SHAUNA DOYLE DE BRUN: Confirmed Conference Paper

HERMAN HESSE (1877-1962)

LITERARY FIGURES AND ESOTERICISM: HERMAN HESSE

Hermann Hesse´s book, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), is a literary representation of a life seeking to discover one’s innermost being and the path to self- realization; in other words, Gnosis. The Glass Bead Game in essence relates the autobiographical culmination of Hesse´s own inner search for Gnosis while incorporating and invoking prior esoteric teachings and practices. With especial reference to the following quotations from the book.

“How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis´s hallucinatory visions. This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of the Mind toward the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion.”
Page 7.

“In the symbols, ciphers, signatures, and abbreviations of the Game language an astronomical formula, the principles of form underlying an old sonata, an utterance of Confucius, and so on, were written down. A reader who chanced to be ignorant of the Glass Bead Game might imagine such a game pattern as rather similar to the pattern of a chess game, except that the significances of the pieces and the potentialities of their relationships to one another and their effect upon one another multiplied manyfold and an actual content must be ascribed to each piece, each constellation, each chess move, of which this move, configuration, and so on is a symbol.”
Page 110.

The Glass Bead Game

We re-enact with reverent attention
The universal chord, the masters´ harmony,
Evoking in unsullied communion
Minds and time of highest sanctity.

We draw upon the iconography
Whose mystery is able to contain
The boundlessness, the storm of all existence,
Give chaos form, and hold our lives in rein.

The pattern sings like crystal constellations,
And when we tell our beads, we serve the whole,
And cannot be dislodged or misdirected,
Held in the orbit of the Cosmic Soul.

(See The Poems of Knecht´s Student Years, Page 412)

Hesse, Hermann, Magister Ludi (The Glass Bead Game), (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1970).

Shauna Doyle de Brun is an MA student at the University of Exeter, Centre for the Study of Esotericism.