Gothic Grotesque: Precursor of Modern Horrors
Saturday, June 30th, 2007In the last decades of the 19th century, stimulated by the fantastic and racist mythologies of Helena Blavatsky, by Malthus, Darwin (as formulated and promulgated by T. H. Huxley), by new data from geology, chemistry and physics and by a thirst for a preeminent history, for moral and physical superiority, Germany and Austria produced a series of occultist theorists who invented and then exalted an ancient history for the Aryan peoples. These millenarian evolutionary cults featured an eternal struggle by Aryans against various kinds of aggressive sub-humans and against religious persecution of their pure race-based, nature-worshipping gnosis.
Like the original Romantics and even more like their contemporary Victorian artists and thinkers, these Aryan cultists idealized the feudal past and all its trappings, considering it an essential expression of the German spirit. Medieval “Gothic” heraldry, for example was idealized and interpreted as a Gnostic transmission of the primary wisdom in Icelandic runes which were presented as the pictographs of creation. These influential cultists “preached the necessity for a new feudal order and corporate state,” as suggested by Hegel; they made a cardinal point of selective racial breeding, eugenics and “claimed that Germans were blood descendants of the ancient [Norse] pagan gods.” [1]
The fashioners of “Ariosophy,” many of whom changed their names and added the aristocratic prefix, von, drew heavily on Scriptural patterns, personae, and centuries of textual and esoteric commentary; grotesque distortions of Kabbala filled nearly all their theories, creative linguistics, symbolism and numerological speculations. The swastika and a related form, the triskelion (three spinning legs joined at the crotch) by 1875 became popular symbols of their ambitions and challenge to Christian symbols. In their subjective historicism and drive to create a new mythos, a spiritual history in which Aryans achieve godhead they continued essentials of the quest that is Romanticism (core period 1780-1835). Like Romantic and the subsequent “Victorian” texts their writings reveal the regressive and anxious tenor of post-Enlightenment dogmas of progress and exaltation of the Will to power and to re-create the world, ambitions offset by a sense of impending collapse as seen in short lyrics like Arnold’s “Dover Beach” or sprawling epics of passion, of civilizational rise and collapse like Wagner’s operas. (more…)
