Wild Apollo’s Arrows. An illustrated introduction II

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