47. About Bruno Wille's book, “Revelations of the Juniper Tree”

Among the literary works of the present day that seek to point the way to a deepening of our spiritual culture, Bruno Wille' s book “Revelations of the Juniper Tree: A Novel of an All-Seeing Eye” (published by Eugen Diederichs in Leipzig in 1901, 2 volumes) is arguably one of the most significant. The book has something “representative” for our time: the word “representative” used in the way the great American Emerson speaks of “representative” personalities in world history, meaning those who, as it were, harbor typical feelings and thoughts in their person. Those, incidentally, that are distributed among many, but still constitute a certain coherent aspect of human endeavor, a necessary tone, as it were, in the great symphony of human activity. In this sense, Wilee's “Novel of an All-Seeing Eye” is representative of our time. It expresses, in compressed form, the feelings and thoughts of all those of deeper nature in the present day, who are filled with a striving for spiritualization in our culture, which is absorbed in purely external life. — And he expresses these feelings and thoughts in a genuinely artistic form. This is particularly appealing because the pursuit of knowledge and of a new kind of religious devotion is interwoven with a personal life story, so that in the “hero” of the novel we are presented with a human being in all aspects of his existence. From the immediate events of the emotional and passionate life, which plays out in everyday life, to the highest spheres of all-pervasive knowledge and free, dignified devotion and piety, we are presented with the full gamut of the personal life of a person thirsting for wholeness and harmony. And no less appealing is the introduction of nature into the novel. The beings of nature, especially the juniper tree, reveal the depths of their essence themselves, and reveal their soul, which the science of the present, directed at the merely factual and sensual, wants to deny them. Since Wille is a true poet, he is able to depict the dialogue and the whole interaction and empathy between man and nature in a way that is poetically effective in the most beautiful sense and that gives the novel greatness and artistic perfection.

One sentence from the book is enough to show how the basic feelings of deeper natures in the present are captured here. “What is truth? Must not the truth be united? But what do all these wise men do, each of whom boasts that he possesses the truth? The researcher shrugs contemptuously at the priest. The priest fights back like a snake and hisses: “Your knowledge is sacrilegious; it is cursed!” The scientist now leans towards the poem, smiling: “Nice – but unfortunately a lie!” The poet replies: “And your science? It may be correct, but I find it distasteful!” – So what is truth? Where does that unified vision flourish, which is at once science, devotion and beauty?” (Volume 1, page 6). Wille points to a unity in the human soul that finds truth in a sublime and beautiful guise, so that it - at the same time spiritualizes the poet's art, and is so lofty, so divine that it urges the heart to pious devotion, to a religious mood. How, on the other hand, modern science relates to poetry is vividly expressed in the world view that a professor of anatomy develops. The natural scientist, who is at the “height of scientific knowledge,” says to his students: “So, gentlemen, as a result of our science, we get a view of the world whose basic features would be bleak if they did not have the one consolation of being true. We may regard the sentence: “The world is a theater!” as a gain and a mentor worth heeding. ... We who know stand behind the scenes; through peep holes we look at the audience and wonder whether to laugh or cry. ... Yes, the world is a theater, and here, gentlemen, in this corpse... yes, here we see a prima donna of the conjuring trick of life. ... This body, which seems to be all beauty and poetry, presents itself to the unmasking science as a mere bandage of bones and ligaments, muscles, nerves, blood and skin. And like this woman, so the whole world. Let us go behind the scenes of the great game of deception, hand in hand with science. We see the sun shining brightly and benignantly. But behind the scenes, the loving mother is a soulless fireball. The happiness of childhood, innocence, hope tremble in the spring buds; presentiments and wondrous dreams shiver through the forest. So say the poets; they imagine they are eavesdropping on nature and, in doing so, have grasped some great truth. Theater-making is all that! Subjective mood transferred to soulless objects. One deceives oneself, there is present what only exists here in the mind... Gentlemen! From this corpse, I have removed the skull and show you a gray mass, rich in convolutions and tangled fibers, which consists mostly of protein. That spiritual world is nothing but a process in this substance. Mind and emotion are functions of the brain. Without nerve mass, there is no feeling, no imagining and thinking, no feeling and willing. ... Gentlemen! This world view may seem dull to some of you. Indeed, it destroys the naive belief in beauty, in the reality of beauty. But before all poetry, it has the advantage of being scientific. Science is ruthless, it must be, it has the duty to destroy even the most charming illusions in order to erect the sober structure of truth on the ruins of fantasy.” ... In the novel, this speech is followed by: ‘The professor bowed, the students trampled and applauded...’ (Volume 1, pages 43 ff.).— And so do many of our contemporaries. They applaud “sober science,” the destroyer of illusions, and build an opinion of the world on this soberness, which is their only truth, their only religion. And the more profound natures, who cannot believe that the Supreme is so soulless, so sober, so arid of intellect in the face of the “illusions” that appear on its surface, who ascribe beauty, sublimity, and : these deeper natures feel doubt sinking into their souls and say to themselves what the hero of our novel says to the “scientist,” his friend: “Oh, of course, it is good manners to tolerate poetry. But who believes in it? Who believes the poet when he says that the sun smiles – that it really smiles, not just as it were? But your science objects that the sun has no smile muscles. And in front of Böcklin's mermaids, it argues that a human body with a fish's tail is anatomically absurd. ... This kind of science is a tyrant! It looks bleak and dull under her sceptre. I want to turn my back on her – my heart is with the Cinderella of poetry – I long for my childlike faith, the lost paradise.” And what ‘Friend Oswald’ would probably do today is the same as any ‘true’ scientist when confronted with such deeper natures. “Oswald shrugged his shoulders impatiently and walked around, repeatedly clearing his throat. With him, this was a sign of nervousness."

Out of such doubts, the following idea can arise in the one who is pondering: is the poetic sense really obscuring your perception of reality? Could it not also be the case that, on the contrary, your intellect is obliterating the higher reality that lies in things, making you a bungler at perceiving them; and that the poetic sense is the only one that opens up these higher realities to you? Could not realities quite different from those admitted by your intellect lie behind the realities that your intellect admits, realities that do not condemn this world to “scientific” desolation, but that. wring pious devotion from your soul and give it a true religion? These are the representations that take place below the threshold of our all-seeing creator's consciousness and that finally lead him to no longer seek the secret of the world exclusively in the dry words of the anatomist, but to let it be revealed to him by the rustling of the trees in the forest, by the beings of nature itself. For he comes to the conclusion that there could be just as much soul in the movements and rustling of the trees as there is in man, whose inner life, after all, also becomes clear to him not directly but in gestures and sounds. He says to himself: I hear the sounding words and see the movements of my fellow man, and say to myself: he sends me sounds as I myself give them; he makes gestures as I myself make them: so he will have an inner life as I experience it myself within me. And only in me can I perceive such an inner life. All other inner life is only revealed to me through external signs. If I now interpret the external signs on other people's inner life, why should I not be able to relate the creeping movements of the hop plant, the crackling sounds of the trees, to an inner life? — Inspired by such ideas, our all-seeing person learns to understand the language of the juniper tree; it reveals an inner life to him, just as human language reveals an inner life to him. And so, for him, the whole of nature becomes the outer expression of its inner soul. What is given to man as perception is in itself an experience, a soul, even if it is of a different kind from that of man. And just as plants and seemingly inanimate beings are ensouled, so are entire world bodies. Man's organism is composed of innumerable cells. And each of these cells has its soul. The harmony of all these cell-souls is built into the common soul, as which man experiences himself. But he is only one link in a comprehensive organism. Am I not, the All-Seer reflects, a soul-link in the earth organism, just as the soul-cell of my blood corpuscle is a link in my organism? And must not the earth organism, like mine, be an experience and a soul in itself? Thus Goethe's Earth Spirit becomes a reality before the meditating soul. The way in which poetry can give rise to convincing truth in this way, and how the perception of this high truth in the heart of the All-Seer becomes religious devotion to the world soul: that is the content of Will's novel, which seeks to unite in unity: art, science and religion. Science is raised from the realm of the intellect to that of the imagination, an imagination that seeks to be not an organ of illusion but of higher knowledge. And life, which in the light of rational science appears to be a purposeless game of deception, acquires meaning and order in the context of the soul of the universe. A tragic experience of the hero is clarified when he views its causes and consequences from the point of view of his thus formed belief. He himself feels meaningfully integrated into a meaningful world. And he devoutly submits to the all-pervasiveness of the world spirit, recognizing his will in this pervasion as a member. “Foolish human brothers and sisters! From your fearful narrowness, turn soon to the boundless expanse! Stop confusing a part with the whole, mistaking your petty, fickle, cowardly, mercantile ego for your deepest, cosmic self! If you feel only as fragments of nature... Redeemed are those who, having penetrated the narrow barriers of the ego, feel their community with the whole and enter into the great order with devotion! They have accomplished the highest human art, have shaped their lives into devout music – have become a blissful voice in the symphony of the world (Volume 2, page 391).

This “novel of the All-Seer” may be called a book of longing. On the last pages, there is the sentence: “Every ideal means burgeoning high-altitude life, the early spring of a world Pentecost, prophetic reaching into the better world, awakening, inspiring dawn that precedes the new sun, reflection of the Heavenly Kingdom that cannot fail to appear.” The “all-seeing” person clearly ascends to this ideal. He looks into the past of man. He has developed from lower conditions. “That the future extends into the present is the nature of all development – just as the past extends into the present. The individual human being passes through the stages of development that his species had to go through before it reached the threshold of humanity. In my mother's womb I was a worm — and a fish — a newt and a lizard — a platypus, a marsupial and a monkey. My germ history is a brief repetition of the tribal history. This fundamental law can be extended beyond the present so that it also applies to the forthcoming stages of human development. Just as man in one respect still is what he once was, so in another respect he already is what he will later be. If, therefore, a higher development is to come out of him, then the germ of the higher must already be found in humanity (Vol. II, p. 396f.). Here stands Wille before the gates of the temple in which the creed matures, the cultivation of which the theosophical spiritual currents of all times have made their task. And he remains standing at the entrance. For anyone who feels the full significance of his above sentences will see that the next step is necessary: he must put them into living action. If the “germ of the higher” lies in man, then this germ must be developed. One cannot be satisfied with the mere fact that man's soul is his inner experience, but one should go further and see what can be experienced inwardly. Then one enters completely new realms of a higher reality. Our “all-seeing” friend repeatedly points out that the external facts that unfold before our senses point to inner experiences, and he repeatedly emphasizes that this inner life is the soul. Soul, soul, and again soul: we hear him say this in countless repetitions on his fascinating paths of knowledge and life. But is it not as if someone were to lead us through the entire animal kingdom, repeating over and over again, 'animal, animal, animal,' instead of explaining the special forms: worm, fish, newt, duck-billed platypus, and monkey? No, the soul is just as structured, rich, and diverse, and has just as many powers and laws as the physical. And into these realms of the soul lead the higher cognitions, which are called the theosophical views. Before the entrance gate to them, the will stops. Therefore, there are beautiful vantage points: the eyes, to see from these points, are given by theosophy. This can be seen everywhere in the book. This will be shown for the interesting sections: the “deed body” and “the all-phonograph” in the next issue, where, in reference to Leadbeater's “astral plane,” reference will be made to the realms to which Wille points without opening the eye for them.