The Magic Mountain

 I recently re-read Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice'  - a great Platonic masterpiece - especially the Dionysian dream. And at the same time, read his 'Tristan' which is loaded with the most superb layerings of meaning. Then, I found this small piece and share it here with you.

Thomas Mann wrote: 

"The seeker of the Grail, before he arrives at the Sacred Castle, has to undergo various frightful and mysterious ordeals in a wayside chapel called the Atre Périlleux. Probably these ordeals were originally rites of initiation, conditions of the permission to approach the esoteric mystery; the idea of knowledge, wisdom is always bound up with the "other world," with night and death.

In The Magic Mountain there is a great deal said of an alchemistic, hermetic pedagogy, of transubstantiation. And I, myself a guileless fool, was guided by a mysterious tradition, for it is those very words that are used in connection with the mysteries of the Grail. Not for nothing do Freemasonry and its rites play a role in The Magic Mountain, for Freemasonry is the direct descendant of initiatory rites. In a word, the magic mountain is a variant of the shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life. " 

From: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Seker & Warburg, London, 1980, p. 728. The author’s note on "The Making of The Magic Mountain" first appeared in the Atlantic, January 1953.

 

 

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