Kaspar Hauser and the Struggle for Europe 1510 - 2010

 by Terry Boardman

First published in New View magazine (Summer 2006 - 3rd Quarter)

This summer will see two events that will surely yet again raise the awkward question of Anglo-German relations: the 90^th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme , and the soccer World Cup finals to be held in Germany . For many Britons, the battle of the Somme has become almost synonymous with the First World War; books on the battle far outweigh any other aspect or event of the war on British bookshop and library shelves, certainly far more than books on the actual causes of the war. There is not space here to go into the reasons for this in detail, but a good case could be made for saying that the British fixation on the Battle of the Somme is because the nation somehow senses that that battle was not only the most traumatic experience in the history of the British army – although revisionists  insist the battle was in fact a victory in that the front was pushed forward -  by a mere 5 miles and the German army weakened – but through the terrible wastage of so many of its sons, it spelled the beginning of the end for the British Empire and Britain's pre-eminence in the world.

Britain and Germany

For Britain the First World War as a whole was a pyrrhic victory, which the country after 1915 could not have won without American financial assistance. Most significantly, the war utterly sapped the British ruling class's will to imperial power, as the interwar decline of the Empire showed, most starkly in India . A month before the Battle of the Somme began, another pyrrhic victory of massive significance at the naval battle of Jutland showed the British that their much vaunted naval prowess was not what it seemed[1]; though retaining command of the sea, they lost more ships and many more men than the Germans,. Indeed, one could say that between 1912 and 1916, the three events of the sinking of the Titanic – that potent symbol of  British society and material achievement – the Battles of Jutland and the Somme constituted a colossal wake-up call for Britain , which largely went unheeded. In 2001 a writer in The Independent noted depressingly: "The Second World War looms so large at the moment for all kinds of reasons – because the anniversaries have fallen due, because new material is suddenly available, because television audiences continue to respond – but also because so many of us continue to  fight it in our imaginations. It’s unlikely that anything short of a larger conflict will persuade us to stop.[2]

Today, when the number of Britons who can speak German or indeed any foreign language at all is declining, when knowledge or understanding of German culture is at a low ebb even among the literate sections of society compared with a hundred years ago, Germany exists in the British imagination mostly as a rival to butt the national head against, especially in sport and finance. A survey  commissioned by the Goethe-Institut in Britain in 1996 found that 68% per cent of British schoolchildren listed Adolf Hitler as the most famous German, over twenty points ahead of footballer Jürgen Klinsmann .[3]  

Every time England plays Germany at football, the two nations re-examine their complex relationship: a regular cycle beginning with mutual admiration, suddenly transformed into fear and loathing, subsiding into ignorance and indifference. This can be a depressing exercise. We compete in every sphere, we mock each other’s peculiarities, from the linguistic to the lavatorial. We even have physical caricatures of one another which are, in fact, remarkably similar in emphasising girth. It seems that we are doomed forever to struggle for the survival of the fattest. [...] As long as we feel that our national independence is threatened by Europe , however, we shall continue to treat the football pitch as a battlefield. Germany will respond in kind. And the nations of Shakespeare and Goethe will go on glorifying Beckham and Beckenbauer.[4]  

There seems to be little generosity of spirit in British media discourse, certainly not recognising that "it might be more helpful to see [Britain and Germany] in terms of the doublings that characterize so many of Shakespeare’s plays...In Shakespeare’s comedies, twins abound, misrecognitions drive forward the plots and produce discord and even outright aggression, until the situation is commonly resolved in the often dubious happy ending of a love match." [5] Rather, the unforgiving tones of such writers as  A.A. Gill, writing in 1999,  are perhaps more common:  

We all hate the Germans – come on, it’s all right, admit it, we’re all agreed, we hate them. [...] As political correctness irons out the parenthesis of prejudice, there will always be a special, sour dispensation for Bismarck ’s baby; hating the Hun is perhaps the only thing that emulsifies the rest of us. [...] What can they do to stop us seeing them as Europe ’s psychopaths? [...] They can run but they can’t hide, and we can’t stop remembering. There is nothing they can do other than live with the stain and the guilt, because so many millions can’t.[6]  

Here we see again the familiar icons of loathing: Bismarck , Huns, the allusion to the Holocaust and the alleged responsibility for two world wars. There is little heard from our political, cultural or economic leaders about anything that may be learned from Germany; the country is seen, in Donald Rumsfeld's  phrase, as "Old Europe" compared to "British dynamism and creativity". As British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown, the City (London's financial centre), the British intelligence community and the British media steadily increase the symbiotic integration of Britain with the USA, looking instinctively across the Atlantic for inspiration, the ocean is portrayed as a pond much narrower than the Channel, and Miami more familiar than Munich or Mainz.  

Are the British people content to be led in this direction? Are they themselves perhaps already so comfortable with MacWorld, country 'n' western, gangster chic, Disney and Microsoft that they regard them as their own culture? American airforce bases in Britain , still here over 60 years since the USAAF arrived, and 15 years after the end of the Cold War, are not signposted as such but rather as RAF bases, as if to reassure the British that they are not in any way under occupation. Such considerations beg questions as to the meaning of  national culture, patriotism, and national identity in the 21^st century. There will be some on the left of the political spectrum and also in the New Age movement generally who regard all such concepts as deserving of no merit whatsoever in the modern world. They will ask: "is this not the age of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, the age of the freethinking individual who lives not for the state and the national or tribal collective but for humanity? What should we care for national cultures and states? Today there is but the individual and the world". World government and a world parliament, allegiance to and support for the United Nations – such is the creed of many moderns; some of them are very powerful businesspeople who run mega-corporations and see national states and national laws based on national traditions and cultures as obstructions to their will, obstacles between their global corporate aims  and individual consumers. What then in this 21^st century world of the post-Westphalian nation state[7] is the role of the national state to be – or not to be: that is a question. And what does Kaspar Hauser have to do with this question and with Anglo-German relations in the 21^st century? The answer can be expressed in symbolic shorthand as a bridge between the Sun and Moon. The rest of this article will seek to explain what that means.  

The Inhaling Moon

In the traditional esoteric view, the spiritual sphere (i.e. within the orbit) of the Moon is the last stop for the human soul  before incarnation into the earthly physical realm, which is why it has always been associated with birth, storks and babies. Now the symbol of Islam is the Moon, not the Sun, and the inspirer of Mohammed was Gabriel , archangel of the Moon, not Michael , archangel of the Sun. The Koran is full of exhortations to read in the Book of Nature the proofs of Allah's glory - to read and observe the signs of the physical world. It is hardly surprising that the natural science of the ancient world was taken up enthusiastically by Muslim Arabs, most notably during the Abbasid dynasty ( 750-1258 ) when Baghdad was the capital of the Muslim world empire and arguably the greatest city on Earth. This Arab 'Moon  science' and philosophy[8]  made its way to Europe and was most eagerly taken up by the Oxford School of Franciscan scholars such as Robert Grosseteste (1175-1253)[9] Roger Bacon , Duns Scotus and William of Okham. It was a science that desired to seek God above all in the evidence of the physical material world, the world of the senses, or one could say, in the world-womb of the mother (mater). This came naturally to the English at a subconscious level because the Anglo-Saxons, originally from Jutland, Schleswig-Holstein, northwest Germany and Frisia, had deep down in their cultural memories the feeling for the Mother Earth Goddess Ing (also called Nerthus, Herthum) and the rituals of her appearance on Earth, an echo of which is  still celebrated in the May Queen processions.[10]  

By the end of the Middle Ages, that which bubbled up from instinctual knowledge, from 'the guts', as it were, from within the English folk element itself, and that which descended 'from on high' via the intellect, from abroad in the thoughts of the translated Arabian lunar-tinged sciences, had fused to bring about a culture that was inclined primarily to the  physical world of sense reality, a culture that tended to value practicality, simplicity and no-nonsense pragmatism. William Shakespeare completed the process of placing  the English individual self four square on the Earth, consciously free from the ancient mysticism of the stars (astrology) yet still vaguely and uncomprehendingly aware of the magic behind the natural sense world. At this point in the first third of the 17^th century, three things happened: Francis Bacon set the course for what we now know as the inductive method of experimental natural science which was to give such a tremendous boost to British development over the next 300 years. Secondly; the British Puritans, like the Muslims a  People of the Book, headed for the 'Promised Land'  of America on the Mayflower. From their voyage  would eventually come the dominant 'Yankee' culture of the north-eastern United States, an entity which would emerge from its British cultural matrix to become the world's first ideological global state -  the first state based on abstract ideals enshrined in documents (the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution) and by the end of the 19^th century, the first state to consist of peoples of all races. Thirdly; King James I (1603-1625), who also gave us the concept of Great Britain and the Union Jack besides the Authorised Version of the Bible (1611), introduced the habits and customs of speculative Freemasonry[11] from Scotland into England . Despite its later international appeal, this would become a peculiarly British form of spiritual endeavour in the modern world. It was based on the esotericism of  Egypt and Israel (especially Solomon 's Temple ). Freemasonry too entreated its members to read in the Book of Nature the proofs of the glory of the Great Architect of the Universe. It focused on the twin pillars of knowledge and power, Jachin and Boaz , on the black and white chequerboard, on innumerable dualities and polarities.  

By the time of the American Revolution in 1776, Freemasonry was well-ensconced in British and American society and was acknowledged by both sides even when they were fighting each other. To commemorate 1776, a century later, the Freemasons of France presented to the Freemasons of the USA a gift designed and built by a French Freemason, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, namely, his great statue of the Moon goddess Isis, retitled disingenuously as the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World) and originally designed to stand by the Suez canal and to represent Egypt and the Light of Asia. ( Bartholdi , a native of Colmar in Alsace , was initiated into the Alsace-Lorraine Lodge, Paris in 1874[12]. Fellow Freemason Gustave Eiffel, builder of the Eiffel Tower , created the internal framework for the Statue). By 1886, Britain had grown to be the 'strongest' nation in the world on the basis of material physical power – scientific, commercial, industrial, military, financial and legal[13]. Into this material basket the British people put not all but most of their eggs between 1650 and 1950. And then came those titanic years 1912-1916, and the breaking of the basket. But the secrets of the weaving of that lunar basket had been taken up by the offspring, and by 1950 the American 'empire' had supplanted the empire of its parent. Since the reign of King James I, the colossal consequence of this Anglo-American globalising process with its overwhelming concentration on the nature and  products of the sense world matrix has been a mighty acceleration in the pace of economic, scientific and technological change to the point where today, the very future of humanity is threatened[14] by nuclear annihilation, ecological disaster, genetic manipulation and the replacement of human beings by robots and cyborgs, all the consequence of a reductionist philosophy of natural science that rigidly restricts its investigations to the world of the five senses and their technological extensions. We are finally beginning to realise, as we never seriously did during the nuclear showdown years of the Cold War, that unless we change our way of life significantly, our so-called post-industrial civilisation may well not see the end of the 21^st century; the human race will have committed suicide.  

The Sun's Outbreath

So much for the inhaling Moon. What of the Sun and the outbreath? It is now generally recognised that hermeticism and the esoteric sciences of the Renaissance period played a key role in preparing the mental ground for the more exoteric natural scientific developments of the critical 17^th century; Newton was one of those men who straddled both the exoteric and the esoteric sciences, though in a very British way: he kept them in their separate boxes, which is why the British were able to entertain for so long the delusion that Newton was 'only' a natural scientist. In the Rhineland Palatinate region of Germany in the late 15^th century there lived an esotericist of considerable calibre – Abbot Trithemius of Sponheim (1462-1516), well-known in esoteric circles not only for his cryptographical studies but also for his writings about the structure of time. In his book on the archangelic rulerships of time periods in history[15], Trithemius described how the age of the Moon archangel Gabriel was due to start in 1525, followed by that of the archangel of the Sun, Michael , in 1879. Now it happens that Britain's rise to world power and material pre-eminence occurred almost exactly within the age of Gabriel 1525-1879 (from Henry VIII to Victoria); historians usually date the beginning of Britain's decline from the 1870s, when Germany and the USA began to overtake it. The age of Gabriel was one in which humanity, by developing natural science to the full – a process in which Britain led the way – incarnated ever more deeply into the material world, and the corollary of this was that concern with spiritual affairs faded by comparison with previous ages to the point where, by the later 18^th century, many so-called progressive minds throughout Europe had come to regard all religion and spirituality as mediaeval superstition.  

To try to balance this one-sided focus on the material world, the Rosicrucian movement began in Germany after 1614. Its hermetic spirit sought a general reformation of society that would involve  a reading in the Book of Nature that was not divorced – as Henry VIII 's concept of human affairs was – from spiritual experience and the human soul; this was the symbolic meaning of the Rose Cross . The cross itself is that of the natural material world, a one-sided obsession with which can only lead through a reductionist materialism to the ultimate death of culture and of all human life (we are finally beginning to understand this now in our social and ecological hand-wringing). The five-petalled red rose with its thorns brings to mind the blood and the human "I" (the quintessential self) that is active within the blood and  which can, through its own experience, pain and sorrows, its own prodigal path,  dedicate itself both to the transformation and purification of the soul and to the wholesome understanding of Nature; this requires a 'knowing" (i.e. 'sci-ence') of the spirit that can relate both the individual "I" and the individual phenomenon of natural science to the rest of creation, visible and invisible.

Along the seaboard of western Europe, the solid, unitary, political states– England , France , Spain , Portugal and Holland explored the world beyond Europe and contributed the most to Man's initiation into natural science. The more mercurial, politically, culturally and religiously mixed region of Central Europe , especially Germany and Bohemia , and its geographical location in the heart of Europe , receptive to east, west, north and south, fitted it to be the region that would initiate a spiritual science. This was attempted in the decade after 1614, but comprehensively blocked by the catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War, which divided the region north and south, devastated the country, entrenched the forces of conservatism, and drove the Rosicrucian movement underground for over a hundred years.  

As Trithemius had described in the 15^th century, the age of the Sun archangel Michael did indeed begin in 1879, with its emphases on cosmopolitanism and the spiritualisation of thinking, the hallmarks of each age of Michael (the previous one had been from c.600-250 BC). Materialism continued to have things very much its own way until the First World War, a war which, as Steiner pointed out, was in fact the consequence of the one-sided European development from the early 17^th century onwards. Since the First World War – or  even since the year 1916, for that was the year the horrors of the Great War  forced contemporaries to recognise that a threshold had been crossed and that they were now living in a new age – materialism has been increasingly challenged on all fronts, not just the philosophical. We are now in the second century of the age of Michael , and this battle of the worldviews will only become more intense.  

With the dawning of the age of Michael , a spiritual movement arose in the 1870s from both Russia and the English-speaking world. It sought to return mankind to the wisdom of the ancient pre-Christian dispensation; this was the Theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky and later, Annie Besant . It disparaged Christianity and ignored Central Europe . Much like Tony Blair today, Besant declared that Germany had little of spiritual substance to offer and had but to follow the lead set by the English-speaking world. This stance was challenged by Rudolf Steiner , who sought to link his anthroposophical movement with the Rosicrucian heritage of Central Europe , in other words, with esoteric Christianity. This new Rosicrucian impulse was blunted, however, like that of the 17^th century, by another appalling conflict that broke out in 1914 and which, in retrospect, we can now see constituted a second Thirty Years' War (1914-45)[16]; once again, Central Europe was devastated, millions killed, and the region  was divided a second time  - east from west.  

Kaspar in the Middle

Between these two efforts of a Rosicrucian spiritual impulse to emerge as a cultural balance to a natural scientific worldview that was becoming or had become one-sidedly materialistic, a third, less focused impulse developed in Europe around the year 1800. The first overt signs appeared with the threefold motto that was adopted at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789 – liberty, equality, and fraternity[17], a motto rooted in the Rosicrucian understanding of Man and Nature.  A tremendous spirit of idealism and humanity, the dawning of a new age, was in the air and keenly felt by a glittering group of spirits in central Europe that included: Goethe , Mozart , Herder, Schiller, Hegel , Novalis, Beethoven , Schelling , and many more. It was into this cultural milieu that Kaspar Hauser was born on Michaelmas Day 29^th September 1812 . The news of his birth was taken to his mother's foster father, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was then sitting with his army in the burnt-out ruins of Moscow , vainly waiting for the surrender of Czar Alexander I, whose wife was Kaspar Hauser 's aunt, (born Princess Luise of Baden ).  

The two forces that worked to block Kaspar Hauser and the fructifying impulses from Germany that could otherwise have had a far greater influence at that time were the same two that had been involved in blocking the Rosicrucian movement of the 17^th century: elites in Britain and Austria, working through Philip Henry, 4^th Earl Stanhope (1781-1855) and Prince Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859), Chancellor of Austria. They used as their instruments the courts of Baden and Bavaria, which were locked in dispute over the Palatinate territory of Sponheim, where Trithemius had lived, and ownership of the two cities of Heidelberg, the focus of Rosicrucian hopes in 1614, and Mannheim, where Kaspar Hauser's mother had her residence after the death of Kaspar's father Grand Duke Karl in 1818. Kaspar's fate became bound up in this sordid squabble, which led to his solitary confinement for 12 years and his eventual murder at the age of 21 in 1833. Rudolf Steiner indicated that in 1802, 10 years before Kaspar Hauser's birth, their fear of Napoleon drove the mutually antagonistic hostile forces of Freemasonry and Jesuitism into a cooperative agreement in which the Freemasonic British would dominate the realm of economics and the Jesuits that of culture.[18]  

33 years after Kaspar Hauser 's death, Prussia defeated Austria in the struggle for supremacy in Germany . 12 years after Kaspar's death, in the year of revolutions which swept Europe in 1848-9, Kaspar's homeland of Baden played a key role and was the main centre of reformist and revolutionary activities; the Badeners were eventually crushed by the Prussian army. From comments by Rudolf Steiner and some of his pupils at that time, we can understand that if Kaspar Hauser had lived to become the rightful Prince of Baden, such was his spiritual stature that the disasters of 1848 (the year of failure for reformist movements across Europe) and 1866 (the Austro-Prussian War)  would not have occurred. German and European development in the 20^th century would then certainly not have turned out as it did.[19]  

[pictures relating to the following section can be found below after the endnotes]

Today, in the struggle over the future of the European Union, we see essentially the same two elements at odds: the elite forces behind the economic materialism of the West (UK and USA, like the junior and senior partners in the same firm) trying to impose an essentially economically-focused Europe in their own image against the resistance of a combination of elitist forces of the old Europe. These are the pro-Vatican Catholic element, which would like to resurrect a kind of Holy Roman Empire such as the Austrian Habsburg Charles V ruled over in the 16^th century. They are assisted to a degree by the French national statist element, forever dreaming of how to revive la gloire de la France , which they do not wish to recognise as passé. Not for nothing was the great EU meeting to agree the  EU treaty held before a mighty statue of Pope Innocent X in Rome in October 2004, and not for nothing did Tony Blair reply a year later by siting the October 2005 EU summit at Henry VIII's Hampton Court (see photos). These were not merely empty gestures, for sometimes we see realities of history expressed in certain gestures; these gestures in Rome and at Hampton Court were of such a kind : they barely disguised the ongoing struggle between the more modern but unspiritual and profoundly unhealthy materialism of the Anglo-American world (economic and scientific oligarchy) and the utterly decadent pseudo-spirituality and of the Roman Papacy and its allies (theological and political oligarchy). The Rose Cross movement of the early 17^th century, the missing Grail Prince of the early 19^th century, the Rosicrucian anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner in the early 20^th century sought to bring to this polarity the healing mercurial element that can build a bridge between the 'lunar' natural sciences from the past and the solar-focused spiritual science of the future. Steiner 's Rosicrucian movement of the 20^th century received a great setback in the Thirty Years War of 1914-1945, but it was not destroyed or driven underground as in the 17^th century. We need to find the reality behind the symptoms of history and current events if we are to avoid becoming the victims of another disaster in the 21st.

 The last of these articles on Kaspar Hauser will consider his esoteric significance for the 20^th and subsequent centuries.

 NOTES