented the hydraulis, the first mechanical pipe organ, which used water pressure to push air through pipes . This ingenious device – the world’s first „keyboard“ instrument – was not aimed at heavenly praise but at secular spectacle. The hydraulis’s sound was loud and penetrating, designed to thrill crowds in open-air arenas . In fact, during the late Roman Republic and Empire, organs were a centerpiece of imperial games and circuses, blasting triumphant tunes to accompany chariot races, gladiatorial combat, and public entertainments . It is chilling to consider that the earliest Christians may have died in the arenas with the organ’s blare ringing in their ears – the same instrument that would later lead hymns in their basilicas. This dark irony was not lost on the early Church. The Church Fathers, witnessing how the organ’s ancestor (and its reed-voiced kin, the pagan aulos) inflamed crowds into frenzies of lust and bloodlust, were deeply suspicious. To their ears, the organ carried the sonic residue of Dionysian excess – wanton dances, drunken ecstasy, the “wail of the aulos” associated with orgiastic rites. How could such an instrument ever be reconciled with the chaste worship of Christ? For centuries, instruments were banished from Christian liturgy as being too “carnal.” Yet the organ’s story is one of eventual transformation and sublimation of its “fleshly power” into spirit. The turning point came through detours of history: by the 6th–7th centuries AD, organ technology had improved (the clumsy water hydraulics were replaced by efficient bellows ), and the instrument found its place in the Byzantine court. In Constantinople, organs became imperial regalia – marvelous diplomatic gifts and emblems of the Christian emperor’s glory. In 757 AD, the Byzantine emperor Constantine V sent a splendid organ as a gift to King Pepin the Short of the Franks . This royal curiosity astonished the West. Pepin’s son, Charlemagne, soon requested one for his chapel in Aachen , planting the seed of the organ in Western Europe. Over the next few centuries, organs cautiously entered churches, first as prestigious ornaments and later as functional musical instruments. By the Gothic era, nearly every major cathedral boasted organ pipes in its choir loft. Crucially, as the organ moved from amphitheater to cathedral, its symbolic character began to change. What had been an instrument of imperial spectacle and even war (one medieval legend speaks of a terrifying “war organ” used to rout enemies with sound) was reborn as an instrument of spiritual awe. Medieval thinkers even reinterpreted the organ’s pagan heritage in Christian terms: the multi-piped organ could symbolize the many voices of humanity joined in one harmony of praise. The 14th century Roman Catholic Bishop and composer Phlippe de Vitry likened the diversity of an organ’s pipes to the diversity of peoples in the Church – each pipe producing a different tone, yet all tuned to a common purpose of simultaneous worship. In the grand unity of the organ’s sound, he saw an antidote to discord – or, more provocatively, a kind of “holy synchronization” of souls. By the 13th century, the organ had firmly established itself in the house of God. The timing was apt: Europe was in the midst of building the great Gothic cathedrals, those towering “stone bibles” and acoustical marvels. (Already By 1033, a thousand years after Christ’s death, many expected his return—just as the Book of Revelation foretold Satan’s release “for a short time” after Christ’s millennial reign. But heaven stayed silent. In response, a surge of church-building swept across Europe—from Cluny to Speyer—as if to fill the apocalyptic void with sacred architecture.) These new cavernous spaces cried out for a colossal sound to match their scale. And so the organ, once a sideshow noisemaker, was consecrated as the “Queen of Instruments” at the heart of the sacred service. The fleshly power of the organ’s sound – its capacity to awe and overwhelm – was now channeled to serve the spirit. What had been circus music became the voice of the cathedral. It is in the Gothic cathedral that the organ’s metaphysical potential truly blossomed. These cathedrals were not only visual triumphs of stone and glass, but also acoustic triumphs – resonant chambers carefully tuned for worship. In a Gothic church, the architecture itself is an extension of the organ. Every ribbed vault, every arch, every hollow triforium becomes part of a giant resonating chamber, a sounding board for the instrument. As one moves from the Romanesque to the Gothic, there is a marked shift: walls thin into stained glass, interiors soar higher – and the reverberation times increase. Sound lingers and layers in the air. Music (and especially the organ’s music) begins to blur the boundary between source and space. The medieval builders might not have articulated it in modern terms, but they intuitively grasped an acoustic theology of resonance: build a space so large and reverberant that human voices and instruments merge into something more. At the dedication of Solomon’s Temple, the Scripture in Second Chronicles, chapter five, verses eleven to fourteen, reads as follows:
11 And when the priests came out of the Holy Place (…) 12 and all the Levitical singers, (…) ,their sons and kinsmen, arrayed in fine linen, with cymbals, harps, and lyres, stood east of the altar with 120 priests who were trumpeters) 13 and it was the duty of the trumpeters and singers to make themselves heard in unison in praise and thanksgiving to the Lord, and when the song was raised, with trumpets and cymbals and other musical instruments, in praise to the Lord: “For he is good,for his steadfast love endures forever,” the house, the house of the Lord, was filled with a cloud, 14 so that the priests could not stand to minister because of the cloud, for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God.”. 
Likewise in a Gothic cathedral, sound itself becomes that mystical cloud filling the house. The organ, when it plays, does not sing alone – it plays the entire space. Each note launches cascades of echoes from the stone pillars and vaults, until “the whole room becomes an instrument” . The faithful listening are enveloped by a sonic cloud, a many-layered halo of tones. It was thought that in the cathedral, the music “reflects so that the voice of God may lodge in the heads of the faithful” . This is a theology of acoustics: God’s voice isn’t a literal thunderclap or a mystical whisper, but a resonance, a standing wave in the air that induces awe and inner reverberation. The drone of a deep organ pedal rolling through the nave can feel like creation’s own primordial hum, the “OM“, or like the very breath of God, the “ruach“ which blew Adam into life, vibrating in your bones. Even before organs were common, the Gothic soundscape was being shaped by human voices through techniques like the organum in early polyphony. Imagine a single plainchant melody, now sustained as a slow-moving drone in the bass while other voices weave around it in sinuous lines. Medieval composers discovered that this could flood a church with sound. A low pedal tone (the bourdon or drone) would excite the building’s acoustics, making the whole space hum. If you have ever heard medieval organum performed in a stone church, you know the uncanny power of a single sustained note. In those reverberant spaces, a deep bass note isn’t just heard – it’s felt, saturating the air. Chroniclers tell us of early organs (before they had keyboards as we know them) that could only play “Mixture” chords – each key sounding a stack of parallel fifths and octaves . These primitive organs did not play elaborate melodies; they acted more like drones or harmonic anchors, adding a splendid halo of overtones to the choir. Parallel fifths (consecutive fifth intervals) were considered a pure, ringing sonority since antiquity – Pythagoras had deemed the fifth second only to the octave in natural consonance of the harmonic overtone series . When the organ doubled voices in perfect fifths and fourths (a practice called organum itself), it created a shimmering, otherworldly effect – as if angelic trumpet harmonies were descending to blend with human song. No one captured the idea of cosmic harmony via the organ better than the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher. In his grand vision of universal knowledge, Kircher loved to illustrate analogies between music and the cosmos. He even famously portrayed the Creation of the World as an organ: each of the six days of Creation corresponded to one of the organ’s stops, which God pulled in succession to bring the universe into being . For Kircher and his contemporaries like Gaspar Schott, the organ was the perfect symbol of divine order and universal harmony . Think about it – an organ contains a miniature universe of sounds: dozens of stops, each a different timbre, all governed by a single musician. It can be as soft as a breath or as loud as a thunderclap. It can imitate the chirp of a bird or blast like an entire brass band. To Kircher, this made the organ a microcosm of Creation: diverse yet unified, material yet animated by spirit (the wind). The organist pulling stops on an organ was akin to God issuing forth creation by Logos (Word) and Pneuma (Breath). In a very real sense, every organ is operated by wind (air pressure) and thus every organ performance is an allegory of the divine breath – the ruach – moving through the world. The metaphysical resonance of a single organ chord in a cathedral can thus be seen as a mini reenactment of the Creation: “And God said, let there be sound… and there was sound.” Thus, by the High Middle Ages, the organ had shed its taint of the arena and had donned a sacred mantle. It became at once an instrument and an architectural event. Its authority in sacred space was undisputed – so much so that even during times of iconoclasm and reform, the organ often evoked fierce protection. (The organ’s “holy authority” has not entirely faded: consider how even today, in a moment of national mourning or celebration in a cathedral, it is the organ’s voice that confers solemnity and grandeur, more than any amplified recording could.) Let us turn from architecture to music itself – to the mystical language of musical modes and tonalities. If the organ is the body, the mode (scale) is the soul of the music it plays. In antiquity, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle believed that different musical modes held distinct moral and emotional powers. Music wasn’t just art – it was ethics and politics by other means. Plato, in his Republic, rather infamously banned most traditional Greek modes in his ideal city, allowing only those that he thought nurtured virtue. “Leave me the Dorian and the Phrygian,” says Plato – for these, he thought, could suitably imitate the accents of a brave man or the calm of a temperate one . Dorian, in Plato’s mind, was sturdy and warlike – the musical equivalent of a disciplined hoplite. The Phrygian mode he associated with more peaceable, contemplative moods (somewhat contrary to how later ages imagined Phrygian; there is room for confusion here because the medieval names of modes got scrambled relative to the Greek ones !). Aristotle later added his own twist: Phrygian mode inspires enthousiasmos, a kind of divine ecstatic fervor, he noted, and is thus especially powerful . This idea of music inducing en-theos (being “possessed by a god”) was not abstract – think of the frenzied rites of Dionysus where flutes and drums drove dancers into trance, or the solemn chants of Eleusinian mysteries. Different modes were thought to tune the soul in different ways: one for courage, one for moderation, others for sorrow or for unbridled pleasure. The medieval Church inherited these ideas in a modified form through Boethius and others, developing the system of Gregorian church modes. By naming the ecclesiastical scales after Greek modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, etc.), they implicitly acknowledged that music has spiritual effects. Modes became associated with sacred or emotional atmospheres: for example, “Lydian” chants were often jubilant; “Phrygian” chants, with their flat second note, carried an eerie, plaintive quality. Composers like the 12th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen exploited these modal colors for spiritual ends. Hildegard – a visionary abbess, poet, and composer – wrote music of unprecedented expressive range for her nuns. In her cycle of chants honoring Saint Ursula and the 11,000 virgin martyrs, Hildegard chose the mode that we call Phrygian (the 2nd mode) for several pieces . To modern ears, the Phrygian mode has an “oriental,” byzantine, otherworldly tinge – it feels slightly unstable, as if yearning or grieving. For Hildegard, telling the story of Ursula’s mass martyrdom (a brutally violent and yet spiritually triumphant tale), this mode was apt. It clothed the narrative in an archaic, exotic aura, perhaps to evoke the ancient battlefield of faith on which Ursula stood. Hildegard’s sequence “O Ecclesia” is a striking example. It recounts in symbolic poetry the fate of Ursula, a Christian princess who, with her company of virgins, was slaughtered by pagan Huns near Cologne after refusing to renounce her faith. This grisly subject – arrows piercing virgins’ hearts, blood and sanctity intermingling – is transfigured by Hildegard into a mystical meditation. And the sound of that meditation is rooted in a low drone and the winding Phrygian melody above it. In a contemporary interpretation by the early music ensemble “Graindelavoix“ male voices hold a nasal bourdon (drone) – perhaps on a single “modal final” note – while female voices (or soloists) spin out melismatic lines that float above . The effect is hypnotic and intense. The drone is like the earth or the Church – immovable, firm. The melodies rising above are like the souls of the martyrs ascending in ecstasy even as their bodies fall. The Phrygian modality, with its lowered second scale degree, injects a sense of solemn tension, a gravity that never quite resolves – fitting for a story that, in worldly terms, did not have a happy ending, yet in spiritual terms was a great victory. The musical mode becomes a vector of meaning – emotional, spiritual, even political. When Plato warned that the wrong music could trigger social chaos, he implicitly acknowledged music’s political vector. Jump to centuries later: Hildegard’s music, composed within cloister walls, may not be overtly political, but it is profoundly social and spiritual. By invoking the “extatic” Phrygian colors, she aligns the suffering of Ursula with the ecstatic suffering of Christ, with the holy madness of martyrdom. Music can be bliss, but it can also be weaponry. The ancients knew this well, and so do modern governments (consider the use of loudspeakers, sirens, or even “sound cannons” for crowd control). The line between religious ecstasy and sonic violence is intriguingly thin. Let’s venture into the realm of speculation and myth, where sound becomes an almost supernatural force – both creative and destructive. The Bible is an excellent source of such sonic lore. We find in its pages a series of episodes that could be compiled into a veritable history of sacred sonic warfare. For example, consider: The Fall of Jericho: Joshua’s army was instructed to march around the walled city blowing shofars (ram’s horn trumpets) for seven days. On the final day, with a great blast and shout, the mighty walls of Jericho miraculously came tumbling down. In military terms, it was psychological warfare; in spiritual terms, it was sound as the hand of God. (Fascinatingly, modern acousticians and mythologists alike have speculated: was this story a memory of some real sonic effect, or purely metaphor? Either way, Jericho stands as a symbol of sound overpowering the physical world.)

Mount Sinai Revelation: When Moses brought the Israelites to Sinai to receive the covenant, the mountain was engulfed in cloud and thunder – and notably, a “loud trumpet blast” rang out from the heavens, growing louder and louder, causing the people to tremble in fear . This unearthly shofar sound is depicted as the very voice of God’s presence, instilling terror and awe to prepare the people for the divine law. Here, sound mediates between the mortal and the immortal, literally shaking humans to their core as a prelude to spiritual transformation.

The Trumpets of Apocalypse: In the New Testament’s Book of Revelation, seven angels blow seven trumpets, each unleashing a cosmic catastrophe – from hail and fire to falling stars and plagues. The apocalyptic trumpet is the ultimate megaphone of God, a signal that announces world-shattering events. Again, sound is more than symbol; it is an active agent of change (or destruction) in the fabric of reality. Such stories highlight what we might call the “megaphonic power” of sacred sound: when deployed in ritual or mythic contexts, a loud sound (a trumpet blast, a chorus, an organ chord) becomes a channel for divine or cosmic force. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben notes how aesthetic experiences can produce a kind of “holy terror” – an awe so deep it’s indistinguishable from dread . The biblical trumpets exemplify this holy terror: they are beautiful in their purpose and terrifying in their effect. This duality – ecstasy and dread entwined – is at the heart of many religious sound traditions. It’s not only Western or biblical culture that links sound with power and ecstasy. Think of the Dionysian rites in ancient Greece – frenzied music (pipes, drums, clashing cymbals) driving maenads into states of possession. Or the Sufi ceremonies with their droning chants and dizzying repetition, designed to induce trance and communion with the divine. Everywhere, we see a pattern: drone, rhythm, and high volume are age-old tools to alter consciousness. They can be used benignly – to heal, unify, or bring spiritual visions – but they can also overwhelm and subjugate. Sound can flood our sensory field, bypassing rational defenses, which is why it can be used to sway crowds or even incapacitate. (Modern scientists have experimented with infrasonic frequencies that cause anxiety or nausea – a grim techno-echo of the walls of Jericho.) One modern thinker-artist who explores this is Steve Goodman (aka Kode9) in his book Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear. Goodman writes about Gregory Whiteheads 2004 BBC radio essay, which dubs the Jericho story “Project Jericho” – framing it as the first known use of sound as a weapon . It’s a startling lens: reading ancient myth as a military R&D case study. While this might be tongue-in-cheek, it underscores a serious point: loud, immersive, or infrasound has a physiological impact. At certain intensities, sound is a physical force, not just a metaphorical one. Now, let’s relate this back to the organ and architecture. A Gothic cathedral with a full organ and choir in blast is perhaps the closest pre-modern Europe got to a sonic weapon. Envision a medieval feast day: the organ’s pipes roar, the bells in the towers peal, a hundred voices chant – for an uninitiated peasant entering from the quiet outside, it must have been overwhelming, a shock-and-awe for the soul. But unlike a weapon aimed to harm, this sonic onslaught was meant to annihilate the ego, to humble and uplift simultaneously. I often think of it as a kind of benign bombardment: the stone walls quake with alleluias, the floor rumbles with pedal tones, your chest vibrates, your ears ring – and ideally, your spirit yields, your heart opens. In that state, it is believed that the sacred terror can seep in deeply. Consider the term “immersion” — now used positively in contexts like immersive art or immersive sound. Its Latin root, immergere, means ‘to plunge into’ or ‘to dip deeply.’ It comes from in- (into) and mergere (to sink or submerge). The word once evoked the act of being fully enveloped — in water, in darkness, in mystery — and still carries that sense of surrender into something vast and overwhelming. To be immersed in sound is to be bathed, even drowned in it. Many religious rituals symbolically “sacrifice” the individual self to achieve communion – through fasting, dance until collapse, or indeed through being immersed in overwhelming sound. The shouts at Jericho, the trumpets at Sinai, the organ thunder at Easter Vigil – all involve a kind of surrender: walls fall, people tremble, congregants weep. This is sacred violence in a peculiar sense: not violence against so much as violence within – a breaking of ordinary boundaries. Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote about the Apollonian vs. Dionysian principles in art – the orderly, rational, measured (Apollonian) versus the chaotic, ecstatic, boundary-dissolving (Dionysian). He held that Greek tragedy was powerful because it united both: the beautiful form with the intoxicating content. I propose that the organ in a cathedral is a Dionysian machine operated for Apollonian ends. The architecture and liturgy provide the strict form (Apollonian structure), but the sound itself – especially at its peak – unleashes Dionysian ecstasy. When the two principles unite, as Nietzsche dreamt, the result is transformative. The listener may be carried to a state of holy rapture, a “sacred psychosis” as it were – not in the sense of true mental illness, but a temporary stepping outside oneself, an exalted madness that the Greeks would have seen as divine inspiration. The organ’s droning foundations, the repetition of chants or chords, the intensifying registrations – these are tools to induce trance, to transport the mind beyond the here and now. The themes explored throughout this discussion are embodied in the original organ composition, Virgo. Drawing on the historical and theoretical contexts outlined above, the piece incorporates techniques such as sustained bourdon tones, heavy reed registrations, and the evocative use of the Phrygian mode. Additional elements include dense tone clusters and the intentional creation of “Schwebungen” (subtle phase beating) through partially engaged organ stops. In this way, Virgo serves both as a reflection on the organ’s enduring legacy and as an artistic experiment in the continuing possibilities of acoustic and spiritual experience.

Selected drawn reports for Life, produced between 1937 and 1961: the Cold War, spectacular trials, media hype. Life, July 26, 1937
: American Regionalist Thomas Hart Benton, later known as Jackson Pollock’s teacher, took on the role of reportage artist in Michigan. In brush-and-ink sketches for Life, he depicted what he labeled “menaces to democracy”: communists, strikers, and Nazi sympathizers. The drawings reflect both the Depression-era tensions and Benton’s mix of satire and alarmism. Life, October 24, 1949
: William Sharp sketched the Smith Act trial of eleven Communist Party leaders in New York. All were sentenced to prison, in a case that marked the beginning of Cold War anticommunist prosecutions and foreshadowed the McCarthy era.
 Sharp, born Leon Schleifer in Vienna, had fled Europe in 1934 after his antifascist caricatures made him a target. In the U.S. he worked as illustrator and courtroom artist for Life, Esquire, and other magazines. Life, October 3, 1955
: Reportage drawings by Franklin McMahon from the Emmett Till trial in Sumner, Mississippi. The 14-year-old Till had been lynched and murdered; two white defendants were acquitted after a short deliberation. With photography banned, McMahon’s sketches document witnesses, jury, and the courtroom scene. Months later, the acquitted men openly admitted their crime in a magazine interview. Life, November 7, 1955: 
Ronald Searle drew the Geneva Conference of the Big Four foreign ministers—Dulles, Macmillan, Molotov, Pinay—at the Palais des Nations. The meeting followed the summer summit and raised hopes for détente, but produced little beyond symbolism. Searle’s sketches register the setting and the delegates in session. Life, October 31, 1960
: Ronald Searle followed the U.S. presidential campaign between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. His drawings reduce the race to sharp caricatures: Kennedy with a towering quiff, Nixon with rigid gestures, the campaign trail as a sequence of rallies, bars, and TV images. Life, June 30, 1961: 
Ronald Searle reported from Jerusalem as Adolf Eichmann faced trial. His drawings did not aim at sober accuracy; with a nervous, almost grotesque line, Searle caught Eichmann’s bureaucratic gestures and the courtroom ritual. The result is a precarious balance between documentation and caricature.

Decades before the French Revolution, the Enlightenment witnessed an outbreak of national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm whose force, as cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder observed, resembled the epidemic arrows that open Homer’s Iliad. Alexander Roob’s image-text essay traces this attraction to a newly discovered “primitivist” Homer – from the cult surrounding his Nordic counterpart Ossian to the titanic attempt to surpass Homeric classicism in The Messiah, the epic work of Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, the first literary superstar of the German language. This volume offers the first in-depth examination of Klopstock’s considerable influence on the visual arts of his time, while also broadening the view to the international context of early Romanticism – particularly Klopstock’s reception among the circle of Fuseli, Flaxman, Blake, and Hayley. The lack of such a study can also be explained by the consequences of the Austro-Prussian dualism, since Klopstock’s cultural orientation toward Vienna meant that an informal Klopstock gallery – developed there in the spirit of Fuseli’s Milton Gallery – remained largely ignored in Austrian archives.  Alexander Roob: Die Pfeile des wilden Apollo. Klopstockkult & Ossianfieber,                                                                 Art Collections of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with a prologue by Sabine Folie Textem Verlag, Hamburg 2025 248 pages, €32.00

I Classic / Anti-Classic

Decades before the French Revolution, a culture of intoxicating affects burst into the heyday of the Enlightenment, increasingly boosted by national-mythical and folkloristic enthusiasm. The cultural philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder compared its impact to the epidemic projectiles that marked the beginning of Homer’s battle epic Iliad. Terms such as the ‘Age of Sensitivity’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’ do not sufficiently characterize this long phase of transgression and alienation from the model of an allegedly rational antiquity. Laocoön, a late graphic by the English painter-poet William Blake, programmatically reflects this departure from Classicism. Its clearly contoured world of shapes merges with a vague organism of writing, an auditory space of angry, tattoo-like slogans that open up a provocative, counterfactual approach to ancient history: The artistic magnum opus of Greek antiquity and the ideal of a Classicist view of art is nothing other than the copy of a Hebrew original, an adaptation of prehistoric Christian symbolism whose meaning is twisted; the serpent battle of the Trojan Apollo priest and his two sons is in truth an allegory of the Fall of Man. Blake counters the physical body cult of antiquity with the spiritualistic corpus of Christ as a collective space of imagination, in which the physical eye is nothing and vision is everything. With its anti-capitalist rage, the work from the late 1820s is already a swan song to the escapism of the high Romantic period and at the same time an outlook on the early-socialist messianism of the burgeoning workers’ movement.

The historical perspectives that Herder and Blake had on the culture of angry Apollo function as a continuous companion through the exhibition, while the students’ current commentaries engage more intensively with individual aspects. The latter ones are published in the exhibition booklet, which is also available for download.   II Elysium is not. The Messiah. A Heroic Poem Paintings Gallery

Since the mid-18th century, the break with French-influenced Classicism of the Enlightenment and the absolutizing of art as a quasi-sacred and socially transformative force had been associated throughout Europe with the largely forgotten name of the Saxon poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. With the frenetically celebrated partial publication of his grand epos The Messiah. A Heroic Poem in 1748, the young theology student rose to become the first superstar of German-language poetry. His titanic endeavour to supersede the Old Testament epos Paradise Lost by the leading English poet John Milton with a dramatization of the Christian story of salvation appealed not least to a new national and cultural self-awareness.

Klopstock as an icon of Art Religion (Kunstreligion). The engraving after a painting commissioned by the French ambassador from the Hamburg painter Hardorff in 1827, which later became part of the collection of the Musée de l’Histoire de France in Versailles, is evidence of the poet’s enduring popularity in France, even during the Restoration and the July Monarchy.

The Messiah replaced Milton’s grim puritanism with the vision of an eschatological universal salvation. The work reversed basic rules of the classical epic and wrested a modern expressive quality from the stilted German language. Instead of a dramatic narrative flow and graphic vividness, he featured introspection and exaltation as well as a difficult to comprehend, polyperspectival narrative construct that, as acosmic delirium, incessantly oscillated between different astral planes, while simultaneously remaining stuck in time like a liturgical drama. Up to its completion in 1773, the pietistic monumental opus involved the author and the readers in an almost 30-year spiritual exercise based on the possibilities of the transfer and intensification of affects. The Klopstock frenzy was omnipresent and could also be found at the centre of the manic suicidal world that his follower Johann Wolfgang von Goethe created in his debut novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Afterwards, it was his collaborator Friedrich Schiller—in later years also a renegade of Klopstockianism—who explicitly warned against the poet’s morbid influence which was liable to corrupt the young. However, the critique of Weimar Classicism failed to recognize the community-forging aspects of a poetry that was anything but remote from daily life and bodiless, and tended towards a ritual Gesamtkunstwerk. The flow of free rhythms was to be read aloud and experienced together—Klopstock also stood at the beginning of the modern poetry reading—and the choruses of his pieces were to be ceremoniously intoned and danced, like in a Greek tragedy. For him, musical art, especially singing, was the highest realization of an aesthetic that sought to penetrate into an emotional deep layer that visual art could not access. Who ever cried when looking at a painting or sculpture? So he obviously sought the collaboration with composers, many of whom were inspired by him. The Klopstock cult had the effect of a catalyst in the early days of Weimar Classicism and later affected Beethoven und Schubert. 150 compositions after his poems by 45 composers are known merely from the time until 1800.

What is surprising, though, is that despite his disparaging of the sense of sight, he also made considerable efforts to have his Messiah visualised. [1]At first, the publisher forced him to work with illustrators, but after initial negative experiences, he made the selection himself and engaged with the social function of visual art and the limits of what can be depicted. Although he considered painting an elitist feudal relict and his ideal was auteur graphics accessible for broader strata of society, he set his hopes on two leading proponents of history painting for a long time. After Angelika Kauffmann, following several attempts, capitulated in the face of the poet’s increasing demands and limitations, he gave free rein to Heinrich Füger for the illustrations. The director of the Viennese Academy regarded the grand epos as a worthy subject for completing his lifework and in 1797 created a cycle of 22 illustration sketches for the complete edition of the Messiah. In addition, he did 20 paintings with almost the same format, which he made accessible to the public for many years in the Messiah room of his studio. Only five of these paintings survived the bombings of the Second World War, some were severely damaged. Their rather sketchy character and the executions of the illustration drafts at around the same time give rise to the presumption that from the outset he had also planned an execution in a representative format that could compete with the paintings of a Milton Gallery that Heinrich Füssli had announced with a great deal of advertising in London.

The Swiss literary critic and painter-poet Füssli, who was ten years older and a student of the Zurich Milton translator and outstanding Klopstock mentor, Johann Jakob Bodmer, had retained his early enthusiasm for the poet of the Messiah after moving to London, where he advocated for his literary idol, among others things, with translation samples of his own. It was Füssli’s colleague William Blake who ultimately accepted the national challenge by the German Milton and with his image-poetic Albion cycle (1797 – ca. 1820) presented a national-mythical and depth psychological, essentially anti-puritan engagement with Milton’s Paradise Lost and the history of revelation, whose multi-voiced, oratory-like character and extreme temporal interrelations bore clear signs of the efforts to outdo the German Messiah.

Heinrich Füger’s conception of Klopstock’s Messiah, which oscillates between inwardness and Füssli-like heroism, was inspired by Richard Westall’s illustrations for Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, which had been previously published in a three-volume edition of Milton’s complete poetic works.

Blake´s efforts were driven not only by the example of Füssli, who alongside poetic imitations already at an early stage dealt with illustrating the Messiah commissioned by Klopstock, but also by the cult surrounding the German opus pursued by his most important patron, the Milton biographer William Hayley. Among Klopstock’s English admirers was another close friend of Blake, the graphic artist, sculptor and spiritist John Flaxman, with whom Klopstock established contact just a few years before his death. He had identified in Flaxman’s style of emblematic brevity a quality of translation that corresponded to his own poetic ideal of omission and allusion: In a good poem, the wordless must wander about ‘like the gods in Homer’s battles, who are longed for only by a few’.[2] After he fell out with Füger because of his conventional illustrations, which did not even shy away from a theatrical depiction of God, Klopstock built his last hopes on Flaxman, albeit to no avail, for he was already overburdened with commissions.

Following Klopstock’s death in 1803, his works attracted a new kind of attention and, under the impression of the Napoleonic occupations, also took on an increased identity-forging function. In Rome, Füger’s master student Josef Abel responded to the news of Klopstock’s death by conceiving a large-scale group painting depicting the deceased poet entering Elysium, the realm of the blessed in Greek mythology. The documentary ambition of a portrait gallery of classical poetry and the obvious references to the two Roman Parnassus frescos by Raphael and Anton Raphael Mengs as the two founding documents of the Classicist painting tradition suggest that it must have been far more than an obituary, even if it’s subject was a national bard, who was venerated in an especially lasting way in the Habsburg territories of the Old Empire.

While in the Parnassus frescos of Raphael and Mengs, Apollo as an individual figure was at the centre of the composition, Abel’s painting involved a confrontation. In the preliminary sketch (Klopstock’s Arrival in Elysium, National Gallery Prague), the tensional atmosphere of the encounter between the new arrival and Homer, the patriarch of antique poetry, is expressed better than in the damaged final version (Klopstock Among the Poets in Elysium, Belvedere,Vienna). What is decisive, however, is what the painting does notshow: its immediate future horizon alluded to by Klopstock’s forwards pressing posture, by the messianic victor’s palm and the newrevelation in his hands. His entry into Parnassus as the antique centre of Elysium will extinguish the painting’s entire classical reference system in the very next moment. ‘Elysium is not’, is stated in the Messiah. Thus, the painting is headed for its own annulment and, with regard to this implicit drasticness, was comparable to Blake’s recoding of the Laoco.n group. And even more: by evoking an art in the sublimity of the unrepresented, which, according to Klopstock, was primarily intended to serve the Christian religion, the antique idyll also proved to be a central programmatic image at the epochal threshold to Romanticism.[3] After Abel’s return to Vienna, his implicit programme was to be implemented by Füger’s next generation of students in Rome, the Brotherhood of St Luke, which opposed the Classicist orthodoxy of the Vienna Academy and had been founded by the fervent admirers of the Messiah. The work had a further dimension, however, that correlated with Klopstock’s second demand on art of the future and was absolutely un-Nazarene. It can be discerned when reading the motif in the context of a popular series of graphics of political Elysiums, which began in 1782 with an honouring of deceased Rousseau and his elysian encounter with Plato and his Politeia and then switched to state-dynastic contexts with representations of Frederick II (Berlin 1788) and Josephs II (Vienna 1790).

The fact that Klopstock’s transfer to Elysium against this backdrop was not only on a par with imperial apotheoses, but even surpassed them with its pompous historical format, was entirely in keeping with the proud self-image with which the poet had presented himself to the imperial court during his lifetime. With his cultural-political so-called ‘Viennese Plan’, which he had addressed to the liberal Joseph II, he advocated unitary state demands and the enforcement of artistic autonomy and creative freedom. What points to the fact that Klopstock in Elysium, in times of an imminent new conception of the notion of the empire, could be understood as an appeal to the conservative successor of Joseph II, is the large number of depicted persons associated with the idea of republican liberty: Klopstock himself, who was an honorary citizen of the French National Assembly and with his political odes stood for the beginning of interventionist poetry in the German language; John Milton, the best-known apologist of freedom of speech and of the press; Pietro Metastasio, a librettist of republican opera topics; and the revolutionary Italian dramatist Vittorio Alfieri. In 1811, Füger, then the director of the imperial painting collection, was able to successfully endorse the acquisition of Abel’s programmatic painting.After the post-Napoleonic restorative turn, however, a commission to paint his large Messiah cycle did not materialise. A subsequent Messiah cycle by the late Nazarene Leopold Kupelwieser, a close friend of Franz Schubert, was created for the private devotions of Archduke Franz Karl, who was considered very pious.

[1]On Klopstock’s relationship to the visual arts, cf.: Christian Hippe: Superiorität der Dichtung. (2011 / 2013). This dissertation argues from a philosophical and literary perspective and concentrates on the poet’s tense collaboration with his illustrators. Not only does it exclude an examination of his wider influence on visual art, but it also calls into question the relevance of such an endeavour by assuming an ‘almost negligible reference to Klopstock’ (p.24) in this field of visual art. This almost antithetical approach was not taken into account in the conception of the exhibition nor in the composition of the accompanying publications. [2] Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Fon der Darstellung. Drittes Fragment (1779). In: id.: Kleine Prosaschriften. In: Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Abteilung Werke: IX 1. Ed. by Horst Gronemeyer et al., Hamburger Klopstock-Ausgabe. Berlin/ New York, 2019, p. 356. [3] Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: Eine Beurtheilung der Winkelmannischen Gedanken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in den schönen Künsten (1760). In: id., Kleine Prosaschriften, p. 149.

III Blind Visionaries –True Homers Paintings Gallery The dismantling of noble Homer had already begun in the 1730s, in the cultural-anthropological milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment, which was characterised by approaches based on early cognitive science and evolutionary theory. The atavistic portrait bust, which on a self-portrait of the Edinburgh barber and graphical chronicler John Kay fixates the viewers with an hypnotic gaze, reflects a primitivistview of the founder of occidental culture as it was spectacularly expressed in the text An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer (1735) by the Aberdeen literary historian Thomas Blackwell. Blackwell regarded the Iliad and the Odyssey as products of an archaic wandering bard with an historical and ethnographic eye who freely improvised and continued the contents of his epics in ecstatic performances, presumably also under the influence of drugs. The impact that this study had on the soon commencing folkloristic wave, on the enthusiastic investigation of peoples and their traditions, can hardly be overestimated.

The professional barber had made a name for himself as a graphic chronicler of Edinburgh society. His favourite motifs included protagonists of the Scottish Enlightenment such as the essayist Hugh Blair, who was largely responsible for the dissemination of James Macpherson’s Ossianic Songs. As a self-taught artist, Kay recognised an idol of ingenious naivety in the wild homer of Macpherson’s Aberdeen teacher Thomas Blackwell, to whom he made offerings of his painting and hairdressing utensils.

The atavistic Homer as the central subject of a conversation between the painter-poet Johann Heinrich Füssli and his teacher and mentor Johann Jakob Bodmer. The translator of Milton and Homer had already advocated a ‘poetic frenzy’ in his writings at the beginning of the 1720s and was responsible like no other for the literary and artistic impetus of the Sturm und Drang movement. The Enquiry was probably inspired by the thoughts on the origin of a poetic primal language that the Neapolitan cultural philosopher Giambattista Vico had proposed ten years earlier in his universal history The New Science (1725), particularly in a chapter on the ‘Discovery of the True Homer’ that he had added to the second edition of his opus magnum in 1730. As opposed to Blackwell, Vico did not assume that Homer was an historical figure, but an heroic ‘character of the Greek people, inasmuch as they told their histories in song’. The organismic construct of a collective Homer went on to become enormously charged in the course of the Sturm und Drang and the ensuing nationalistic firestorms in the identitarian declinations of the soul of the people, the spirit of the people and the body of the people, and posthumously lent its author the reputation of a pathbreaker of Counter-Enlightenment. But Vico completely ruled out that the civilised human could revert to an archaic state, for he considered the gap between a reflecting, civilized consciousness and the wild, poetic sensitivity of early times, which he compared to the stage of childhood, to be too big. Blackwell, on the other hand, thought it was indeed possible to empathise with a Homeric consciousness, in which sensory impressions connect ‘with the awe of divine presence’ by largely neutralizing reason. At the end of the 1750s, the poet James Macpherson, who was taught in Aberdeen by students of Blackwell, started putting this to the test by immersing himself in a Celtic world at the time of late antiquity, based on written and oral traditions, until he was finally able to bring to light a complete epic cycle, which he attributed to a legendary Gaelic bard named Ossian. This old bard told the history of his people in the face of its imminent demise as a saga of sorrow, trauma and loss. The dark mood of the epos also beguiled Goethe’s world-weary Werther. Ossian displaced vital Homer entirely from his heart, as he confessed to his fiancé. Both were blind, the ancient bard and his Nordic counterpart, and yet they provided, as Goethe’s mentor Herder stressed, two worldviews that could not be more contradictory. ‘With Homer all forms come forward in brilliant light, as under free and clear heaven. Like statues they stand,’ writes Herder. Milton, suffering from old-age blindness, was also praised for his detailed and vivid imagination, which, according to the leading English art theorist Jonathan Richardson in his essay On the Theory of Painting (1715), was superior to all visual art. The Ossianic space, in contrast, indeed appeared unseen in a certain respect. It mainly consisted of repetitive allusions, it was hypnotic, foggy, tactile and essentially acoustic. ‘Let whoever wants to form gods and heroes go to Homer. […] The painter whom Ossian inspires is left to his own imagination’, is Herder’s conclusion.[1]

IV Prospects into Eternity. Wound and Nation Paintings Gallery

The primitivist orientation of the times was not only reflected in the relation to pagan myths, in the need to not only understand but also to feel and enact Homer, but also and quite essentially in the relation to the Christian religion. Huguenot religious refugees, who had formed an apocalyptic ‘Church of the Desert’ in the rough Cévennes in resistance to the Sun King’s troops, shocked modern Enlightenment theologians when they introduced a series of early Christian ecstatic practices, such as prophetic speaking in tongues, prophetic writing in trance and spontaneous healings, to Reformed and radical Pietist circles at the beginning of the century, first in London and then in the territories of the Old Empire. At the same time as Ossian’s Songs were published and fueled early nationalistic trends throughout Europe, William Hogarth, in his graphic Enthusiasm Delineated (1761), registered on a thermometer measuring the degree of revelation a boiling point of this primal Christian excitement. Using the example of a Protestant service, set to the piercing sound of a litany on the blood of Christ, Hogarth, more than a decade before the breakthrough of mesmerism, analysed the interrelations between collective hysteria and techniques of visual and acoustic mass suggestion.

Although Enthusiasm Delineated and the revised version, Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism (1762), addressed the English Methodists, the allusions to Catholisizing image cult, the magical worship of Christ, sacred bloodlust and the orgiastic unleashing of the sexual drive applied much more to the accusations and rumours circulating about their inspirers and awakeners, the German Herrnhuter. The religious community was founded at the end of the 1720s by Nikolaus Graf von Zinzendorf in the Saxon town of Herrnhut, Germany, and established itself a short while later under the name Moravian Church in England as well. Visitors of the London centre included not only the founders of Methodism, John and Charles Wesley and the Swedish apparitionist Emmanuel Swedenborg, who had his first visions of the afterlife there, but also William Blake’s mother, Catherine Wright Armitage, who was among the English members of the Moravians.

Zinzendorf’s sensitive religion of the heart imagined human existence in all its facets as a life in the pleura, the side wound of Christ. At the beginning of the 1740s, a scandalous cult of naiveté developed in the Moravian Church, a Christianity understood in a tribal way, whose fantastic forms of Sacred Heart worships and side wound devotions ritually aimed at departing from the rule of reason. The ecstatic culture of the so-called ‘Sighting Time’ cannot only be explained by the regression to a biblically glorified childhood stage, it also had to do with the proselytising efforts of the count among North American tribes, with whom he acted like a Christian shaman. Among the followers of charismatic Zinzendorf were Herder and his teacher, the enigmatic philosopher of language Johann Georg Hamann, as well as the Swiss pastor, healer and literary figure Johann Caspar Lavater and his young colleague Goethe, who greatly admired Zinzendorf’s naive expressivity and the daring flight of his imagination.[2] Klopstock, on the other hand, who with his Messiah already saw himself exposed to the suspicion of poetic ‘Herrnhuterei’ early on, carefully sought to distance himself from the antinomianism of the count. In reality, he followed him not only as a language innovator and poet of church songs, he also competed with him in terms of the drasticness of a boundless Eucharistic symbolism. The latter mainly applied to his first patriotic theatre play, Hermanns Schlacht (Hermann’s Battle), which he wrote under the impression of Ossianism as a Bardiet, as a ‘tragedy with bard songs’. Klopstock started from the assumption that the British Celts were of Germanic origin and hoped that with the rediscovery of the lost collection of the bardic heroic songs of Charlemagne the Germans would soon be granted a similar find as Macpherson. The neologism Bardiet referred to an imagined, cultic performance practice in which encouraging choral singing allegedly played a leading role. The fact that Klopstock’s Hermann, in his capacity as the redeemer of Germania from the imperial Roman yoke, presented an application of the messianic topos to the national context had already been noted by contemporary critics. By being able to publish his Hermanns Schlacht in 1769 with a strategic dedication to Joseph II, the poet could attribute to him—also with regard to his ‘Viennese Plan’—a comparable role as a redeemer of German culture.

To glorify the victory that Archduke Carl had won over France in the First War of the Coalition, Füger pulled out the essential stops of a Klopstockian-Ossianic national mysticism: the mythical ancestor (here: Rudolf von Habsburg), the national bard, the oak grove, the transcendental drunkenness, and the courage of death that strives for a wound. When in 1784 Angelika Kauffmann was commissioned by the ‘Hermannically’ elevated emperor to create two history paintings of her choice, she opted for the victory celebration from the last act of the Bardiet, a motif that corresponded with the optimistic purport of this homage.[3] Close to two decades later, this theme gained an entirely different topicality due to the French conquests, which Joseph Abel sought to do justice to by overwriting Kauffmann’s operetta-like depiction in a further version of Hermanns Schlacht from 1809 with the new reality of the Wars of Liberation. What could be discerned next to the allusions to mass mobilisation, Landsturm and guerrilla warfare, were the sacred victim symbolism and the erotic cult of blood and wounds that bizarrely permeated Klopstock’s patriotic drama.

Also in 1809, in England, William Blake took up a comparable topos of resistance from early national history under the impression of the Napoleonic threat. In his painterly magnum opus, The Ancient Britons, he evoked the last battle of King Arthur against the Roman occupiers, a constellation that must be considered counterfactual already for the Arthurian 6th century. According to a Welsh tradition, three Britons—Blake claims there were actually four who symbolised the basic forces of man—were said to have emerged unscathed: the dually formed Beautiful man (primal androgynous Apollo-Christ, the Poetic Genius), the Strong man (Hercules) and the Ugly man (Faun, reflecting reason). After being exhibited in London in 1809, the large-format history painting disappeared without a trace; all that has been passed on is a description by the artist which was circulated in all details three years later in the Klopstockian cultural magazine Vaterländisches Museum in Hamburg. It formed the basis of a hypnotic visualisation that a work group of the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart recently used to successfully reimagine the work employing analogue and digital techniques.

Reimagining the lost painting The Ancient Britons by William Blake through hypnotic visualisation. Three Britons, who are actually four and symbolise the basic forces of man, had emerged unharmed from the last battle of the Celtic king Arthus against the Roman occupiers: The two-faceted Beautiful (primordial androgyne Apollo-Christ), the Strong (Hercules) and the Ugly (Faun). Among the fallen was the last of the bards in agony, according to the author in 1809 in a detailed description of the painting.

Ezekiel’s ascent into the visualisation of God’s throne world takes place by means of a vehicle (Hebrew: merkaba) made up of four multiform animal beings (Greek: zoa), which Coronelli conventionally depicts as angels. Modern hypnosis goes back to Franz Anton Mesmer’s healing method of animal magnetism, which had been causing quite a stir since the end of the 1770s, first in Vienna and then in Paris and London. It’s most popular propagandist and practitioner in the German-speaking countries was Johann Caspar Lavater, a close friend of Füssli, who had already made a name for himself with his internationally distributed physiognomy, a largely intuitive, not objective method of character identification according to bodily features, which went on to become responsible for the most ominous typological and racist categorisations. Through his spiritistic and evolutionistic rationales, which Lavater first presented in his multi-volume Aussichten in die Ewigkeit (Prospects into Eternity,1768–1778), the stylistic device of personification as a key element of religious-mythological art experienced a turn from the metaphorical to the psychophysical and occult, which was highly relevant for the culture of Romanticism.

The theologian, poet and magnetic healer Johann Caspar Lavater, a close friend of Heinrich Füssli, was another student of Johann Jakob Bodmer. Lavater became internationally known through his multi-volume opus ‘Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschliebe’ (1775-1778). This occult study on characterisation was accompanied by aphoristic precepts on self-knowledge, some of which achieved pop-cultural fame in William Blake’s free adaptations as Proverbs of Hell.

The ‘cold narrowness’ that Lavater ascribed to Swedenborg’s facial features reflects his ambivalent attitude towards the Swedish spiritualist’s schematic ideas of the afterlife, which he sought to poetise in his own „Aussichten in die Ewigkeit“ (Prospects of Eternity) (1768 – 1778) with ideas such as that of a pantomimic spectral language.

In his poetics of affect transfer, Klopstock already assumed the efficacy of deeply felt imaginations, calling them `fastwirkliche Dinge´ (almostreal things).[4] The separating line to Romanticism was very thin. Sublimated trance techniques, stimulation through opiates and magical as well as spiritualistic practices seemed to make it possible to transform the virtuality of the almost-real without these affective efforts into states that in their holographic intensity corresponded to visionary super-realities, of which biblical prophets such as Ezekiel or the Indian poem Bhagavad Gita gave an account. With the painting Phidias an der Büste des Zeus meißelnd (Phidias Chiselling the Bust of Zeus, 1802), Joseph Dorffmeister, who had studied under Füger during the same time as Abel, dedicated an extremely ambiguous work to this mental formation process. The legendary sculptor of antiquity, whose works only survived as copies, appears here as an imitator. It remains unclear whether he grasps the transcendental original with his transfigured gaze or whether the visualisation does not instead take place inner-acoustically following the guidelines of the speaking Zeus apparition.

Blake, too, understood himself as a copier of imagination. In his scheme of the four forces, as presented in the Ancient Britons, the avatar of this experience of immersion was Christ/Apollo as ‘Poetic Genius’, and his sensor was not the eye but the ear. As in Abel’s Elysium, pictorial art was confronted with the paradox of an orientation that was not anti-pictorial, but consisted of an inversion of visual appearance and thus also implied its own disappearance—without a trace or in archives and depots. ‘Now I understand it’, young Goethe had responded to the accusation of his mentor Herder that ‘everything is gaze’ with him, ‘close your eyes and grope’.[5]

[1] Johann Gottfried Herder: Homer and Ossian [1795]. Translated by John Bealle. In: The Folklore Historian. vol. 20 (2003). [2] 4 Cf. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels. Book IV, Chap. ii, Translated by Thomas Carlyle. London, 1899. [3] The painting later aroused the covetousness of Adolf Hitler, who ordered the painting to be brought from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to Berlin in 1939 for the new Reich Chancellery. After the war, it was long considered lost, but is now believed to be in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. [4] Klopstock, Fon der Darstellung, p. 352. [5]  Letter to Herder in July 1772. In: Briefe Goethes und der bedeutendsten Dichter seiner Zeit an Herder. Ed. by Heinrich Dünter and F. D. von Herder. Frankfurt am Main, 1858, p. 4

V Companionship of the Afterlife. Departure to the Past Exhibit Gallery

The mesmerist influence on the Romantic generation was highlighted ideal-typically by several heads of a book of portraits that Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, a main proponent of the Brotherhood of St Luke, created between 1816 and 1824 in Rome. Their gazes to the afterlife correspond with the magnetised states that his brother Ludwig Ferdinand captured in the portraits of several of his female patients. Ludwig Ferdinand was also a painter and in 1820 had gained access via his acquaintance Friedrich Schlegel to the Viennese circle of mesmerists, where he soon became successful as a talented mesmerist. Alongside the portrait drawings, he also created a painting in 1821 following the instructions of a sleeping woman, which identified her as an effigy of St Cecilia, the patroness of immersive music. The fact that the passed away saint was simultaneously the motif of the last work by the terminally ill St Luke brother Johann Scheffer von Leonhardshoff could indicate a veneration in the circle of the Nazarenes in connection with magnetic practices. Spherical sounds played a key role in Mesmer’s trance induction. He created them himself on a glass harmonica, while Schnorr invited his friend Franz Schubert to accompany him on the piano for a therapy session.

The painting was created after a vision that Countess Lesniowska had while in a trance.

The ideal-typical image of Christ that the Nazarenes put forward against the heroic-antique views of Heinrich Füger was inspired by a supposedly contemporary description of the Messiah in the Letter of Lentulus, a pseudo-epigraphy from the late Middle Ages that had already influenced the depictions of Christ during the Renaissance. Overbeck was familiar with this „Wahre Abbildung unsers Herrn“ (True depiction of our Lord) in the form of a pamphlet that the bookseller and writer Jakob Kaiserer circulated in Vienna in 1806 with a copperplate engraving by Academy student Sebastian Langer.

In 1813, the leading Nazarene Johann Friedrich Overbeck had followed the example of the Klopstockian and former Hainbündler Friedrich Leopold Graf zu Stolberg-Stolberg who with his conversion to Catholicism in 1800 had triggered a veritable wave of conversions in Protestant artistic and literary circles, in which Friedrich Schlegel and Ludwig Ferdinand Schnorr von Carolsfeld also participated.

For Bonaventura Genelli, who had come under the influence of Joseph Anton Koch (centre) in Rome, in his autobiographical retrospective it was not the opposing Nazarenes, but the classicists in the succession of Asmus Jakob Carstens (left) who represented the true art-religious alliance, as they were joined in the afterlife by Saint Luke (left in the background). The glorified Middle Ages that the artists of the Brotherhood of St Luke imagined at the beginning of the 19th century had a remarkable precursor: almost a half century earlier, 12-year-old Thomas Chatterton had beguiled the English public with his Gothic hallucinations. At the end of the 1760s, the son of a sexton, who was fascinated by Ossian, circulated an extensive set of late medieval writings that he had allegedly found in the chests of a remote room of St Mary Redcliff church in Bristol. After his suicide in 1770, the find was to go down in the history of the Romantic period and the Gothic Revival as a brilliant historical forgery. The shock over his suicide grew into an unprecedented idolisation of a youthful genius through the conjunction with the international Werther mania. In Blake’s early Sturm und Drang comedy An Island in the Moon (1784), he appears as a childlike Phoebus-Apollo, whose rising sun of imagination sends not arrows but spurts of urine, causing utter confusion among the somnambulistic moon inhabitants. However, the Middle Ages that Chatterton resurrected through intensive research and the use of opiates as a complex texture of overlapping voices sought to emancipate itself from the ideological narrowness of a feudal society and thus diametrically opposed the regressive vision of the Nazarenes.

Chatterton’s vision of an early enlightened Bristol Gothic can also be understood as England’s antiquarian response to the national-mythical challenge posed by Ossian’s songs, which reclaim both Scotland and Ireland for themselves. But Wales was also represented in the identity competition of Great Britain—by an antiquarian illusionist who even surpassed Macpherson and Chatterton with his multifacetedness and performative consistency. The poet, stonemason, linguist and folklorist Edward Williams from Glamorgan, who was also known under his bardic name Iolo Morganwg, mastered—supported by the effect of the opiate laudanum—all variants of speculative antiquarianism, from meticulous research, to artful forgery, all the way to free mythopoetics. In 1792 he initiated the neo-druidic movement by organising the first modern bard convention. His bardic system of imaginary rites and largely fabricated graphic characters and insignia can be regarded as a precursor of modern roleplay and cosplay.[1] Hence, Williams was active in a similar area of archaic re-enactment as Klopstock with his Bardiets, which, according to the author’s concept, were to be ideally performed outdoors. As a poet and reciter of his own poems, Williams stylised himself as a ‘bard of liberty’ and thus joined the ranks of an international guild of bards that in the context of the French Revolution and with reference to pre-feudal, liberal conditions announced a universal republican dawn—members of the guild included, alongside Klopstock, the Scottish folklorist and ‘Ploughman poet’ Robert Burns and the English songwriter and singer William Blake.

It was William Owen Pughe, the co-editor of Iolo Morganwg’s Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, who had commissioned Blake to paint The Ancient Briton.

Iolo Morganwg’s forgeries also affected Edward Davies’ biblical speculations on Celtic history, which exerted a considerable influence on Blake’s mythopoetics

  VI Wild Apollo. Ossian und the Songs of Ancient Peoples Exhibit Gallery Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian, written in rhythmicized prose, became popular in the German-language region only through the metric translation by the Viennese Jesuit priest Michael Denis, which through the use of the hexameter alone revealed the influence of the poet of the Messiah. Denis himself wrote odes under the bardic pseudonym ‘Sined’ (his name read backwards) in the style of his northern German idol and functioned as his most important agent in the Habsburg region. Herder’s Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a Correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples, 1773), a path-breaking digression on folklore in the form of a fabricated dialogue, did not refrain from criticising Denis’ artful translation, while Macpherson’s version was accepted as a prime example of the superior expressivity of the folk song.[2] The wilder, ‘i.e. the more lively, the freer a people’ are, ‘the wilder, […] the more sensual, lyrically acting’ its songs must be. Their furthest distance to an artificial, high-cultural reflectivity is necessary for ‘the entire miraculous power that these songs possess, the rapture, the driving force, the people’s eternal inherited and sensual singing! These are the arrows of Apollo, with which he pierces hearts and to which he attaches souls and minds!’[3] Who was this wild Apollo, this exuberant vitalistic agent? In Blake’s system, he was included in the figure of Los (Sol / sun read backwards), the embodiment of creativity and the source of revolutionary energy. Herder grasped him as the antithesis of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s interpretation of Apollo of Belvedere as the ideal expression of classical sublimity. [4] In Herder’s opinion, Apollo with his quiver in truth seeks revenge, not transcendence, as described by Homer at the beginning of the Iliad, when his arrows bring an annihilating pest, and therefore, the metaphor of the piercing quality of the ‘Völkische’ as an eternal ‘inherited and sensual singing’ also prophetically resonates with the suggestion of a cyclical devastation.

These folkloristic projectiles were unsurpassed in their sharpness of expression and depth of feeling, but according to Herder, their paths were anything but strictly intentional. With his observation that Ossian and the songs of the peoples were all ‘leaps and bold throws’, he was not only referring to Blackwell’s proposition of the freely improvised, oral background of the Homeric epics, but also to Klopstock’s more recent poems with their ‘harder bardic tone’ of bold leaps and inversions. As an example, he cited Christoph Willibald Gluck’s ode set to music, Wir und sie (We and They, 1766), which was agonistically directed against England and was countered decades later with faecal satire by the British national bard William Blake. [5] The transgressing, experimental approach of Klopstock’s new bard style was expressed programmatically in the so-called skating odes, which after the inner movement of the Messiah addressed an ecstatic body and nature experience of Nordic gods dancing on ice. With the idea that poems could be shaped metrically after the movements on ice, Klopstock placed himself as a poetic lead dancer at the top of a bourgeois-patriotic skater movement. Simple affect transfer turned into an interrelation between body motor skills, word movements and their acoustic resonance in the performance.

What inspired him to this leap from poetics to performance, however, came from the field of graphics, namely, from William Hogarth’s popular aesthetics in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), which along with laying down an ideal beauty curve also contained notions of auto-dynamic lines and the way they appear in space as freely flowing, diagrammatic dance figures. The connection that Klopstock makes in his poem Der Eislauf (Skating, 1764) between his dancing track and the uncontrived lines of an engraver friend already points to his preference for the disguised lineaments of a John Flaxman. The desired illustration of the Messiah by the English graphic artist did not materialise. However, with Joseph Anton Koch there was an excellent artist from the Roman circle associated with the short-lived Classicist Asmus Jakob Carstens, with which Joseph Abel also consorted, who, a few years after the poet’s death, wanted to translate the Messiah ‘in the manner of the Englishman Flaxmann (sic!)’.[6] The project was to commence after the publishing of his Ossian cycle. But the turmoil caused by the Napoleonic Wars thwarted both the printing of his Ossian—only the 37 final drawings in the possession of the Vienna Academy and the 53 preliminary sketches at the Copenhagen Thorvaldsen Museum have survived—and the planned Messiah cycle.

Carstens’ most famous drawing, The Night with her Children (1795), served as the title vignette of an influential scientific treatise on magnetism in 1811. The Night is accompanied by Apollo’s son Asclepius, the god of healing incubation. A few years later, Berthel Thorvaldsen took up Carstens’ motif again in a scuptural tondo.

The Ossianic longing for death found an ideal interpreter in the Mannheim painter and lithographer Simon Petrus Klotz. This artist, oscillating between Classicism and early Romanticism, is also regarded as a pioneer of practice-orientated academic art history, but was restricted in his teaching activities by his unstable mental constitution. He maintained contacts with Carstens’ successors in Rome and created an abysmal version of The Night with its children Sleep and Death in 1811.

Klopstock’s Nordic Apollos were named Tialf or Braga and they did not dance regimented beauty lines but hurricanes in the sky. And their bards, as chthonic descendants of the primal singer Orpheus, did not sing on a clear Mount Parnassus, but—like in Klopstock’s most famous bardic ode Der Hügel, und der Hain (The Hill and the Grove, 1771)—alighted under shady oaks from a forgotten national underworld. The Germanic past remained dark and inaccessible, the bardic collection of Charlemagne untraceable—in marked contrast to the Celtic culture of the Scottish Highlands. Macpherson and his contemporary interpreters were fascinated by the idea that, with the indigenous people of North America, a culture quite comparable with, if not related to, the Celtic tribes of the Highlands could be studied live. ‘The bards of Ossian and the savages in North America have everything in common’, according to Herder.[7]

In his agonistic ode “Wir und sie” (We and they), Klopstock challenged the bards of England by suggesting the superiority of Teutonic poetry and music. Gluck’s unadorned expressivity shows him to be a congenial composer of such works.

Angelika Kauffmann’s famous allegorical motif of the mourning friendship, represented here in a drawing of a Habsburg noblewoman, was based on a portrait of Anne Hunter, with whom the painter was close friends during her time in London. Klopstock hoped that this Scottish connection of Kauffmann’s would help to shed light on the source material of Macpherson’s Ossian poems.

It is documented that Blake also performed his songs himself, and so successfully that the melodies were noted down by music connoisseurs during spontaneous performances in the salon of his patron Harriet Mathew. As there were close connections to Anne Hunter’s Music Salon, it cannot be ruled out that Haydn also heard examples of the Songs of Innocence with the lost melodies there during his London years. The Scottish poetess Anne Hunter (n.e Home), who in London at the beginning of the 1790s worked with Joseph Haydn on an English- language cycle of songs and through this aroused his passion for the Scottish folk song, had borne witness to this Ossianic identification with the heroism of the North American indigenous peoples with her poem Death Song of the Cherokee Indians published as a one-sheet print in 1785. Blake, who during this time participated in the folk movement of ‘Wild Apollo’ with spontaneous performances as a singer-songwriter, felt attached to their spirituality. As with Zinzendorf, who regarded the North American ethnicities as descendants of the tribes of Israel, his identification also took place via the bible. In his manifesto-like picture poem, Marriage of Heaven and Hell (ca. 1790–1793), he had the prophet Ezekiel proclaim that in the unfolding of his genius he saw himself entirely on a par with the visionary practices of the peoples of North America. This identification was made possible not only through wild speculations of esoteric ancient research.[8] As early as 1753, the English bishop Robert Lowth, with his seminal treatise De sacra poesi Hebraeorum (On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews), had already provided surprising, literary-historical access to the prophesies and psalmic songs of the Tanakh, through which Hebrew, Celtic-Germanic and indigenous American bardism, druidism, prophetism and shamanism could be merged to a single, primeval topos.

  [1] It was the co-editor of Edward Williamsʼ Myvyrian Archaiology of Wales, the Welsh language scholar and antiquary William Owen Pughe, who commissioned Blake to paint The Ancient Britons. [2] Herder coined the term Volkslied, folk song, in this essay. [3] Johann Gottfried Herder: Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (1773). In: Herder, Goethe, Frisi, Möser: Von Deutscher Art und Kunst. Einige fliegende Blätter (1773). Ed. by Hermann Korte. Stuttgart, 2014, p. 16f. [4] Cf. Johann Gottfried Herder: Eine ungekrönte Preisschrift Johann Gottfried Herder’s aus dem Jahre 1778. In: id.: Die Kasseler Lobschriften auf Winckelmann. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1963, p. 42. [5] With the poem When Klopstock England defied existing in two different drafts. [6] Joseph Anton Koch: Letter to Georg Friedrich Fischer, Rome, on 3 May 1805. [7] Herder, Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker, p. 19. [8] Towards the end of the 19th century, a wide variety of speculations about an Israeli descent were to become part of the broad nationalist-identitarian current of Anglo- Israelism in Great Britain and the United States.

CS: New Series. A first visual essay in the wake of the Wild Apollo’s Arrows project.  What happened after the Ossianists discovered the descendants of their wild Homer among the North American tribes and Blake identified their shamans as visionary Ezekiels? Lightning strikes a curved thimble in a garden by night.

Too beautiful! The English Gaze on the Rhine
, Mittelrhein-Museum Koblenz, 10 May – 7 September 2025 After the end of the Continental Blockade, the Middle Rhine Valley became a major attraction for English travellers. The exhibition presents paintings, watercolours, prints, photographs, caricatures, and travel objects of this early form of tourism. Central to the popularisation of the Rhine was Lord Byron, who in his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage poetically transfigured the Drachenfels and other sites, thereby establishing a visual tradition that remains influential to this day.

That William Turner – the entrepreneurial painter of speed and light effects, who in the 20th century came to epitomise Rhine Romanticism – is represented here only by a minor work proves to be a gain. It allows attention to shift to a more nuanced and documentary-rich artistic milieu, with works by Clarkson Stanfield, Samuel Prout, James Webb, David Roberts, and Thomas Miles Richardson.

Travel diaries, souvenirs, and John Murray’s Handbooks document the practice of English travel along the Rhine. Caricatures by Eyre Crowe, Thackeray’s assistant, by Richard Doyle, or by Henry Ritter reflect the paradox of the search for seclusion and the simultaneous overcrowding of the valley by English visitors. British communities in Koblenz and Bonn, boarding schools, and Anglican churches illustrate the lasting presence of English residents. The picture is further expanded by early photography – by Cundall, Fleming, and Frith, among others – which revealed the processes of modernisation in the landscape where painting continued to suppress them.

The information-rich catalogue accompanying the exhibition: Too beautiful! Der englische Blick auf den Rhein, ed. by Matthias von der Bank and Silke Bettermann, with contributions by Piet Bovy, Christa Dohmann, Monika Effelsberg, among others, Paderborn: Fink Verlag, 2024, 248 pp., numerous illustrations.

Alexander Roob’s “History of Press Graphics. 1819-1921. The Age of Graphic Journalism” is out now. (Taschen Cologne, Hardcover, 24.6 x 37.2 cm). In over 600 pages, this far-reaching compendium presents press illustration and graphic journalism as a distinct and unique genre and a laboratory for developing avant-garde aesthetics. The images are largely taken from the collection of the Melton Prior Institute. The period during which press graphics were at their most influential lasted for about a hundred years, from the satirical campaigns of William Hone in the late 1810s through until the First World War. After that date, illustration was used less and less often for images printed in newspapers as the result of improvements in photomechanical reproduction techniques. “The collection covers a broad range of news graphics and political and satirical cartoons. Alongside the works of renowned artists such as Jean Cocteau, Juan Gris, and Käthe Kollwitz, the most famous illustrators of the time are also well represented. Thomas Nast, Honoré Daumier, Gustave Doré, and the numerous relatively unknown press graphic artists, the so-called “special artists,” whose work is rediscovered here. Their rich and varied press work is considered not only in connection to the genre and the historical painting of the 19th century but also in its capacity as a pioneering influence on modern art. With striking examples of proto-cinematic narrative thinking, disruptions of the single image space, and daring forays into abstraction, this material is shown to have laid the groundwork for much of the avant-garde artistic expression that followed. The book also explores Vincent Van Gogh’s careful attention to the illustrated press of his time. He was inspired not only by the artistic aspect of it but also by the spirit of social reform that it represented. An avid collector, he owned a large number of press graphics and went so far as to consider it a “Bible for Artists” (publisher’s announcement) Together with “Alchemy and Mysticism. The Hermetic Museum” (Cologne 2006), this museum of exotericism forms the second part of the author’s informal trilogy on the interdependent relationship between inner and outer vision, between enlightenment and counter-enlightenment.

Primal Catholicism / Marian Magic / Evadah / A throw of the dice Primal Catholicism As a graphic practitioner, Richard was a farmer and gardener through and through, one who furrowed lines with sigil-magical ploughs into which he spread evocative seeds, only to have them emerge in the end into a colourful talismanic sea of flowers, someone who planted letters, grafted ligatures and got a wizard´s garden of wild signs in the end that seemed to put themselves into languages and images. In combination with the scant biographical clues, this dense agrarian symbolism inevitably arouses the suspicion that he may have been a farmer in real life as well. On the other hand, the subtlety and the stringency of this symbolism, which would always refer to biblical metaphors and parables, speak less for physical practice but more for a disassociation from the peasant environment, for a mentality to which the confinement and rusticity of the circumstances were alien, perhaps even hated. Such an assumption is underlined by certain combinations of words, for example the frequent use of the paronym pair “trison – prison”. The association of mourning (tristesse) and prison can be associated with the domestic problems researched by the Pétrys, but together with other puns such as the neologism “amourir”, composed of amour and mourir, it may also be seen as symptomatic of a melancholic-gnostic state of mind for which earthly agriculture remains nothing more than a metaphor.

The fundamental question is whether one does justice to the complexity and the graphic and poetic inventiveness of this body of work if one treats it primarily under the aspects of a rustic archaism and an autistic constitution. The art historian Baptiste Brun, for example, considers all efforts to interpret the inscriptions and figures to be a largely futile endeavour, for the coherence of these so-called grimoires would only be an expression of the peculiar mania of their author and in the end such an Art Brut would remain as secretive and mute as Palaeolithic art.[1]  He criticised comparisons with the pictorial poems of the medieval cleric Rabanus Maurus, which the Pétrys had made, as an iconographic comparatism with poor aim, only to place himself Richard’s imaginary world in the vicinity of an Opicino de Canistris, a late medieval mystic who was under psychopathological suspicion.[2] All in all, there seems to be a consensus in Richard´s case, that we are dealing with someone whose oeuvre, for whatever reasons, has fallen out of time. It is not only the hypothesis of a dissociated, solipsistic production that seems to suggest such ahistorical analogies, but even more so the atavistic genre of grimoires itself and its combination with Catholic devotional motifs.  Paradoxically, however, it was precisely this seemingly anachronistic synthesis of Catholic belief in miracles and ritual magic that kept this Lorraine “peasant” at the cutting edge of his time. Indeed, the time of the composition of his books coincides with an exciting phase of transformation in European magic culture, which the British researcher Christopher McIntosh has characterised as a climax in the development of a French Occult Revival, later resulting in the esoteric symbolism of the Fin de Siecle.[3] Pierre Richard was eight years older than Alphonse-Louis Constant aka Éliphas Lévi, with whom this high flight of the occult started. In his two main works Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (1854 / 56) and Histoire de la magie (1860), the outcast cleric had renounced theosophical influences, above all Swedenborg’s reformed spiritualism. He defined the newly coined term “occultism” as the primordial or Ur-Catholicism, i.e. the original and sole true practice of the Catholic faith. In his view, ritual magic was practiced in an ecclesiastical context even up to the end of the early Middle Ages. As proof, he cited Pope Leo III’s Enchiridion, this grimoire, that had served Richard as the starting point and base of his own magical Catholicism. Lévi’s syncretic writings were founded on extensive historical studies, on Christian Kabbalah, interpretations of the Tarot and various Masonic rites. It seems unlikely that Richard had studied them. However, the vigour of his own synthesis of Neoplatonic-Kabbalistic theurgy and Catholic liturgy makes it likely that he was at least aware of the main features of this occult awakening, either through persons close to him or from his own experience. The significant blanks in his biography certainly admit of travelling activities and the possibility of longer absences. The fact that he spoke Patois in his grimoires would not necessarily mean that he was limited to dialects as means of expression. Marian magic Lévi’s appeal for a magical renewal of Catholicism was no mere rhetoric, but was borne out of his own faith in revelation, as was evident from his first publication, written in 1839 while he was still at the seminary. “Le Rosier De Mai Ou La Guirlande De Marie” was an expression of ecstatic Marian devotion and consisted of a series of Marian cantatas and hourly devotions. Among them was the defence of a spectacular Marian apparition of 1830, where the Mother of God had revealed herself to a nun as a conquerer and treader of serpents, first in a ring of stars, then in the apparition of the versal M.[4] At Mary’s instruction, these motifs were to be immortalised onto a miraculous medal. The event and, more importantly, the mass distribution of this medal provided an unexpected boost to Marian devotion, especially in the “other” France shortly after the bourgeois July Revolution. Pierre Richard must have been just as impressed by this as the members of the Dalstein Brotherhood.

The apparition of a salvific insignia had a prominent precursor in the famous Christogram of Emperor Constantin, but in this case it had been the Blessed Virgin herself who had attributed the magical effect to her initial. The example of the miraculous letter of Mary must have provided a new, exclusive access to Sign Magic for occultly interested Catholics. And last but not least, the background of this letter miracle also justified a comparison between Richard’s hierogyphics and the avant-garde Lettrism of the 20th century, as drawn by Francois and Mireille Pétry in their contribution, although in Richard’s case it was a Marian Lettrism, in contrast to the Jewish-cabbalistic connotated Lettrism of an Isidore Isous.[5]  However, the magic of letters seemed to work across epochs. Richard’s animist ABC consisted largely of alterations of the newly revealed Marian M including its references to the Evean V, the Adamic A, the Serpens S and their combinations with the Christogram comprising the letters T (t), X (Chi), R / P (rho) and IHS (in hoc signo).

Boehmist ideas were known in France above all through the translations of the Catholic theosophist and mesmerist Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803), a critic of Masonic theurgy and re-founder of Martinism as a contemplative spiritual path. As demonstrated by the case of the Austrian prophet Jakob Lorber (1800-1864), Boehme’s model also exerted a considerable influence on Catholic mystics at the time Richard’s Magic Books were composed. (Plate XI)

  Evadah The magical interest in the Marian miracle that Richard and Levi apparently had in common, does not yet have to indicate a concrete connection. Far more telling was the common narrowing of the Marian cult with the hermetic ideal of the androyn. But with Levi this association was much less pronounced than with his esoteric role model and teacher, the sculptor, graphic artist and phrenologist Simon Ganneau, who was almost the same age as the “peasant” from Kédange. So if there was any link between Richard and the esotericism of the urban France, it must have consisted more in references to Ganneau, who, in contrast to Constant, also addressed the lower classes.

On the Feast of the Assumption 1838, in the overheated climate of an early socialist millenarianism that had gripped many intellectuals and bohemians in the aftermath of the July Revolution, Ganneau had proclaimed in Paris the dawn of the age of the Great Evadah. Evadaism strove for the cosmic and societal overcoming of all dualities, more precisely: for the uniting of “the Genesis unit Mary-Eve” with the “Genesis unit Christ-Adam”.  As an evidence that he himself lived this nonbinarity, Ganneau wore a skirt alongside his Quaker hat and his prophetic beard and hairstyle, and called himself Mapah, ma and pa combined. Grandville caricatured him in this outfit.

One can imagine this Ganneau as a charismatic artist who, like a Joseph Beuys, spread his holistic teachings with a tremendous sense of mission. He not only attracted many of the tone-setting intellectuals, including the poet Alexandre Dumas and the feminist Flora Tristan, who gathered around his divan in his studio, but also addressed a broad public. He was present on the streets with evadaist leaflets and charts, and sent original artworks to the royal family and to the members of the Chamber of Deputies, where, according to Dumas, they probably ended up unnoticed in the attics. The fact that only one crude woodcut graphic has survived, which appeared on one of his pamphlets, seems indeed to be a testimony to the extremely low esteem in which his art was held. It shows a female-male Janus head complemented in the middle by a Hindu lingam-yoni emblem to form a mythical trinity, an inspiration perhaps for Richard´s frequent motif of the tricephalos.

It is safe to assume that Ganneau’s interventionist art was generally characterised by an explicit rawness, i.e. that it was an early form of primitivism, an Art Brut whose manner was inspired by ethnographic models and whose motifs were based primarily on hermetic emblematics. The latter is suggested by some details in the background of a portrait of the Mapah delivered by his friend the illustrator Charles-Joseph Traviès. In the background of a quite different, parodic portrait by Grandville, one can obtain an impression, albeit a caricaturesque one, of a world of signs that obsessively revolved around the subject of gender duality. (Fig) The famous Baphomet graphic by his former disciple Constant aka Lévi seems to be a kind of compression of this Evadaist symbolism of suspended opposites, albeit under slightly sinister auspices. The Caduceus rod that rose from the genital region of this goat-headed androgyne is echoed in the open 8 of Richard’s name initial, and the rainbow-like circle in the background, Ganneau’s myth of the accomplished Evadah, could be Mzona; – could.

  A throw of the dice If there was anything that characterised Richard’s grimoires apart from their Catholic consistency, it was their hieroglyphic consistency, the transposition of the heterogeneous image-text genre to a level where lettering and pictorial representation became indistinguishable. Richard may have seen reproductions of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, which were widely distributed in the numerous publications that followed Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. Popular grimoires such as “La poule noire” (The Black Hen) recalled the ancient Egyptian provenance of the magic in their legends, and Champollion’s decipherments gradually revealed basic features of the ancient Egyptian cult of the dead.[6]  Richard’s work showed surprising parallels to this Egyptian Book of the Dead in the depictions of vehicles for the dead, the invocations of spiritual guides and other magical preparations for the Last Judgement. However, such influences could only have affected the basic pictorial and ritual conception. Formally, there are no Egyptian echoes whatsoever.

The relations to the pictographic symbolism of the Evadaism, on the other hand, could have been quite different. The chroniclers unanimously refer to Ganneau’s images as hieroglyphics, which would be disseminated via lithographed leaflets and signs that he would call plâtras, chunks of plaster. Little is known about the stylistic range. His imagery, in any case, seems to have been cryptographic in nature as well, for the esoterically versed poet Gerard de Nerval reported that the Mapah also lent them from Cabalistic grimoires.[7]  Probably they also contained neologisms, which were produced by the simplest combinatorics, according to the pattern of Evadah and Mapah. Was Ganneau, then, possibly a model for Richard’s childish sorcery-language? What seems to speak against such a hypothesis of an Evadaist influence, however, is the absence of any social or social-reform impulse in Richard´s books. Ganneau’s hieroglyphics aspired to an upheaval of social conditions. With the February Revolution, for whose outbreak his disciple Constant even held Evadaist agitators on the streets of Paris responsible, he associated the realisation of his harmonious ideal of freedom.  Mary meant an icon of emancipation for him, as well as for Constant. In Richard’s books, reflections of this idea of a Marian Miss Liberty are found at most in a few talismanic depictions in which the Holy Virgin defies her enemies with a determined gaze and huge scimitar at the ready.

Comparable depictions of the Virgin Mary had never been seen before. Overall, the characters of his grimoires left a less than saintly or even devout impression. They looked slightly cunning and rebellious, suspicious like Levi’s Baphomet, a somnambulistic gang up to something, even if it was the Last Judgement. Nevertheless, these magic books could hardly pass for documents of rebellion, revolt or resistance, the characteristics that the publishing house Artulis had taken up, at best they could be regarded as testimonies of survival, of introspection, of fear, in other words, of the preconditions on which the practice of protective magic is based. To the libertarian impulses of the Evadah cult, those resigned features seemed diametrically opposed. In fact, with the suppression of the Europe-wide uprisings in 1849, Ganneau’s movement had come to a depressing end. It was the time when Richard presumably moved from Dalstein to Chemery, only to immerse himself even more intensely in his world of magic. From the example of Constant, one can trace how under the impression of this devastating defeat, the spirit of revolt imploded in an esotericism that cultivated seclusion and retreat as the main spiritual path. Constant’s occult Catholicism of the 1850s bore the resigned signature of the failed androgynous Universal Revolution. But was it also the signature of Richard’s sgrimoires? How far away was the shift from a socialist Evadah to a hermetic Baphomet from pious Lorraine folk magic? In these albums, had there even existed a nonbinary mzona and an andogynous caduceus-8? Every turn of the Arepo mechanism could result in the next moment in a new constellation of the same signs and thus in a revised reading.  Admittedly, the biblical and theurgic connotations were such that basically every combination could touch on the numinous and produce an essential meaning, a circumstance that shortly afterwards some exponents of a symbolist poetry would also take advantage of. So, in the end there would remain not a palaeontological silence, but a mythopoetic and graphic compression that bordered on madness – and the certainty of a throw of the dice.   With sincere thanks to Francois and Mireille Pétry, and Pierrette Turlais of Editions Artulis. Photo credits: Pierre Richard images: Klaus Stoeber, Strasbourg   [1] Cf. Baptiste Brun, « Pierre Richard (1802-1879), Grimoires illuminés », in: Gradhiva [En ligne], 32 | 2021, mis en ligne le 02 avril 2021, URL : https://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/5838 ; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/gradhiva.5838 [2] In both cases, these were works that would reflect forces “that pervade and inform people at a particular time, sometimes at the risk of psychic collapse.”   [3] Cf. Christopher McIntosh, Éliphas Lévi and the French Occult Revival, Albany 1972 [4] Cf. Julian Strube, Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi, Inauguraldissertation, Heidelberg 2015, p. 34 ff. [5] Cf. Francois et Mireille Pétry, in: Pierre Richard (1802-1879): grimoires illuminés. Paris 2019, p. 157 / Cf. Sami Sjöberg, The Vanguard Messiah: Lettrism between Jewish mysticism and the avant-garde, Oldenbourg 2015; Sami Sjöberg,  Mysticism of immanence: lettrism, Sprachkritik and the immediate message, Partial Answers: journal of literature and the history of ideas, volume 11, number 1, January 2013, pp. 53-69. Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, DOI: 10.1353/pan.2013.0002. https://www.academia.edu/2974010/Mysticism_of_Immanence_Lettrism_Sprachkritik_and_the_Immediate_Message. [6] With Karl Richard Lepsius’ “Todtenbuch der alten Ägypter” (“Book of the Deaths of the Ancient Egyptians”), a comprehensive annotated edition had appeared in 1842. [7] Cf. Julian Strube, Sozialismus, Katholizismus und Okkultismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Genealogie der Schriften von Eliphas Lévi, Inauguraldissertation, Heidelberg 2015, p. 257