Faust Without Mephistopheles: The Historical Background of Oswald Spengler’s Philosophy of Science
Faust Without Mephistopheles
The Historical Background of Oswald Spengler’s Philosophy of Science
[Expanded Edition]
By Amory Stern
© 2019, Amory Stern
San Diego, CA
Faust Without Mephistopheles
Growth and Death
Oswald Spengler’s writings on the subject of the philosophy of science are very controversial, not only among his detractors but even for his admirers. What is little understood is that his views on these matters did not exist in a vacuum. Rather, Spengler’s arguments on the sciences articulate a long German tradition of rejecting English science, a tradition that originated in the eighteenth century. Luke Hodgkin notes:
“It is today regarded as a matter of historical fact that Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both independently conceived and developed the system of mathematical algorithms known collectively by the name of calculus. But this has not always been the prevalent point of view. During the eighteenth century, and much of the nineteenth, Leibniz was viewed by British mathematicians as a devious plagiarist who had not just stolen crucial ideas from Newton, but had also tried to claim the credit for the invention of the subject itself.”[1]
This wrongheaded view stems from Newton’s own catty libel of Leibniz on these matters. During this time, the beginning of the eighteenth century, Leibniz’s native Prussia had not yet become a serious power through the wars of Frederick the Great. Leibniz, together with Frederick the Great’s grandfather, founded the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences. Newton’s slanderous account of Leibniz’s achievements would never be forgiven by the Germans, to whom Newton remained a bête noire as long as Germany remained a proud nation.
In the context of inquiring into the matter of how such a pessimist as Spengler could admire so notorious an optimist as Leibniz, two foreign members of the Prussian Academy of Sciences merit attention. The thought of French scientist and philosopher Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, an exponent and defender of Leibnizian ideas, was in many ways a precursor to modern biology. Maupertuis wrote under the patronage of Frederick the Great, about a generation after Leibniz. Compared to other eighteenth century philosophies, Maupertuis’ worldview, like modern biology and unlike most Enlightenment thought, presents nature as rather “red in tooth and claw.”
An earlier foreign member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, a contemporary and correspondent of Leibniz, Moldavian Prince and eccentric pretender to descent from Tamerlane Dimitrie Cantemir, left two cultural legacies to Western history. Initially an Ottoman vassal, he gave traditional Turkish music its first system of notation, ushering in the classical era of Turkish music that would later influence Mozart. Later – after he had turned against the Ottoman Porte in an alliance with Petrine Russia, but was driven out of power and into exile due to his abysmal battlefield leadership – Cantemir wrote much about history. Most impactful in the West was a two-volume book that would be translated into English in 1734 as The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire. Voltaire and Gibbon later read Cantemir’s work, as did Victor Hugo.[2]
Notes one biographer, “Cantemir’s philosophy of history is empiric and mechanistic. The destiny in history of empires is viewed . . . through cycles similar to the natural stages of birth, growth, decline, and death.”[3] Long before Nietzsche popularized the argument, Cantemir proposed that high cultures are initially founded by barbarians, and also that a civilization’s level of high culture has nothing to do with its political success.[4] Thus was the Leibnizian intellectual legacy mixed with pessimism even in Leibniz’s own lifetime.
Goethe Against Numerology
It was most likely in the context of this scientific tradition and its enemies that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, generally recognized as Germany’s greatest poet (or one of them, at any rate), later authored attacks on Newton’s ideas, such as Theory of Colors. Goethe, an early pioneer in biology and the life sciences, loathed the notion that there is anything universally axiomatic about the mathematical sciences. Goethe had one major predecessor in this, the Anglo-Irish philosopher and Anglican bishop George Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Goethe argued that Newtonian abstractions contradict empirical understandings. Both Berkeley and Goethe, though for different reasons, took issue with the common (or at least, commonly Anglo-Saxon) wisdom that “mathematics is a universal language.”
By the early modern age of European history, when Goethe’s Faust takes place, cabalistic doctrines, notes Carl Schmitt, “became known outside Jewry, as can be gathered from Luther’s Table Talks, Bodin’s Demonomanie, Reland’s Analects, and Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum.”[5] This phenomenon can be traced to the indispensable influence of the very inventors of cabalism on the West’s transition from feudalism to modern capitalism since the Age of Discovery, and in some cases even earlier. In 1911’s rigorous study The Jews and Modern Capitalism, Werner Sombart finds that “Venice was a city of Jews” as early as 1152.[6]
Later, the 1492 voyage of Columbus revolutionized Europe’s jurisprudential conception of space, transforming it into an open-ended one. Closed seas gave way to what seemed, at the time, like the virtually infinite ocean. This transition to history’s first global ideas of empire and international law greatly expanded the scope of the Jewish moneylenders, transforming their enterprises from already-powerful medieval underworlds into vital sectors of early modern Europe’s political economies.
Cabalism deeply permeates the worldviews of many influential secret societies of Western history since medieval times, and certainly continuing with the official establishment of Freemasonry in 1717. Although the details will never be entirely clear, it is known that Goethe was involved with the Bavarian Illuminati in his youth. He seems to have experienced conservative disillusionment with it later in life. It is possible that the posthumous publication of Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy was due at least in part to the book’s ambivalently revealing too much about the esoterica of Goethe’s former occult activities.
What is clear is that he was directly interested in cabalistic concepts. Karin Schutjer persuasively argues that “Goethe had ample opportunity to learn about Jewish Kabbalah – particularly that of the sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria – and good reason to take it seriously… Goethe’s interest in Kabbalah might have been further sparked by a prominent argument concerning its philosophical reception: the claim that Kabbalistic ideas underlie Spinoza’s philosophy.”[7]
At one point in the second part of Faust, Goethe shows an interest in monetary issues related to usury or empty currency, as Schopenhauer after him would.[8] This is fitting for a story that takes place in early modern Europe and concerns an alchemist. Some early modern alchemists were known as counterfeiters and would have most likely had contact with Jewish moneylenders. Insofar as his scientific philosophy had a social, and not just an intellectual significance, this desire on Goethe’s part for economic concreteness was perhaps what led him to reject and combat one key cabalistic doctrine: numerology.
Numerology is the belief that numbers are divine and have prophetic power over the physical world. Goethe held virtually the opposite view of numbers and mathematical systems, proposing that “strict separation must be maintained between the physical sciences and mathematics.” According to Goethe, it is an “important task” to “banish mathematical-philosophical theories from those areas of physical science where they impede rather than advance knowledge,” and to discard the “false notion that a phrase of a mathematical formula can ever take the place of, or set aside, a phenomenon.” To Goethe, mathematics “runs into constant danger when it gets into the terrain of sense-experience.”[9]
That numerology is a key tenant of cabalism has been noted by the latter’s critics as well as its proponents. In his well-researched 1927 book on Freemasonry, General Erich Ludendorff remarks, “One must study the cabala in order to understand and evaluate the superstitious Jew correctly. He then is no longer a threatening opponent.”[10] In his proceeding discussion of the subject, Ludendorff then focuses exclusively on the numerological superstitions in cabalism. Such beliefs are affirmed by a Jewish cabalistic source, which informs us that “Sefirot” is the Hebrew word for numbers, which represent “a Tree of Divine Lights.”[11]
Everything about Goethe’s rejection of scientific materialism can be seen as a rebellion against numerology in the sciences – and certainly, the modern mathematical sciences stand on the shoulders of numerology, as modern chemistry does on alchemy. Schmitt once mentioned the “mysterious Rosicrucian sensibility of Descartes,” a reference to the mysterious cabalistic initiatory movement that dominated the scientific philosophies of the seventeenth century.[12] In this Descartes was hardly alone; the entire epoch of mostly French and English mathematicians in the early modern centuries, which ushered in the modern infinitesimal mathematical systems, was infused with cabalism. Francis Bacon, the founder of what is to this day considered “the scientific method,” was a major leader of the Order of Rosicrucians.[13] (Goethe, like another disillusioned Freemason, Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre, disliked Francis Bacon’s teachings.)
Even if it were possible to ignore the growing Jewish intellectual and economic influence on that age of seemingly boundless maritime conquests – and investments – one would still be left with the metaphysical affinities between numerology and even the most scientifically accomplished worldview that takes literally the assumption that numbers are eternal principles.
Sombart remarks of modern state-builders like Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great that “when speaking of these modern statesmen and rulers, we can hardly do so without perforce thinking of the Jews: it would be like Faust without Mephistopheles.”[14] The same may as well be said of modern mathematical doctrines.
According to early National Socialist economist Gottfried Feder, “When the Babylonians overcame the Assyrians, the Romans the Carthaginians, the Germans the Romans, there was no continuance of interest slavery; there were no international world powers… Only the modern age with its continuity of possession and its international law allowed loan capitals to rise immeasurably.”[15] Writing in 1919, Feder argues with the help of a graph that that “loan-interest capital… rises far above human conception and strives for infinity… The curve of industrial capital on the other hand remains within the finite!”[16] Goethe may have similarly drawn connections between the kind of economic parasitism he satirizes in the second part of Faust and what he, like Berkeley, saw as the superstitious modern art of measuring the immeasurable.
Zalmoxis Versus Verjudung
Cabalism attempts to synthesize numerology with empirical science. The fusion of science with numerology, it should be noted, is actually not of Hebrew or otherwise pre-Indo-European origin. It originates from pre-Socratic Greek philosophy’s debt, particularly that of the Pythagoreans, to the northern Indo-Iranian world, chiefly Thrace. The ancient Greek Orphic initiatory religious movement, controversial for its ascetic pessimism and a faith that one scholar shows to have been very heavily borrowed from the Thracians, was a known influence on Pythagorean ideas.[17] The pre-Socratic philosopher Zeno, among others, claimed that Pythagoras plagiarized the Orphics. In his Thracological study, Mircea Eliade analyzes the significance of Herodotus’ skeptical account of Thracian (or “Getic,” after the northern Thracian tribe known as the Getae) cults of the deity Zalmoxis, whom Herodotus held to have been based on a real historical figure:
“The account is consistent: The Hellespontine Greeks, or Herodotus himself, had integrated what they had learned about Zalmoxis, his doctrine, and his cult into a Pythagorean spiritual horizon. That the Hellespontine Greeks, or Herodotus himself, had done this for patriotic reasons (how could such an important doctrine possibly have been discovered by barbarians?) is not important. What is important is that the Greeks were struck by the similarity between Pythagoras and Zalmoxis. And this in itself is enough to tell us what type the doctrine and religious practices of the cult of Zalmoxis were. For the interpretatio graeca permitted a considerable number of homologations with Greek gods or heroes. The fact that Pythagoras was named as the source of Zalmoxis’ religious doctrine indicates that the cult of the Getic god involved belief in the immortality of the soul and certain rites of the initiatory type. Through the rationalism and euhemerism of Herodotus, or his informants, we divine that the cult had the character of a mystery religion. This may be the reason why Herodotus hesitates to give details (if – which is not certain – his sources had informed him); his discretion in regard to the mysteries is well known. But Herodotus declares that he does not believe the story of Zalmoxis as the slave of Pythagoras; on the contrary, he is convinced that the Getic daimon was by far the earlier of the two, and this detail is important.”[18]
Of note and perhaps ironic in this regard is that Schopenhauer admired the Thracians for their arch-pessimistic ethos, as though this mindset were the polar opposite of the world-affirming Jewish outlook he loathed.[19] Taking into account the Thracian belief in the immortality of the soul and that of the body as a prison, concepts that the more body-bound and anthropomorphically-minded Greeks found both disturbing and intellectually invigorating, this opposition makes sense. But though the antagonism between the Jewish and Thracian spirits is not in itself a contradiction, in the context of the subject under discussion, it presents a puzzling paradox. It points to something enigmatic and contradictory in the history of numerology and mathematical theory. How and why did the underlying ethical and spiritual content of traditional European numerology change so dramatically throughout the centuries, from its inception in the dour Thracian cult of Zalmoxis to the rise of will-embracing Jewish Kabbalah? It would be a difficult but rewarding task to conduct an exhaustive study of the subversion of Western numerology through the ages. Economic occult forces would be revealed. In the process, modern mathematical systems, and their effects on political economy, would themselves perhaps be reassessed.
Yet it doesn’t require painstaking research, but only an observation of the phenomena, to behold how the character of numerology changed throughout the course of European history. With every great revolutionary event since the 11th century, the century of the Schism of Christendom and in Spengler’s system the beginning of the “Faustian” style, the underlying spiritual direction of the numerological arts moved away from the foundational Thracian ethos toward the Jewish one. Western mathematical thought firmly belongs to the latter by the 17th century, the age of Rosicrucianism.
In this way, through historical and cultic forces – namely the Exploration Age and the rise of Rosicrucianism – numerology’s original spiritual meaning became inverted. It was turned upside down, from an aloof world-denying worldview, in Schopenhauer’s sense, into one of optimistic sophism. Incidentally (or not), financier classes thrive on the latter.
And yet, numerological assumptions remained in many ways the same in form, if certainly not in content. Lines have sometimes been drawn by historians from the Thracian influence on Greek philosophy to modern science. One obvious, if uncited, influence on Spengler’s work blamed this phenomenon for the destruction of the anthropomorphic ancient Greek idea of beauty.
In The Foundations of the 19th Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain goes farther than Nietzsche, who had argued that Socratic philosophy was the ruin of Greece. Chamberlain argues that philosophy itself was the downfall of Greece, because the Greek calling was in art, as represented to its fullest potential by Homer. Impressively, for an English Germanophile writing in 1899, Chamberlain is aware that so much of what was unprecedentedly revolutionary in Greek philosophy came from the Thracians. (To this day, few people outside of some parts of Eastern Europe know that.) Chamberlain is not the complete racial determinist of the black legend surrounding his reputation, because he notes (again, correctly) that the Thracians were closer to the “Teutons” and less mixed than the ancient Greeks were; nevertheless, he criticizes the cultured Greeks for borrowing the less cultured Thracian superstitions and being untrue to the Homeric national form of the “Hellenes.” Rhapsodizes Chamberlain at one point in The Foundations of the 19th Century:
“O Hellenes! if only you had been true to the religion of Homer and the artistic culture which it founded! If you had but trusted your divine poets, and not listened to your Heraclitus and Xenophanes, your Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of them! Alas for us who have for centuries been plunged into unspeakable sorrow and misery by this belief in daemons, now raised to sacred orthodoxy, who have been hampered by it in our whole intellectual development, who even to this day are under the delusions of the Thracian peasants!”[20]
This analysis is accurate where form is concerned, but it neglects much in terms of content. Thraco-Greek mathematical ideas were empirical and finite. Spengler’s analysis of Classical science, even if sometimes exaggerated, demonstrates quite well the closed nature of the ancient Greek mathematical systems. The medieval-to-modern West, “Faustian Man,” by contrast thinks in the infinitesimal systems introduced in the early modern centuries for the reasons mentioned above (although Spengler argued that the Gothic cathedrals of the eleventh century already represented precursors to infinitesimal mathematical thought). The Thraco-Hellenic model of mathematics is an archetype of grimly heroic acceptance of death, while the Judeo-Faustian one is an archetype of the myth of eternal life – a myth most useful to any economy based on loans and debt.
In any case, Goethe recognized the intrusion of numerological myths and superstitions into the physical sciences as a powerful weapon. A weapon, he perceived, with the potential to ruin nature. That he studied numerology has been established by scholars.[21]
Goethe’s Influence
A generation before Goethe, Immanuel Kant had propounded the idea that the laws of polarity – the laws of attraction and repulsion – precede the Newtonian laws of matter and motion in every way. This argument would influence Goethe’s friend Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, another innovator in the life sciences as well as a key pioneer of the literary and philosophical movement known as Romanticism. By the time Goethe articulated his anti-Newtonian theories and led a philosophical milieu, he had an entire German tradition of such theories to work from.
Goethe’s work was influential in Victorian Britain. Most notably, at least in terms of the scientific history of that era, Charles Darwin would cite Goethe as a botanist in On the Origin of the Species. Darwin’s philosophy of science, to the extent that he had one, was largely built on that of Goethe and the age of what came to be known as Naturphilosophie. Historian of science Robert J. Richards has found that “Darwin was indebted to the Romantics in general and Goethe in particular.”[22] Darwin had been introduced to the German accomplishments in biology, and the German ideas about philosophy of science, mainly through the works of Alexander von Humboldt.[23] (The latter was a Prussian traveler, geographer, and cosmological theorist who also influenced 19th century American poetry, from the Transcendentalists to Edgar Allan Poe.[24])
Why has this influence been forgotten? “In the decade after 1918,” explains Nicholas Boyle, “when hundreds of British families of German origin were forcibly repatriated, and those who remained anglicized their names, British intellectual life was ethnically cleansed and the debt of Victorian culture to Germany was erased from memory, or ridiculed.”[25] To some extent, this process had already started since the outbreak of the First World War, if not even earlier.
Heroic Science in Spengler’s The Decline of the West
Britain’s intellectual ethnic cleansing would not go unreciprocated. In 1915’s Händler und Helden (Merchants and Heroes), German economist and sociologist Werner Sombart attacked the “mercantile” English scientific tradition. Here, the author is particularly critical of what he calls the “department-store ethics” of Herbert Spencer, but in general Sombart calls for most English ideas – including English science – to be purged from German national life.
In his writings on the philosophy and historiography of science, Spengler would answer this call. The first volume of The Decline of the West was written mostly during the First World War, although some of it was conceived even before that. It was first published in 1918.
Sombart had argued, citing a line by the great poet Friedrich Schiller, that from the perspective of the “heroic” worldview, “life is not the highest value.” Spengler expanded this sensibility to the sciences. Everything written on philosophy of science in The Decline of the West seems to advocate the heroic, soldierly acceptance of death over what Sombart had criticized as the “merchant” ethos of wanting to live forever.
Spengler heavily drew on the ideas of Goethe, and evidently also on the views of a pre-Darwinian French Lutheran paleontologist of German origin, Georges Cuvier. For instance, Spengler’s assault on universalism in the physical sciences mostly comes from Goethe, but his rationale for rejecting Darwinian evolution appears to come from Cuvier. The idea that life-forms are immutable, and simply die out, only to be superseded by unrelated new ones – a persistent theme in Spengler – comes more from Cuvier than Goethe.
Cuvier, however, does not belong to the German transcendentalist tradition, so Spengler mentions him only peripherally. On the other hand, in the third chapter of the second volume of The Decline of the West, Spengler uses a word that Charles Francis Atkinson translates as “admitted” to describe how Cuvier propounded the theory of catastrophism. Clearly, Spengler shows himself to be more sympathetic to Cuvier than to what he calls the “English thought” of Darwin.[26]
Several asides about Cuvier are in order. First of all, this criminally underrated thinker is by no means outmoded, at least not in every way. Modern geology operates on a more-Cuvieran-than-Darwinian plane.[27] Secondly, it is worth noting that Ernst Jünger once astutely observed that Cuvier is more useful to modern military science than Darwin.[28]
It may also be of interest that the Cuvieran system is even further removed from Lamarckism – and its view of heredity, as a consequence, more thoroughly racialist – than the Darwinian system.[29] In Cuvier’s thought, races and species do not evolve, but rather emerge from major natural catastrophes, and hybrids cannot survive in nature. Spengler often uses these concepts as cultural metaphors throughout The Decline of the West.
Another scientist of German origin who may have influenced Spengler is the Catholic monk Gregor Mendel, the discoverer of what is now known as genetics. One biography of Mendel notes:
“Though Mendel agreed with Darwin in many respects, he disagreed about the underlying rationale of evolution. Darwin, like most of his contemporaries, saw evolution as a linear process, one that always led to some sort of better product. He did not define “better” in a religious way – to him, a more evolved animal was no closer to God than a less evolved one, an ape no morally better than a squirrel – but in an adaptive way. The ladder that evolving creatures climbed led to greater adaption to the changing world. If Mendel believed in evolution – and whether he did remains a matter of much debate – it was an evolution that occurred within a finite system. The very observation that a particular character trait could be expressed in two opposing ways – round pea versus angular, tall plant versus dwarf – implied limits. Darwin’s evolution was entirely open-ended; Mendel’s, as any good gardener of the time could see, was closed.”[30]
How very Goethean – and Spenglerian.
His continuation of the German mission against English science explains Spengler’s citation of German-Jewish scientist and fervent anti-racialist Franz Boas’ now-discredited experiments in craniology in the second volume of The Decline of the West. In his posthumously published book on Indo-Europeanology, the unfinished but lucid Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte (Early Days of World History), Spengler cites the contemporary German Nordicist race theorist Hans F. K. Günther in writing that “urbanization is racial decay.”[31] This would seem quite a leap, from citing Boas to citing Günther. However, in the opinion of one historian of scientific ideas, Boas and Günther had more in common than they liked to think, because they were both heirs more of the German Idealist tradition in science than what the Anglo-Saxon tradition recognizes as the scientific method.[32] Spengler must have keenly detected this commonality, for his views on racial matters were never synonymous with those of Boas, any more than they were identical to Günther’s.
The Death of Idealism in Science
He probably went too far in his crusade against the Anglo-Saxon scientific tradition, but as we have seen, Spengler was not without his reasons. He was neither the first nor the greatest German philosopher of science to present alternatives to the ruling English paradigms in the sciences, but was rather an heir to a grand tradition. Before dismissing this anti-materialistic tradition as worthless, as today’s historiographers of science still do, we should take into account what it produced.
Darwin’s philosophy of nature was predominantly German; only his Malthusianism, the least interesting aspect of Darwin’s work, was singularly British. As for Einstein, that proficient but unoriginal thinker was absolutely steeped in the German anti-Newtonian tradition, to which he merely put a mathematical formula. These are only the most celebrated examples of scientists influenced by the German tradition defended – maniacally, perhaps, but with noble intentions – in the works of Oswald Spengler.
Whether one considers Spengler’s ideas useful to science or utterly hateful to it, one question remains: Should the German tradition of philosophy of science he defended be taken seriously? Ever since the post-Second World War de-Germanization of Germany, protested by the ill-fated General Patton and euphemistically called “de-Nazification,” this intellectual tradition is now pretty much dead in its own fatherland. But does that make it entirely wrong?
***
The term “Turan” has experienced many uses and abuses ever since it was first coined. “Turan” originally referred to the less civilized northern Iranian semi-nomadic pastoral nations that had not adopted Zoroastrianism, while “Iran” referred to the more settled Zoroastrian nations of the south. But they were both of Indo-Iranian origin.
“Turan” first became misapplied to Turco-Mongolian nations starting with Muslim scholars in the Middle Ages, then this was further abused by the Magyar-identifying nineteenth century Jewish historian Ármin Vámbéry of Hungary. The Turco-Mongolian peoples actually entered into history much later, and were easily confused with the ancient “Turanians” (even though they were different people, if in some cases partially descended from and mythologically connected to their predecessors) because they possessed virtually the same cavalry culture-complex as had the original Iranian-speaking Turan. The only difference was that the newer medieval Turco-Mongolian conquerors had gunpowder.
According to the ancient Zoroastrian Iranians, the first writers to use the term, “Turan” meant the barbarian steppe-forest cousins from the north. The original location of these marauding north-Iranian horsemen was the Pontic Steppe, north of the Black Sea. This area was the cradle of all Indo-European cultures, which all descend from the first culture in human history to domesticate the horse.
In the summary of Christopher I. Beckwith:
The Central Eurasian Culture Complex, which dominated much of Eurasia for nearly four millennia, developed among a people known only from linguistics: The Proto-Indo-Europeans. Because the precise location of their homeland is not known for certain, scholars working in various areas of cultural history have attempted to develop a model of the Indo-European homeland and of Indo-European culture based on information derived from historical linguistics. The words shared by the languages and cultures of Indo-European peoples in distant areas of Eurasia constitute evidence that the things they refer to are shared inheritance of their Proto-Indo-European ancestors. Based on words referring to flora, fauna, and other things, as well as on archaeology and historical sources, it has been concluded that the Proto-Indo-European homeland was in Central Eurasia, specifically in the mixed steppe-forest zone between the southern Ural Mountains, the North Caucasus, and the Black Sea.[33]
These mysterious war charioteers pushed southwest and quickly conquered the Thracian plain. Later, they invaded the rest of Europe and much of Asia. The tawny-haired, colorful-eyed ancient Scythian and Thracian tribes of the Classical age represented the oldest and purest prototypes of this enigmatic primeval “Turan.”
The Pontic Steppe’s conquest of the Balkans began at Thrace, an ancient region that, in its broader ethnological sense, covered much of Southeastern Europe, especially modern-day Romania (home of the northern Thracian tribes known as the Getae and the Dacians) and Bulgaria (the southern part of the greater Thracian zone and the location of the Kingdom of Thrace proper, which bordered and influenced ancient Greece). Thrace was history’s first conquest by “Turan.”
From 4200 to 3900 BC, long before the Indo-Europeans reached Greece or India, over six hundred Old European (pre-Indo-European) settlements, writes David W. Anthony, “were burned in the lower Danube valley and eastern Bulgaria.” These Old European peoples tried to escape to a settlement in Jilava (located in today’s Romania), explains Anthony, but:
“Jilava was burned, apparently suddenly, leaving behind whole pots and many other artifacts. People scattered and became much more mobile, depending for their food on herds of sheep and cattle rather than fixed fields of grain. The forest did not regenerate; in fact, pollen cores show that the countryside became even more open and deforested.”[34]
The Thracian region was completely overrun by the cavalrymen from the Pontic Steppe. R.F. Hoddinott observes:
“In favorable conditions this eastern infiltration might have given new impetus to the flowering Carpatho-Balkan civilization. Instead, the climate continued to deteriorate and the Yamnaya [Proto-Indo-European] trickle became a torrent, causing a general population surge southwards with increasing conflict for land capable of supporting fewer and fewer people. Complete destruction overtook the wealthy Chalcolithic [Copper Age] settlements north and south of the Danube. Few ever recovered.”[35]
What was the nature of the new conquering culture? What did these hordes on horseback believe? According to Mircea Eliade:
“. . . the Dacians called themselves ‘wolves’ or ‘those who are like wolves’, who resemble wolves. Still according to Strabo (7. 3. 12; 11. 508, 511, 512), certain nomadic Scythians to the east of the Caspian sea were also called daoi. The Latin authors called them Dahae, and some Greek historians daai. In all probability their ethnic name derived from Iranian (Saka) dahae, ‘wolf'. But similar names were not unusual among the Indo-Europeans.”[36]
Eliade explains what this affinity with wolves entailed:
“Now transformation into a wolf – that is, the ritual donning of a wolfskin – constituted the essential moment of initiation into a men's secret society. By putting on the skin, the initiand assimilated the behavior of a wolf; in other words, he became a wild-beast warrior, irresistible and invulnerable. ‘Wolf’ was the appellation of the members of the Indo-European military societies.”[37]
Another belief that can be traced back to the ancient Indo-Europeans is what Eliade calls “dualistic motif of the creation of the World by two antagonistic Beings.” Eliade finds that much folklore throughout the world seeks to explain “human existence by a system of oppositions and tensions, yet without arriving at an ethical or metaphysical ‘dualism’.” In the oldest forms of this folkloric myth, the second being after the Creator-God is described as an animal deity that dutifully helps God create the universe. However, due originally to non-Zoroastrian Iranian (and only superficially and much later, near-Eastern) influence, concludes Eliade, “it is only in Eurasia” that the concept of an assistant of God in creating the cosmos “involves a hostile protagonist, an adversary of God; in other words, only in Eurasia has the theme developed ‘dualistically’.”[38]
The horses these warriors first domesticated were in fact ponies, a tradition that survived in the Romanian principalities into the nineteenth century. The “extremely sure-footed,” if joyless, Wallachian pony described by Field Marshal Count Moltke in his memoirs was actually the original Indo-European war chariot horse. Stout ponies were better suited to the ancient war chariot than large horses.[39]
The confused, anachronistic association of Turco-Mongolian peoples with “Turan” has hopefully been dispelled by the above remarks. It was perhaps with the intent to restore the original meaning that Oswald Spengler named the ancient Indo-European culture-complex “Turan” in Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte (Early Days of World History), a posthumously published book written during the last years of Spengler’s life. In any case, Spengler’s concept is close to the true historical definition. “Turan” originally described an Indo-European culture, not a Turco-Mongolian one.[40]
The influence of the southern, pre-Indo-European civilizations on Greek thought is well-known. Less commonly studied, but at least as substantial, is the inspiration that the Greeks took from the barbaric but innovative Iranian-speaking north. Thrace and Greece had considerable cultural (and in the case of Macedon, probably even ethnological) interactions with one another, despite the different natures of the Thracian and Greek peoples.
From the illiterate but ingenious Thracians came many aspects of ancient Greek mythology and philosophy. In addition to the mathematical influences previously discussed in the essay “Faust Without Mephistopheles,” the mythical Hellenic figures of Dionysus and Orpheus were also of Thracian origin. However, there developed a world of difference between the ascetic significance of Dionysus for the Orphics on the one hand, and the decadent Greek Bacchic cults on the other. The former cult was much closer to the original Thracian roots of Dionysus than was the more familiar Bacchic version.[41]
Thrace was also seen by the Greeks as the home of Boreas, god of the north wind and of winter. Somewhere north of Thrace proper was the land of the Hyperboreans, a mysterious race often associated with the North Pole, and also with the Celts. The location of Hyperborea was apparently debated by the ancient Greek writers, but Homer is believed to have placed it around the Dacia region. Many other ancient Greek sources also located the Hyperborean homeland in areas corresponding to modern day Romania.
According to the early Greek historian Hellanicus, the Hyperboreans were vegetarians. So too, it is worth noting, were the Thracophile Greek Orphics and Pythagoreans. And yet, in addition to the wolfskin rituals described by Eliade above, the Thracian tribes, according to Herodotus, also practiced human sacrifices to Zalmoxis by throwing a selected victim onto a set of stakes.
The lion-blonde, notoriously warlike Thracians, situated to the north of Greece, resembled the intruding Indo-European culture more closely than the Greeks did. The Mediterranean Old European peoples of Greece had also fallen prey to the Indo-European invasions, but thousands of years more recently than the Old Europeans of the Thracian lands had. Furthermore, throughout greater Thrace the southerly Old Europeans appear to have been annihilated more thoroughly in the older “Turanic” (in Spengler’s sense, meaning Proto-Indo-European) conquests of Thrace than in the more recent Indo-European incursions into Greece. In the latter case, amalgamation had been more common – as reflected, for instance, by the bronzed and relatively dark-featured Ionians.
Spengler described Old Europe as “Atlantis,” a reference to his theory that it had been a maritime culture. Ancient Greece reflected a hybridization of the remnants of the conquered “Atlantis” with the younger culture-complex of war charioteers from the steppe. By contrast, the Mediterranean Old European culture had been ruthlessly destroyed in the Thracian region. Accordingly, in addition to predating Hellenic civilization, Thracian culture was a less diluted archetype of the real Turan – and the wolf in man.
***
[1] Luke Hodgkin, A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2005)
[2] See the booklet of the album Istanbul: Dimitrie Cantemir 1630-1732, written by Stefan Lemny and translated by Jacqueline Minett.
[3] Eugenia Pospescu-Judetz, Prince Dimitrie Cantemir: Theorist and Compose of Turkish Music (Istanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 1999), p. 34.
[4] Dimitrie Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, vol. I, tr. by Nicholas Tindal (London: Knapton, 1734) p.151, note 14
[5] Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, tr. by George Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 8
[6] Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, tr. by M. Epstein (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1951 and 1982), p. 69. Originally published as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftleben, 1911.
[7] Karin Schutjer, “Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology,” Colloquia Germanica, vol. 39, no. 1 (2006).
[8] J.W. von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act I, “Imperial Palace” scene; Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life; Chapter III, “Property, or What a Man Has.”
[9] Jeremy Naydler (ed.) Goethe on Science: An Anthology of Goethe’s Scientific Writings (Ediburgh: Floris Books, 1996), pp. 65-67
[10] Erich Ludendorff, The Destruction of Freemasonry Through Revelation of Their Secrets (Mountain City, Tn.: Sacred Truth Publishing), p. 53.
[11] Warren Kenton, Kabbalah: The Divine Plan (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 25
[12] Schmitt, Leviathan, p. 26
[13] Kerry Bolton, The Occult and Subversive Movements: Tradition & Countertradition in the Struggle for World Power, (London: Black House Publishing, 2017); see the sections “Revival of Interest” and “Rosicrucians & the ‘Society of Unknown Philosophers’.”
[14] Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, tr. by M. Epstein (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1951 and 1982), p. 49. Originally published as Die Juden und das Wirtschaftleben, 1911.
[15] Gottfried Feder, Manifesto for Breaking the Financial Slavery to Interest, tr. by Alexander Jacob (London: Black House Publishing, 2016), p. 38.
[16] Ibid, pp. 17-18.
[17] See, i.e. Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek Spirit,” collected in Joseph Campbell (ed.) The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955).
[18] Mircea Eliade, tr. by Willard R. Trask, Zalmoxis, the Vanishing God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia and Eastern Europe, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 23-24
[19] Arthur Schopenhauer, tr. by E.F.J. Payne, The World as Will and Representation, vol. II (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2014), p. 585. Schopenhauer’s dim view of Judaism is concisely summarized in a book on an unrelated subject, Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots of Nazism:
“In The World as Will and Idea [an alternate translation of The World as Will and Representation], Schopenhauer argued that most people strove to affirm their ‘will to live’ with ‘sufficient success to keep them from despair, and sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its consequences’. The enlightened few, however, realized: ‘Existence is certainly to be regarded as an erring, to return from which is salvation’. He found this belief to play a central role in Christianity. He maintained, ‘The doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity’. Thus true Christians had to deny their worldly desires in order to achieve spiritual purity.
Schopenhauer did not explicitly attribute the ability to deny the will to live to Germans or Aryans, but he did argue that Jews lacked this capacity. He stressed, ‘Christianity belongs to the ancient, true, and sublime faith of mankind, which is opposed to the false, shallow, and injurious optimism which exhibits itself in… Judaism’. He further asserted that the Old Testament was ‘foreign to true Christianity; for in the New Testament the world is always spoken of as something to which one does not belong, which one does not love, nay, whose lord is the devil’. Schopenhauer upheld Christian idealism as the opposite of Jewish materialism.
As cited by Dietrich Eckhart, Hitler’s early völkisch mentor, Schopenhauer elaborated on Judaism’s overwhelmingly materialistic nature in his work Parerga. He asserted, ‘The true Jewish religion… is the crudest of all religions, since it is the only one that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, nor even any trace of it’. He also maintained: ‘Judaism… is a religion without any metaphysical tendency’. This argument corresponded with his claim that what passed for the Jewish religion merely represented a ‘war-cry in the subjugation of foreign peoples’. According to Schopenhauer, Jews focused on shallow worldly gain and could not negate the will to live in order to achieve salvation.”
Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 22-23
[20] Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century Volume I, tr. by John Lees, first impression 1910, second impression 1912 (Revisionist Books edition, 2015), p. 108. See also p. 99.
[21] Ronald Douglas Gray, Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.6
[22] Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Philosophy and Science in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 435
[23] Ibid, pp. 518-526
[24] Poe’s onetime rejection from joining Freemasonry left him a critic of that organization and its philosophy, as can be seen in his anti-Masonic revenge fantasy “The Cask of Amontillado.” In his work of philosophy of science, Eureka: A Prose Poem, Poe lampoons Francis Bacon as “Francis Hog.”
[25] Nicholas Boyle, Goethe and the English-speaking World: Essays from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary (Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012), p. 12
[26] Oswald Spengler, tr. by Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of the West vol. II, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 31.
[27] Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 94.
[28] From Jünger’s Aladdin’s Problem tr. Joachim Neugroschel: “It its astounding to see how inventiveness grows in nature when existence is at stake. This applies to both defense and pursuit. For every missile, an anti-missile is devised. At times, it all looks like sheer braggadocio. This could lead to a stalemate or else to the moment when the opponent says, ‘I give up’, if he does not knock over the chessboard and ruin the game. Darwin did not go that far; in this context, one is better off with Cuvier’s theory of catastrophes.”
[29] See Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (London: Forgotten Books, 2012), pp. 125-128 & pp. 145-165.
[30] Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), p. 125.
[31] Oswald Spengler, Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1966), Fragment 101.
[32] Amos Morris-Reich, “Race, Ideas, and Ideals: A Comparison of Franz Boas and Hans F.K. Günther,” History of European Ideas, vol. 32, no. 3 (2006).
[33] Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009) p. 29 (Italics in Beckwith’s original.)
[34] David W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 227
[35] R.F. Hoddinott, The Thracians (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1981) p. 24
[36] Mircea Eliade, tr. Willard R. Trask, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 2
[37] Mircea Eliade, tr. Willard R. Trask, Rites and Symbols of Initiation (New York: Harper and Row, 1958) p. 83
[38] Eliade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, p. 78, p. 127, p. 106 (The posthumous Spengler, writing in 1935-36, also considers the beliefs of “Turan” to have reflected a dualistic sense of polarity.)
[39] Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2001), p. 16; Radu R. Florescu & Raymond T. McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His Times (New York: Hachette, 2009), p. 141; Richard Brzezeinski, Polish Armies 1569-1696 (Oxford: Osprey, 1987), p. 23; and Helmuth Graf von Moltke, Moltke: His Life and Character (San Francisco: Pickle Partners), p. 130.
[40] Spengler’s conception owes less to Vámbéry’s “pan-Turanist” ideology than to the Scytho-Sarmatiaphile Renaissance of early modern Eastern Europe, which originated in late medieval Poland. Nietzsche may have had this famously freedom-loving, yet unabashedly elitist and militaristic, historic current of thought in mind when he dubiously claimed descent from Polish nobility.
[41] Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek Spirit,” collected in Joseph Campbell (ed.) The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1955).
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