Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind: The Forgotten Life of a 20th-Century Austrian Polymath 3030612287, 9783030612283

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Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind The Forgotten Life of a 20th-Century Austrian Polymath Brian Collins

Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind

Brian Collins

Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind The Forgotten Life of a 20th-Century Austrian Polymath

Brian Collins Ohio University Athens, OH, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-61228-3    ISBN 978-3-030-61229-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For all those scholars whose books have been moved to the library’s off-site storage, whose ideas have been relegated to footnotes, and whose stories have been forgotten.

Preface

Twelve years ago, I was poking around in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan when my eyes were drawn to a paperback book with a rather crude drawing on the cover. The drawing depicted a face that was blandly human on one side, while the other side was that of a wolf, mouth open to reveal his cruelly sharp teeth. I turned it over and saw that it was given the triple subject classification “psychology/occult/anthropology.” This curious book was the 1978 paperback edition of Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy by Robert Eisler. At the time, I was dating an anthropology graduate student at Michigan who was enrolled in a course on “non-canonical” scholarship, in which students were required to focus on the work of an outdated, discounted, or otherwise marginal anthropologist. The idea of non-­ canonical scholarship fascinated me (as it still does) and I had it my mind when I purchased the book for $8.00. And so began my long detour onto the dimly lit and overgrown path that leads to this book. Following my initial purchase and perusal of Man into Wolf in 2008, I began to seek out other books written by Eisler. I wanted to read everything that others had written about him as well, but soon discovered that most of the available biographical material could be traced back to a handful of writings by Eisler’s sometimes-friend, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem. By far the most commonly quoted sources about Eisler are Scholem’s autobiographical books and essays, which usually portray him as something of an oddball, if not a crank. So, in order to balance out the condescension in Scholem’s accounts, I sought out vii

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archives that held Eisler’s own correspondence and papers at Oxford and the Warburg Institute. Having done some research on Man into Wolf and its author, I wanted to present it to my fellow historians of religion. To that end (and to the bemusement of my colleagues) I put together a wild card panel on “non-­ canonical scholarship” and gave a paper at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion (AAR) in Atlanta in 2010, a few months after I got my PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School. The paper, titled “Unmasking the Sovereign Sadist: Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf,” was full of errors and misunderstandings, and so it is fortunate that no one had any idea what I was talking anyway. I was, however, encouraged by the size of the crowd we managed to get on a Monday when a good number of attendees have to catch their flights home. They were almost certainly there for Jeffrey J. Kripal’s paper on Charles Fort and Paul C. Johnson’s paper on Michel Leiris rather than my paper on Eisler, but the fact that other scholars of religion had an interest in the work of disciplinary outsiders inspired me to keep looking into Eisler and his work with an eye toward eventually publishing something. In the years that followed (years in which I was in search of an academic position of any kind), I wanted to produce something that called attention to Eisler’s overlooked importance in the history of the religious studies. But I had no idea where to publish, whether anyone would be interested, or even if this was an advisable course of action, given that I was looking for a job teaching Hinduism and Buddhism rather than whatever subfield this project might fit into—if any such subfield even existed. In November of 2011, I met with Natalie Dohrmann at the AAR annual meeting in San Francisco so that we could catch up. Natalie had taught me the Hebrew Bible and Judaism at North Carolina State University when she was a newly minted PhD in the late 1990s. Over the course of our conversation, she asked me “what was keeping me up at night.” I took this to be her way of asking what scholarly problems were occupying my mind. My dissertation on the mythology of Paraśurāma was finished and I was working on a different book project on mimetic theory and Hindu myth, but I still had Eisler on my mind, as I explained to her. She was editing the Jewish Quarterly Review (JQR) and she invited me to submit a note for the journal if I ever got around to writing one. Two years after my meeting with Natalie, I finally landed an academic position as the Drs. Ram and Sushila Gawande Chair in Indian Religion and Philosophy at Ohio University. The next several years were occupied

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with the new job, so my research on Eisler took a back seat. But the chair came endowed with a research budget, which allowed for travel. And in June of 2015, I flew to rural Maharashtra in central India to explore the possibility of setting up a study abroad program at the Gopikabai Sitaram Gawande College in the small trading town of Umarkhed. On my flight out, I scheduled a four-day stop in London, where I could finally visit the Warburg Institute and examine the boxes of papers and correspondence that Eisler’s widow had donated after his death. I would not feel so strange about indulging my curiosity about Eisler if I was able to do it in the course of traveling to India, where my “official” research and curricular development projects were focused. The wealth of material at the Warburg convinced me to make a return trip the next summer, again on my way to India. The five days I spent reading through the papers in May 2016 deepened and expanded my understanding of Eisler and also renewed my interest in writing something about him. I finally finished the “note” I was working on for JQR and submitted it to Natalie. She informed me that it was much too long for a note, which could be published at the editor’s invitation, and would have to be submitted to peer reviewers for publication as an article. The external reviewers were, of course, scholars in Jewish Studies, the field into which I had wandered aimlessly. And though they gave me some great feedback, they ultimately recommended not to publish it. Consequently, I edited it down to the appropriate length for a note (which I had only ever been asked to submit anyway) and limited the subject matter to Eisler’s public debates about the Slavonic Josephus with the American scholar of post-Biblical literature Solomon Zeitlin (debates which, appropriately, had originally played out in the pages of the JQR in the 1930s) and his psychoanalysis of Robert Whitehead around the same time. It was published in the JQR in 2017 as “By Post or by Ghost: Ruminations on Visions and Epistolary Archives.” In the spring of 2017, I was corresponding with the Milan-based author and publisher Roberto Calasso. I had discovered, while perusing the bookshelf at my mentor Wendy Doniger’s house in Truro several years before, Calasso’s one-of-a-kind untitled masterwork on the foundations of human civilization (nine volumes as of this writing: The Ruin of Kasch, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Ka, K., Tiepolo Pink, La Folie Baudelaire, Ardor, The Celestial Hunter, and The Unnamable Present). I had met Roberto in person in the fall of 2014 in Palo Alto and we sent emails back and forth for a few years, mostly on the subjects of René

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Girard and Hindu mythology, which he knows quite well (having taught himself Sanskrit). On April 6, 2017, I wrote Roberto an email updating him on what I had been working on, including the JQR note, which I had just finished. Four days later, Roberto wrote me back. He had been happily shocked to see the name “Robert Eisler” in my email, he explained to me, because he had been interested in Eisler’s work for years and had made his own inquiries about Eisler’s papers at the Warburg. In a subsequent email, he told me that his publishing house, Adelphi, had done an Italian translation of Man into Wolf, and they were only waiting for him to get around to writing an afterword to publish it. He offered me the opportunity to write the afterword myself, which would then be translated into Italian and published with Uomo diventa lupo. I happily accepted and wrote a 23,000-word biographical essay on Eisler in the summer and fall of 2018, during which time I also learned that another Italian translation of Man into Wolf had already been published by Medusa in 2011 as Uomo Lupo. The translation was in many ways an improvement on the 1978 American edition. It contained several dozen images, a bibliography of Eisler’s published works, and two new introductory essays. When I mentioned this fact to Roberto, he was unconcerned by it. Uomo diventa lupo was published in May 2019 with my 68-page afterword, now titled “Un pezzo troppo quadrato: la vita e l’opera di Robert Eisler.” I had finally come out with a major piece on Eisler, but it had been published in a language I could not read. One month before the publication of the Italian translation, I received a grant from my university to pay for a student assistant to help me produce a podcast about Robert Eisler over the summer break. This was an idea I had conceived of some months before after listening to a professionally produced podcast called “S-Town,” which is about a small-town eccentric whose peculiar obsessions included clocks, astrolabes, hedge mazes, exotic flowers, and “fire-gilding.” I thought that if this podcast could make me care about the esoteric interests of this man with whom I had no connection by making them part of a compelling story, then I could do something similar with Eisler. The problem with telling Eisler’s story is, and always has been, that his life is inextricable from his work in economics, art history, religion, philology, and philosophy. Writing a proper intellectual biography would require more background research than it would be possible for me to do. But, I reasoned, if I could do it collaboratively, and bring in experts in the

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various fields in which Eisler worked so that they could contextualize and evaluate his ideas for me, it might be possible. A podcast would allow me to facilitate this collaboration with experts in the form of audio interviews. And in the place of the block quotes from and about Eisler that I would use in a book, I decided to employ voice actors to read the quotes in character. On March 30, 2019, I took the idea to an informal salon called “Iterator” in which friends and colleagues presented creative or scholarly projects in the early stages of development for feedback. At the salon, hosted in my living room on this occasion, I explained to the audience who Eisler was and how the podcast would work. I even had a few audience members read some excerpts out loud to demonstrate what role the voice actors would play in making the podcast something like a Ken Burns-­ style audio documentary, rather than a lecture recorded with an iPhone (which is what academic podcasts often sound like). What I really wanted to know was whether anyone would be likely to listen to something like what I was describing. The feedback was positive and I got some good advice from friends in the artistic community so I decided to go ahead with the project. It will surprise no one that podcasting turned out to be much harder than I had anticipated. Recording my voiceovers was arduous, the voice acting sessions were difficult to schedule, editing was very time-­consuming, and a surprisingly high number of scholars were unwilling to participate as guests. When I explained that I was doing a podcast about Robert Eisler, who wrote on art history, and that I wanted to talk to them about art history, they would tell me that they knew nothing about Robert Eisler. That was no problem, I would reply. I know about Robert Eisler; I want to talk to you about art history. To this, they would reply again that they knew nothing about Robert Eisler. And it went on like that. Adding to these unanticipated complications were my teaching commitments, my new duties as chair of my department, and the two other book projects on Hinduism that I was trying to bring to completion. Ultimately, I only got two of an anticipated ten episodes completed over the summer. But in the fall, I received another grant from the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund to complete the project. This allowed me to hire a new assistant and some new voice actors, and finally get the job done in June of 2020. I had some vague idea that eventually the right person, in publishing or at the AAR, would hear about my project through the grapevine and approach me with an offer to distribute it. This was an

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unreasonable expectation, and more so in light of the fact that the AAR had already denied my requests for funding twice. Rather than wait to be approached, my assistant suggested I contact the New Books Network (NBN), which I already knew from its “New Books in Hinduism” series. I got in touch with Marshall Poe at NBN and sent him the pilot episode of the podcast. Marshall liked it and decided to go ahead and release “A Very Square Peg: A Podcast Series About Polymath Robert Eisler” on NBN, even though it did not really fit their format. The episodes began coming out weekly on June 9, about three months into the COVID-19 pandemic. As of this writing, we are three episodes in. And though I am very proud of the podcast and have gotten some enthusiastic responses, it became clear early on that a podcast could not replace a book. But I did not even have a book; I had an afterword that Roberto and Adelphi had told me was mine to do with as I wished a year after its Italian publication. In November of 2019, I took my copy of Man into Wolf with me to the AAR’s annual meeting in San Diego, where I met with every possible publisher I could think of and pitched the idea of a new edition of Man into Wolf with the original English version of my afterword and maybe with the wonderful images included in the 2011 Medusa translation as well. Absolutely no one was interested in obtaining permissions for two dozen images. But beyond that, there were several other problems with my proposal. First, the book was already widely available online as a PDF and as a print-to-order book. Second, the copyright was an open question that no publisher wanted to have to answer. Third, Man into Wolf did not fit into anyone’s catalogue. It was Phil Getz at Palgrave who was intrigued enough to tell me that if I could expand the essay a bit, it might work for the Palgrave Pivot series. Three manuscript reviewers agreed and here we are. This is not the book that could have been written about Eisler—the much larger book written by a polyglot and polymath possessing mastery of the many disciplines in which Eisler worked. That book may yet come, but this is the book I was able to write. It is the book I have long known that I would write, without quite knowing how. May it serve as a contribution to the history of the history of religions, with its exclusions and arbitrary boundaries, its winners and losers, and all its glorious unlikelihoods (of which this book is one). Athens, OH, USA July 2020

Brian Collins

Acknowledgments

My “Eisler Project,” as I have designated it in the hold-all folder on my computer desktop, has taken many forms over the course of its existence. And each of those forms was made possible with the help of various friends and colleagues. From the panel on “non-canonical scholarship” at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting in 2010, thanks are due to my co-panelists Jason Bivins, Paul C. Johnson, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Hugh Urban, and Alexander Van Der Haven. For their assistance during my two research trips to the Warburg Institute, I am grateful to Eckart Marchand and Claudia Wedepohl. Natalie Dohrmann was the reason my note on the Eisler–Zeitlin controversy was published in the Jewish Quarterly Review, the same journal in whose pages that controversy had originally played out in the 1930s. I also received valuable feedback from some of that piece’s anonymous readers. The person most directly responsible for the essay that is the basis of this book is Roberto Calasso, who originally solicited me to write an afterword for his long-planned Italian translation of Man into Wolf and guided me through several rounds of revisions with his considerable skills as an editor. When I was contemplating turning the project into a podcast, I had a very useful feedback session with friends and colleagues David Colagiovanni, Matt DeTar, Melissa Haviland, Natasha Madoff, Kate Raney, and Lucy Schwallie at the informal “Iterator” salon conceived and hosted by Jeremy Bessoff. My work on the podcast was made possible by the assistance of Bryan Baur, Julie Ciotola, Caleb Crawford, Logan Crum, Brian Evans, Chloe Grogean, Logan Marshall, Marshall Poe, Chiara Ridpath, Tina Saraceno, Alyssa Skikus, Kristen Tobey, and March Washelesky, with partial funding from the Ohio xiii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

University Honors Tutorial College and the Ohio University Humanities Research Fund. I am also grateful to the women and men who were brave enough to be guests on (or at least be interviewed for) an experimental academic podcast of nebulous description: Steven Beller, Nick Campion, Willem De Blécourt, Marcello De Martino, Roberto Duncan, Radcliffe G.  Edmonds III, Amir Engel, Michael Gubser, Marsha Hewitt, Tom Hurka, Miles Kimball, Vladimir Marchenkov, Dorothea McEwan, Kristy Montee, Myrna Pérez Sheldon, Peter Vronsky, and Steven Wasserstrom. At various periods over the course of my research, I have received assistance from the Bodleian Libraries, the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College, the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford, the National Library of Israel, the Warburg Institute, and members of the extended Von Pausinger and Reitzes families (Ruth Armstrong, Peter Regen, Sue Regen, David Stork, and especially Richard Regen). This book in its current form owes its existence to Phil Getz, who took a risk on an unlikely project. Over the years, I have received encouragement to keep going down what often felt like a blind alley from my wife Jennifer Collins, along with Jeremy Biles, David Dawson, and H. C. Greisman. But none of the above people or institutions is responsible for any mistakes I have made in this book; those are mine alone. As Robert Eisler once told an exasperated editor, “I have the courage to err.”

Contents

1 Introduction: Man into Wolf  1 2 Vienna and Value Theory  9 3 The Turn to Art History: Aloïs Riegl, Giovanni Morelli, and the Udine Incident 21 4 “Ladies’ Coats and Beach Cabanas in Light of the History of Religion:” Cosmology, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin 31 5 Orphism, the Afikoman, and Conflicts with the Hamburg Circle 43 6 The King Who Did Not Reign: The League of Nations and the Slavonic Josephus 55 7 Negative Interest: The Dual Currency Model and the Journey to America 71 8 Dreamwork: The Fourth Gospel, Eranos, and the Turn to Psychoanalysis 81 9 Dachau and Buchenwald 97 xv

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10 Vanity of Vanities: Astrology, Ecclesiastes, and Last Days in England105 11 Conclusion: Man into Wolf Revisited—The Method and Magic of the Combinatory Mind117 Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications127 Index145

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1

The dedication page to a series of notebooks dated to 1898 and titled Die Phänomenalwerte: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aesthetik [Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetics]. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute) 11 Fig. 4.1 Portrait of Robert Eisler in Paris in 1925, signed and given to Gershom Scholem. (Courtesy of the Abraham Schwadron Collection at the National Library of Israel) 37 Fig. 10.1 Snapshot of Robert Eisler in England around 1944 taken from the photo album of his nephew G. Frederick Stork (1913–2008). The original caption reads, “Dr. Robert Eisler, scholar, professor, writer and lecturer.” (Courtesy of Richard Regen)106 Fig. 10.2 Snapshot of Robert and Lili in England around 1944 taken from the photo album of G. Frederick Stork. (Courtesy of Richard Regen) 107

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Man into Wolf

Abstract  This chapter introduces the polymathic scholar of religion, economics, philosophy, art history, and philology Robert Eisler through his last book, Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy, in which he theorizes that to survive the Ice Age, proto-humans abandoned the vegetarian and polyamorous life of social primates and began to imitate the hierarchical structures and hunting practices of the wolf pack, and that human aggression stems from incorporation of the wolfish instinct for cruelty in the collective unconscious. Following Eisler’s journey from being “one of the most prodigiously learned men of our time” to being dismissed as a “somewhat reckless amateur,” Collins presents Eisler’s biography as a way to explore the changing nature of intellectual life in Europe in the twentieth century. Keywords  Werewolves • Lycanthropy • Sadism • Masochism • Intellectual History For those readers who are unacquainted with Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy, I will begin by describing its unusual format. In the 1978 edition (which is also the American edition), the main text is preceded by an introduction written almost 30 years after the book’s original publication by someone named Donald D. Lathrop MD, a private practitioner in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_1

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psychotherapy and former director of “The Relationship Center” in Boise, Idaho. Following the introduction is a five-page foreword by the author himself, written three months before he died in 1949.1 Next comes a 30-page essay, identified as an address delivered to the Royal Society of Medicine “reproduced as exactly as the speaker can remember words not written down in advance” (Eisler 1978, xxiv).2 The rest of Man into Wolf’s 220 pages are taken up by 240 endnotes and five appendices. The first note, on the Marquis de Sade, is fully 12 pages long and has five footnotes of its own. The five appendices cover Carl Jung’s theory of archetypes, the Roman Lupercalia rite, “The Flagellation of Women in the Dionysian Mysteries,” the trial of John George Haigh (AKA “The Acid Bath Murderer”), and the case of the mass murderer Howard Unruh. In the foreword, Eisler explains that the unusual form of the book, with its copious footnotes far outstripping the page count of the essay, is an attempt to replicate in print the lengthy question and answer session that would follow the talk if it were given in a public setting. Without giving its title, he also mentions having written an earlier, larger book, in the preface of which he had given readers instructions on what sections to read (and in what order) so that they could quickly glean the main outlines of his arguments and evidence.3 In Man into Wolf, Eisler explains, he has gone one step further and done his impatient readers’ work for them, distilling his argument into a brief form that still manages to be wideranging enough to contain references to the paintings of Boticelli, the crimes of Neville “The Lady Killer” Heath, and the finer points of parachuting. Before first opening Man into Wolf, I had expected to find something like the eccentric antiquarianism of such hoary staples of the used bookstore’s “occult” section as Sabine Baring-Gold’s The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (1865) or Montague Summers’s The Werewolf (1933). But Eisler is no simple antiquarian and pays relatively little attention to historical cases of lycanthropy like those of Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun. Instead, Man into Wolf begins with the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and quickly transitions into a discussion of the phenomenology of sensation, accompanied by a simple but demonstrative graph that shows how masochism is a natural, if extreme, mechanism to prevent the desensitization of the sense organs. Sadism, on the other hand, is not explicable with recourse to sensation. Nor, Eisler insists, is it an atavistic throwback to the farthest reaches of humanity’s animalistic past, as some have suggested. Rather, it is the relic of a long-ago

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event in evolution during which humans abandoned the vegetarian and polyamorous life of the social primate and began to imitate the hierarchical structures and hunting practices of the wolf pack. Eisler concludes that the root of human sadism is the incorporation of the wolfish instinct for cruelty at the level of the collective unconscious as a result of this transformation of humans from prey to predator. Ergo, the instinctive bloodlust that lies behind humanity’s propensity for war and atrocity is not inherent to the organism. After an impressive list of examples from myth, art, anthropology, and psychoanalysis presented as evidence of this transformation, Eisler concludes the essay by hopefully raising the possibility of renouncing the instinctive bloodlust acquired with the adoption of predation and thereby achieving “peace on earth for men of good will” (1978, 30). Even stranger than its argument are the places where Man into Wolf pops up in popular culture. It is a reference point in Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology, a collection of avant-garde essays devoted to the music and thought of psychedelic musician Frank Zappa (Leslie 2005, 242). It also makes the list of recommended reading at the Dallas Leather Library, which specializes not in leather-bound volumes, but rather in books for discerning devotees of bondage and the S&M lifestyle. Willem de Blécourt has argued that Man into Wolf inspired the 1957 drive-in classic I Was a Teenage Werewolf, in which the titular lycanthrope (played by Michael Landon) is hypnotized into becoming a werewolf by a mad scientist who thinks that causing humanity to revert to its animal state is the only way to save it from mass destruction (2013, 206).4 In the 2004 paperback detective thriller Island of Bones, it appears on a suspected serial killer’s shelf, which is fitting, since Man into Wolf, at least according to leading expert on the subject Peter Vronsky (2017), contains the first usage of the term “serial killing” in the English language. In the novel, a police officer finds the book on a suspected serial killer’s shelf alongside some other titles on lycanthropy, prompting him to peruse the volume and comment, “This shrink Robert Eisler had a theory that violence, war, especially murder, could be traced back to man’s primal urges as a member of his animal pack.” The book’s hero, hardboiled private eye Louis Kincaid, then replies “Shrinks… It’s all bullshit” (Parrish 2018, 232). To get the story behind Eisler’s appearance in this detective story, I interviewed Kristy Montee, who, along with her sister Kelly, writes the Louis Kincaid novels under the pseudonym P. J. Parrish. Montee told me that the storyline had been inspired partly by learning about the

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customary “abduction” of the bride in a traditional Asturian wedding during her trip to northern Spain and partly by finding a reference to Man into Wolf on the Internet and ordering herself a copy. She had wanted to quote more of Eisler’s argument directly but was having a problem determining how to get copyright clearance, so she had her characters paraphrase the book in their dialogue instead (personal communication July 3, 2019). Man into Wolf is such an unusual book partly because it was written by such an unusual man. One of the first things that I noticed during my researches into Robert Eisler was the variety of subjects on which he wrote, which included such a wide array of topics as to confuse the identity of their author. Did the same man who wrote This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis also write The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources, both of which were published in 1931? I later learned that I was not alone in this puzzlement. In the frantic letters from friends trying to get him freed from Dachau in 1938 there was some confusion, based on contradictory descriptions, over whether the authorities should be looking for an economist, an art historian, a professor of Slavic languages, or a historian of religion. When, after finally being released in 1939, he was asked about his “subject of academic activity” on an immigration form, Eisler gave this partial account (spilling well into the margins): “History of Christian Origins, Political Messianism, History of Internationalism, [Comparative] History of Religions, and History and Theory of Money.” He appears to have run out of room to write the rest. Eisler did not keep these spheres of academic activity separate, as is evident in his recourse to psychoanalysis, philology, and art history in Man into Wolf. This tendency to freely mix methods and types of evidence goes back to the beginning of Eisler’s career. One reviewer wrote of his first work on the subject of religion, the weighty two-volume Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes [World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldviews]: No single reviewer can venture to sit in judgment upon him over this extended area, and indeed the first word should in justice be one of unqualified praise. Even if specialists decline on some points to ratify his conclusions in their own province, Herr Eisler will still deserve our gratitude in having

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introduced us to the many problems discussed in the book which are brought together there in one connexion. (Burkitt 1911, 145)

Some were less appreciative of Eisler’s polymathic style than others. The French scholar André Boulanger characterized a later work, Orphisch-­ Dionysische Mysteriengedanken in der christlichen Antike [The Ideas of the Orphic-Dionysian Mysteries in Early Christianity] as “an uninterrupted series of hypotheses, unexpected and sometimes bewildering reconciliations, and digressions” and commented that, were it not for the index, “one would go astray many times in the undergrowth of an impossibly dense documentation: texts in all languages, popular songs, folklore, and figurative monuments of all kinds” (Boulanger 1926, 317). But while reviewers of his earlier works sometimes complained about Eisler’s digressive manner of writing (a complaint that the compact and compartmentalized format of Man into Wolf is clearly meant to address), they never doubted his erudition or his seriousness. In the April 1930 issue of The Harvard Theological Review Maurice Goguel of the Faculté de Théologie Protestante at the Êcole des Hautes Études in Paris referred to Eisler as “without doubt one of the most prodigiously learned men of our time” (Goguel 1930, 97). Despite the fact that Goguel went on to eviscerate Eisler’s arguments about the historical Jesus in that same article, there is no discernible irony in this characterization. By 1947, however, the situation had changed. Gilbert Murray, a wellknown classicist and public intellectual who had previously recommended Eisler for both a teaching post at Oxford and a diplomatic post with the League of Nations, characterized Eisler as a “somewhat reckless amateur” in a letter of reference (Murray 1947). Why this change in tone? How did “one of the most prodigiously learned men of our time” become a “somewhat reckless amateur” in the eyes of his peers? We can begin with the obvious: It was not Eisler who changed between 1930 and 1947, but rather the nature of intellectual life in Europe, which became increasingly hostile to the kind of ambitions and personality that he possessed. To go beyond the obvious, we need to construct what has so far been missing from the record: an account of Eisler’s remarkable life and work.

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Notes 1. In the 1951 British edition the introduction is by Sir David K. Henderson, Chairman of the Psychiatric Section of the Royal Society of Medicine, who notes Eisler’s sudden death in a final paragraph: “Since the above Introduction was written, it was with profound regret I noted that on 17 December 1949 Dr. Robert Eisler had passed away. Everyone will deeply regret that he did not live to see the publication of his book, to which he had given so much work and thought” (13). 2. It is not clear from this sentence whether Eisler means that he supplemented the lecture he read to his audience with whatever extemporaneous remarks he remembers making over the course of the talk or whether the entire lecture was extemporaneous and reproduced from memory. The latter is highly unlikely but not impossible; as I would later learn, he was known to give lengthy lectures with no paper in front of him. He probably did have a paper in front of him though, since he published a shorter version of the essay as “Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Account of the Fall” in volume 44 of The Hibbert Journal in 1946. A German-language version of the essay also exists (“Wandlung zum Werwolf. Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen, soziologischen und psychoanalytischen Deutung des Lycanthropie”) but seems to never have been published. 3. The book was The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, which is 638 pages long and contains the instructions for readers on pages xi–xiii. 4. I must confess myself skeptical on this point.

References Baring-Gold, Sabine. 2006. The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Boulanger, André. 1926. Orphisch-Dionysische Mysteriengedanken in der christlichen Antike (Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, II Vorträge 1922–1923, II. Teil) by ROBERT EISLER. Revue de l’histoire des religions 93: 315–321. Burkitt, F.C. 1911. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt by Robert Eisler. The Classical Review 25 (5): 145. Collins, Brian. 2017. By Post or by Ghost: Ruminations on Visions and Epistolary Archives. Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (3): 393–404. ———. 2019. Un pezzo troppo quadrato: la vita e l’opera di Robert Eisler. In Uomo diventa lupo: un’interpretazione antropologica di sadism, masochismo e licantropia, ed. Robert Eisler, trans. Raul Montanari, 323–391. Milan: Adelphi Edizioni.

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———. 2020. Unmasking the Sovereign Sadist: Robert Eisler’s Man into Wolf. Paper presented at the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting; 1 November 2010, Atlanta, GA. De Blécourt, Willem. 2013. Monstrous Theories: Werewolves and the Abuse of History. Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 2 (2): 188–212. Last accessed June 17, 2020. https://doi.org/10.5325/ preternature.2.2.0188. Eisler, Robert. 1931a. The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources. New York: The Dial Press. ———. 1931b. This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis. London: Search Publishing. ———. (1945) 1946. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Account of the Fall. The Hibbert Journal 44 (2): 159–165. ———. 1951. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. ———. 1978. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. Santa Barbara, CA: Ross-Erickson, Inc. Publishers. Goguel, Maurice. 1930. The Problem of Jesus. The Harvard Theological Review 23 (2): 93–120. Leslie, Esther. 2005. Academy Zappa: Proceedings of the First International Conference of Esemplastic Zappology (ice-Z). London: SAF. Murray, Gilbert. 1947. Gilbert Murray to Ilse Ursell. 13 September. Archive, Special Collections, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. Parrish, P.J. 2018. Island of Bones. Traverse City, MI: Our Noir Press. Summers, Montague. 2003. The Werewolf in Lore and Legend. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Vronsky, Peter. 2017. The Origin of the Term ‘Serial Killer:’ A History. November 8. Accessed June 16, 2020. https://serialkillershistory.wordpress. com/2017/11/08/coining-the-term-serial-killer-a-history/.

CHAPTER 2

Vienna and Value Theory

Abstract  This chapter describes how Robert Eisler came of age in the same Jewish cultural milieu that produced the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, the poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the father of Psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, all of whom were connected to Eisler in one way or another. The focus is on Eisler’s early work with the Second Austrian School of Value, influenced by Christian von Ehrenfels, Alexius von Meinong, and Franz Brentano. Collins also discusses Eisler’s first treatment of the philosophical problem of masochism and the beginning of his interest in mythology as a way to reconstruct ancient worldviews. Keywords  Second Austrian School of Value Theory • Jewish Culture in Vienna • Franz Brentano • Christian von Ehrenfels • Alexius von Meinong Robert Eisler, the oldest of four children, was born in Vienna on April 27, 1882, to Friedrich Fritz Eisler, an émigré from Bohemia, and Vienna native Melanie Reitzes. Robert’s father Friedrich was a partner in the manufacturing firm Spieler and Eisler, whose “combs, brushes, pyramids of whalebone, [and] barber and hair dresser tools” won awards at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (Thacher n.d.). He had come © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_2

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to Vienna like many other Jews of the time in hopes of finding a place in the bourgeoisie of the Austro-Hungarian capitol. Eisler’s father died in 1905 at the age of 49. The date of his mother’s death is unknown, but what little evidence we have suggests that Eisler remained close to his mother throughout his life, dedicating his first work to her, calling her to help him when he ran into trouble in 1907, and listing an “aged mother” as his sole dependent on his 1939 immigration form. His mother’s family, the Reitzes, were in banking and had made a fortune investing abroad in the American Transcontinental Railroad in the 1840s (personal communication with Ruth Armstrong, March 19, 2018). They also owned—and Melanie Eisler seems to have inherited—an estate in the wealthy Jewish enclave of Frankfurt am Main, home of the famous Rothschild family. As he tells it in Man into Wolf, Eisler’s uncle was a lawyer who once represented the novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the man from whose name the psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing derived the term “masochism.”1 It is not recorded exactly where Eisler grew up, but in early twentieth-­ century Vienna, the majority of Jews lived in the Leopoldstadt, formerly a ghetto into which they had fled after being expelled by Emperor Leopold in the seventeenth century (Silverman 2012, 23). Although Christians still outnumbered Jews in the Leopoldstadt, it bore the nickname “Mazzesinsel,” or “Matza Island,” and it was the place that Eisler would later designate, in his truly imaginative blueprint for Zionism, as a Jewish state for those Jews not kosher enough to settle in Palestine. After gymnasium, Eisler attended the University of Vienna, where he explored his interests in “archaeological and philosophical problems” (1910, viii). An unpublished essay from this period, Die Phänomenalwerte: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aesthetik [Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetics], comprises six handwritten notebooks dated to 1898. The frontispiece bears the aforementioned dedication to his mother and a picture of the 16-year-old Eisler photographed in three-quarter profile and Victorian finery, complete with a Fiberloid collar and a wool bowler hat clutched loosely in his kid-gloved hands (Fig. 2.1). Eisler’s earliest published work, written when he was a student, is contained in five essays produced at the true fin de siècle from 1899 to 1901 and published as Studien zur Werttheorie [Studies in Value Theory] in 1902. Eisler’s work in this period belongs to the “Second Austrian School of Value Theory.” The First Austrian School of Value Theory had comprised economists inspired by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk,

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Fig. 2.1  The dedication page to a series of notebooks dated to 1898 and titled Die Phänomenalwerte: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aesthetik [Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetics]. (Courtesy of the Warburg Institute)

Friedrich von Wieser, and especially Carl Menger, whose 1871 Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre [Principles of Economics] served as the starting point of Austrian Economics as a school of thought.2 The goal of the First Austrian School was to develop a robust subjective theory of economic value. In this view, objects primarily have value because someone wants them, rather than because of how useful they are, how much labor has gone into producing them, or what one can get in exchange for them. The Second Austrian School of Value Theory wanted to extend the subjective notion of value beyond economics into a more general theory that could also apply to questions of ethical and aesthetic values, and, in the case of Eisler, serve as a scientific basis for historical inquiry. The thinkers of the Second Austrian School, including Eisler’s teachers Christian

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von Ehrenfels and Alexius von Meinong, were influenced by the charismatic thinker Franz Brentano, a former Catholic priest and philosopher of mind whose lectures on empirical psychology shaped the work of a whole generation of scholars, including Edmund Husserl and Sigmund Freud. Rejecting German Idealism, Brentano promoted a return to the Aristotelian and Cartesian scheme that posited three types of mental objects: presentations (Vorstellungen), judgments (Urteile), and “matters of love and hate” (Gemütstätigkeiten, sometimes translated with the more prosaic “interests”). These three categories corresponded to the three fields of ontological inquiry undertaken by Brentano’s psychological realist descriptivism, that is, the ontologies of objects, states of affairs, and values, respectively (Smith 1994, 58). Brentano also developed the idea of intentionality, arguing that mental states are always “about” something. The specific kind of intentionality that the Second School was most concerned with was valuation. Within the Second School there was a range of views about what served as the valuation, with Ehrenfels arguing for “desire” (Verlangen), Meinong arguing for “feeling” (Gefühl), and Max Scheler arguing for the more specific “value-feelings” (Wertgefühl) (Grassl 2017, 10). But, although the Second Austrian School’s theory was subjective, the process of valuation could be “correct” or “incorrect” depending on the intrinsic value of the valued object. Partly this was due to the Aristotelian and scholastic intellectual heritage of Brentano, who had left the Church largely over the doctrine of papal infallibility (see Schaefer 2007). Wolfgang Grassl explains Brentano’s notion of intrinsic value and how it fits into an ostensibly subjective theory: For Brentano, truth, beauty, and goodness, shared in being normative concepts—they carry with them the sense of a requirement or a demand. A judgment is true if and only if it corresponds to that domain of reality it is about; values are emotions that fit what they are about; the good is what is worthy of love and of being chosen; the beautiful is that which is worthy of admiration. Not every presentation is of particular aesthetic value, though; in order to be so, it has to become the object of an emotion in which one correctly takes a positive stance towards it. In short, according to Brentano, an object is beautiful if a presentation that is directed at it arouses a correct, positive emotion, i.e., a form of pleasure; it is ugly, on the other hand, if a presentation that is directed at it arouses a correct, negative emotion, as a form of displeasure. (2017, 15)

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Risieri Frondzi describes the Second School’s conception of value as “a relationship between a subject and an object which, by virtue of a clear and complete picture of the object, determines within us, along the entire range of our feelings from pleasure to pain, an emotional condition more intense than [the] nonexistence of that very same object (1971, 46).3 The difficulty lies in the question of what constitutes a “clear and complete picture of the object.” In Brentano’s view, an imperfect picture of an object could result in a misattribution of value. In other words, a valuation would be mistaken if directed toward the wrong thing, while the “right thing” is something that is worthy of value. For some of Brentano’s followers, part of value theory was to guide people’s valuations toward the right things. In his 1902 lecture, “On the Epistemology of Aesthetic Criticism,” Eisler contradicted this view. Rejecting any notion of the Platonic ideal of beauty, he argued instead that “beautiful is, what somebody actually likes, or at any time liked” (1904b, 77). He also rejected the idea that a value theorist had any business telling someone else what they should value by claiming to have a clearer, more complete, or more objective picture of the world. All such claims were untenable because they always relied on arbitrary unscientific judgments like a priori rational norms, arbitrarily stratified “tastes” (uneducated vs. educated, normal vs. perverted, advanced v. primitive), or recourse to some kind of external authority. Therefore, any theory of value that was anything other than purely descriptive was, to Eisler, epistemologically unjustifiable. To Eisler’s mind, as he wrote in Man into Wolf, the naïve notion that values are mere qualities of a substance was “equivalent to the absurd belief of a person so deluded as to think that the power which drives motor vehicles through our streets or stops them at the crossings is provided by the rays emanating from the red and green traffic-lights” (1951, 24).4 It would be equally naïve to locate these values in the evaluator’s mind alone. To be understood empirically, values must therefore be explained in terms of observable concrete human activities, which are, unlike values themselves, subject to direct observation. In the second essay in Studies in Value Theory Eisler describes values as the “dependent variables” of human behavior. To solve for these dependent variables, he relies on the groundbreaking Vienna Circle philosopher Ernst Mach’s 1886 Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen [Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations], which sets up a triad of body, ego, and external object (see Mach 1914, 8). To summarize a sometimes-confusing

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argument, we can say that Eisler deems a change of state, either of the body or of an external object, to have a positive value when it is brought about by an act of will, which is in turn limited by the physical environment. A change of state inhibited by an act of will therefore has a negative value. In other words, value rests on intentionality. In a review of Studies in Value Theory the American philosopher Evander Bradley McGilvary provides a reductio ad absurdum to Eisler’s argument: It should follow that if, while standing upon the edge of a precipice, I am startled by a sudden noise and topple over, the fall has a positive value as compared with the experience of hearing the noise. This theory is beautifully simple and removes all possibility of difficult complications, only what is meant by value does not seem to correspond in the least with what is usually meant by that term. (1904, 246)

Eisler came to believe that value theory, as he conceived of it, was an area of inquiry that could be used to encompass the ontologies of objects (which had to be studied descriptively) and states of affairs (which had to be studied historically). Objects are opaque to us and can therefore never be apprehended in their entirety; we cannot simultaneously see the inside and outside of an object. Eisler argued that the qualitative-quantitative description of objects is therefore necessarily limited to partial representations of a whole, pointing out that “never, not even in the distant future, will a geographic map be micrographically presented on a magnified scale of n:1” (1902, 4). Likewise, historical analysis of states of affairs is also limited because it must reduce and simplify the “genetic trajectory” of a state of affairs by plotting it along a series of somewhat arbitrarily selected points. Eisler counted both of these methods as “descriptive” and used the term “Method A” for qualitative-quantitative (or synchronic) description and “Method B” for historical (or diachronic) description. He concluded that as these two methods have become more fully developed, they have exposed their own limitations and begun to converge in ways that raise questions about the relationship between objects and states of affairs that neither Method A nor Method B is capable of properly articulating, much less answering. To answer these new questions, Eisler argued, a “higher appreciation” (a “Method C”) was necessary. He characterized this method as “functionally explanatory” (1902, 5).

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To explain the relationship between A, B, and C, Eisler provided an illustration of three related fields in which geography is an example of Method A, “earth history” (perhaps better understood as geology) is an example of Method B, and physics is an example of Method C.  As a qualitative-­quantitative descriptive method, geography could answer any question about the current form of the earth. As a historical descriptive method, geology could work backward to understand how it reached that form. And as a functionally explanatory method, physics could scientifically express the natural laws that underlie geological changes. The example above is noteworthy in that it can precisely describe and explain the shape of the earth in the absence of living beings, whose interventions (as we know all too well) can interrupt the sequence of geological cause and effect to produce a change in the world that is not the result of natural laws but intentional actions on the part of organisms. These intentional actions of organisms produce historical facts. A historical fact, for Eisler, was anything that is different from the way it would be in a world without life. A historical fact could be an object like an arrowhead, an anthill, or a King James Bible; or it could be a state of affairs like birds singing, ice cream melting, or the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV’s pilgrimage on foot in 1077 to see Pope Gregory VII in Canossa and appeal his excommunication (1902, 15). It is hard to imagine an analogous line of inquiry that can explain an event in human history in the same way that geography, geology, and physics can explain the Grand Canyon. Nonetheless, this seems to be exactly what Eisler wanted to do. The problem that will concern us exclusively in the following is that of a philosophy of historical facts. We want to try to answer the questions, to what extent and with what successes Method C has already been used in historical research and to what extent it can be used in it at all. (1902, 8)

In order to describe complex human-initiated events in terms of observable phenomena, Eisler had to reduce the actions and actors to their simplest functions, depicting all organisms as more or less complex energy systems that tend toward equilibrium. All these organic energy systems constantly expended energy by virtue of being alive, and therefore needed to take in energy to maintain their equilibrium. For an organism, then, energy-supply was value and all external objects presented either value or disvalue insofar as they could keep the energetic system in equilibrium. In other words, the “reason” for every organism’s action, no matter how

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complex the organism or how sophisticated the action, can ultimately be understood as the need for an energetic system to achieve equilibrium. Or, as Eisler put it, “all the general functional forms on which the individual reactions…are based must be understood as special cases of approximation to the dynamic equilibrium f(R) + f(S) = 0” (1902, 22).5 Here Eisler’s argument is somewhat confusing. He rejects the idea of free will as belonging in the “asylum ignorantae” with all the other metaphysical concepts about souls and the like (1902, 9). Instead of free will, Eisler explained the intentionality of actions with mathematical formulae taken from Richard Avenarius, whose materialist “empirical criticism” is clearly an influence on Eisler’s thought. He continues: From these explanations there are three tasks for the value theory to be justified as the philosophy of historical facts: I. Qualitative-quantitative description of the known historical phenomena with the help of the analytically derived value concept to be introduced. II. Determination of the general functional forms on which the historical phenomena are based, or of the elementary values ​​corresponding to the given values ​​to be understood as resultants. III. Subsumption of the found general functional forms (or the corresponding elementary values) under the general formula of an indirect or direct approximation to the dynamic equilibrium state f(R)  +  f(S)  =  0 as the vital maintenance maximum. (1902, 22)

Tasks I, II, and III above correspond to Methods A, B, and C, which we have seen exemplified as geography, geology, and physics. But performing an analysis like this on historical facts rather than geological formations adds an extra layer of complexity. Eisler called this “the problem of life,” observing that “in the problem of life included in the problem of historical facts, the problem solver himself becomes the object of problem solving [and] this, linked to the most important interests of life, becomes a vital question in every sense of the word…”(1902, 8). Geological formations do not require an observer to exist; we assume that they even exist on uninhabited worlds. But in order for it to exist, history requires not only an observer, but an interpreter, which makes the act of interpretation an inextricable element in any historical fact. Discussing this problem, Eisler turned to Georg Simmel’s 1892 essay “Die Probleme der Geschichtsphelodophie: eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie” [“The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Study”]. The questions he raises are best summed up in his 1907 revision of this work, where Simmel famously wrote:

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The task of enabling us to see the event “as it really happened” is still naively imposed upon history. In opposition to this view it is necessary to make clear that every form of knowledge represents a translation of immediately given data into a new language, a language with its own intrinsic forms, categories, and requirements… In order to qualify as objects of knowledge, certain aspects of the facts are thrown into relief, and others are relegated to the background. Certain specific features are emphasized. Certain immanent relations are established on the bases of ideas and values. All this—as we might put it—transcends reality. (1977, vii–viii)

Eisler’s point is that when we interpret a historical event, which aspects of the facts are thrown into relief and which are relegated to the background is determined by the imposition of our own consciousness on the consciousness of the historical actors. When we ascribe motivations and reasons to a historical event, we are not only distorting the event, but also using that distortion to reaffirm our own false sense of the objectivity of values. This brings us to the interpretation of Henry IV’s pilgrimage on foot to Canossa in 1077 to appeal his excommunication to Pope Gregory VII, considered by some to have been a desperate act of self-abasement and by others an ingenuous political ploy. In the vast majority of cases [of historical interpretation], we are dealing with emotional accentuations that are so familiar and practiced that the thought of the possibility, indeed conceivability, of another emphasis is suppressed, and the psychological value relationship found is erroneously raised to a necessary a priori. That someone defends his life because life is a good seems to be a sufficient, flawless explanation, although any suicide could teach us that life is not only not a good, but even a bad thing… It is very instructive to examine the usual explanations of a somewhat striking historical event (Henry IV’s walk to Canossa, for example) to determine at how many different points psychological value relationships are assumed, of which would the exact opposite would be conceivable. Accordingly, the assumption of a “necessary link” between the nature of the environment and the subjective emotional state appears as a mere concealment of numerous problems that remain in reality unsolved. (1902, 15–16)

Eisler’s attempt at an empirical interpretation of historical facts appears Quixotic on its face, and it is tempting to separate it out from the rest of his subsequent work for simplicity’s sake. But the ideas in Studies in Value Theory, as difficult as they are to explain, are crucial for understanding the

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development of Eisler’s thought. They are at the forefront in Man into Wolf, even down to the graph that represents the variable intensity of sensation, which appears in nearly identical form on page 76 of his 1904 essay “Der Wille zum Schmerz” (“The Will to Pain”) and, 45 years later, on page 26 of Man into Wolf. Studies in Value Theory also signaled the direction toward myth that Eisler would take in the more immediate future. After his brief discussion of Simmel, Eisler argued that the unsolved problem of the presence of the interpreter was apprehensible in all attempts to describe the world, from the most modern and scientific to the most ancient and mythological. He took special interest in the latter, hypothesizing that its “mythologemes” “would have to be far more tenacious than analogous formations in other branches of research precisely because of their close connection to such a large range of practical interests [and] that this area of knowledge ​​ appears to be historically burdened with rudiments of a lost worldview in an excellent way” (1902, 8).6 It was precisely the project of reconstructing lost worldviews from their rudiments embedded in mythology that Eisler took up in his first major work.

Notes 1. Eisler could be referring either to his maternal uncle Josef Reitzes or his paternal uncle Max Eisler. Both men were lawyers in Vienna. 2. In October 1930, Eisler publicly debated one of the leading exponents of the Austrian School, Ludwig Von Mises. Though he was an Austrian by birth, Eisler’s economics were Keynesian, focused on the role of central banks in controlling inflation and unemployment, while Mises predictably traced the Great Depression back to organized labor and government interventions in the market. See Hülsmann (2007, 616–628). 3. Another of Eisler’s publications from this period will help illustrate the point. “Der Wille zum Schmerz, Ein psychologisches Paradoxon” (“The Will to Pain, A Psychological Paradox”) refutes the Aristotelian notion of eudaemonism with the argument that what Aristotle and others have viewed as the natural human attraction toward the pleasant is better understood as the biological drive toward intensity, which can either be pleasant or unpleasant (Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universitat zu Wien (1904a), pp. 63–79). 4. It is important to note here that Eisler’s early work on value theory remained an important part of his theoretical framework forty years later in what

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seems to be the entirely unrelated project of determining the root cause of human violence. 5. The formula basically says that in a stable energy system, the positive or negative fluctuation in energy expenditure is offset by the positive or negative fluctuation in energy intake. 6. “Mythologemes” seems to refer to the constituent elements of a myth, better described by Claude Lévi-Strauss 1955 as “mythemes.”

References Eisler, Robert. 1902. Studien zur Werttheorie. [Studies in Value Theory.] Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1904a. Der Wille zum Schmerz, Ein psychologisches Paradoxon. Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universitat zu Wien: 63–79. ———. 1904b. Zur Erkenntnistheorie der ästhetischen Kritik. Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum fünfzehnten Jahresbericht (1902) der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universität zu Wien: 73–77. ———. 1910. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. Munich: Oscar Beck. ———. 1951. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. Frondzi, Risieri. 1971. What Is Value? An Introduction to Axiology. 2nd ed. La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company. Grassl, Wolfgang. 2017. Toward a Unified Theory of Value: From Austrian Economics to Austrian Philosophy. Axiomathes 27: 531–559. Hülsmann, Jörg Guido. 2007. Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Auburn, AL: The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. The Structural Study of Myth. Journal of American Folklore 68.270: 428–444. Mach, Ernst. 1914. The Analysis of Sensations. Chicago and London: Open Court Publishing Company. McGilvary, Evander Bradley. 1904. Studien zur Werttheorie by Robert Eisler. The Philosophical Review 13 (2, Mar.): 247. Schaefer, Richard. 2007. Infallibility and Intentionality: Franz Brentano’s Diagnosis of German Catholicism. Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (3): 477–499. Silverman, Lisa. 2012. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Simmel, Georg. 1977. The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay. New York: Free Press.

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Smith, Barry. 1994. Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano. Peru, IL: Open Court Publishing. Thacher, John. n.d. World’s Columbian Exposition List of Awards (Foreign), as Copied for Mrs. Virginia C.  Meredith, Chairman, Committee on Awards, Board of Lady Managers, from the Official Records in the Office of Hon. John Boyd Thacher, Chairman, Executive Committee on Awards. Last accessed June 15, 2020. http://chsmedia.org/media/fa/fa/LIB/WCE_AwardsList_ Foreign.htm.

CHAPTER 3

The Turn to Art History: Aloïs Riegl, Giovanni Morelli, and the Udine Incident

Abstract  This chapter discusses Robert Eisler’s early work as an art historian, influenced by two distinct thinkers. From Aloïs Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen, or “artistic volition,” Eisler developed his idea of a worldview that can be reconstructed from works of art. And from Giovanni Morelli, who focused on small details to correctly identify the artists for misattributed paintings in Italian museums, Eisler took his practice of looking for seemingly quotidian elements that were commonly overlooked by other scholars. Collins also tells the story of Eisler’s travels through the Mediterranean, including his stay with Sir Arthur Evans in Crete and his arrest for art theft in Udine in 1907, followed by an attempted suicide in an Italian jail cell, and confinement to an asylum. Keywords  Aloïs Riegl • Giovanni Morelli • Art theft • Kunstwollen

In 1902, Eisler graduated from the University of Vienna with a doctorate that was neither in archaeology nor philosophy, but in economics. The next year, he published his first article on art history, “Mantegnas frühe Werke und der römische Antike” [“Mantegna’s Early Works and Roman Antiquity”]. Next, Eisler continued his education on his own, traveling through the Mediterranean visiting museums and archaeological sites like Knossos, Ephesus, and Miletus. In 1904, he was hosted in Crete by the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_3

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pioneering British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who would later attempt to secure a position for Eisler at Oxford to help him flee the Nazis. When Eisler returned to Austria in 1905, he took a second doctorate from the University of Vienna Institute of Art History, where he wrote a dissertation titled “Die Landschaftsmalerei in der antiken Kunst” [“Landscape Painting in Ancient Art”].1 Eisler was studying under Aloïs Riegl and Riegl’s student Franz Wickhoff. Riegl, who had himself been a student of Franz Brentano, provided the theoretical foundations of the Vienna School of Art History by aiming to elevate it to “a general science of culture” (Wood 2000, 9). Beyond the traditional art historical tasks of assigning authorship and assessing quality, Riegl was interested in the history of perception itself and thought that it was possible to “[reconnect] the beholder of the painting or the building with an initial perceptual event and ultimately with an entire worldview” (Wood 2000, 9). Both Riegl and Wickhoff exerted a great deal of influence in the development of art history in Austria and on Eisler’s thought in particular. “It is certainly not without internal significance,” writes Julius von Schlosser, “that a student of Wickhoff, Robert Eisler… published Studies in the Theory of Value [Studien zur Werttheorie] in the final years of Riegl’s life, in which, admittedly with only partial success, he sought to ascertain the foundations of artistic judgment” (von Schlosser 2001, 45). Riegl’s thought was influential on the work of Walter Benjamin, whom Eisler would meet through Gershom Scholem, and that of Aby Warburg, the art historian whom Eisler would later connect with in Hamburg. In 1929, Benjamin listed Riegl’s Late Roman Art Industry as one of only four works of German scholarship that still “remained alive” (Peaker 2001, 291). And Warburg was keenly interested in Riegl’s ideas about art history’s potential to become a general history of ideas with its own methodology. In a famous paper he delivered in October of 1912, Warburg laid out his vision: Until now, a lack of adequate general evolutionary categories has impeded art history in placing its materials at the disposal of the—still unwritten— “historical psychology of human expression.” By adopting either an unduly materialistic or an unduly mystical stance, our young discipline blocks its own panoramic view of history. It gropes toward an evolutionary theory of its own, somewhere between the schematisms of political history and the dogmatic faith in genius. (Quoted in Gombrich 1999, 270)

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Instead of political history or “dogmatic faith in genius” Warburg proposed what he called an “iconological analysis” that could “range freely, with no fear of border guards, and can treat the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds as a coherent historical unity (an analysis that can scrutinize the purest and the most utilitarian of arts as equivalent documents of expression)” and “by taking pains to illuminate one single obscurity, can cast light on great and universal evolutionary processes in all their interconnectedness” (Quoted in Gombrich 1999, 270). Two of Riegl’s ideas are worth mentioning briefly here due to the degree to which they shaped Eisler’s work. The first is the hermeneutical situation of the art-observer, whose interpretation of the art-object is informed by the tension between the meaning of the work in its original context and the various other meanings imposed on it in the years since its creation, each of them a product of its own time and place. In Eisler’s words: The “conception” of the work of art, far from being uniquely determined by the constant material substratum, changes incessantly: original existing empathies are lost, new ones, which have little to do with the old ones, are added, and so on. It is clear that these “relative changes” must be taken into account no less carefully than the material ones. (1902, 91)

The other of Riegl’s concepts that influenced Eisler—and for subsequent historians and philosophers, the most significant—is Kunstwollen, or “artistic volition,” which encompasses the intention of the artist, the experience of the viewer, and the shared mentality that brings them into alignment. Kunstwollen is a much argued-about term, but Michael Gubser provides a good elucidation: Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen encompassed this interpenetrating subject/object duality in art as a historically conditioned, formal relationship. This duality was immanent within the work of art (both form and content had subjective and objective significance) and within the viewer/ artwork relationship (both determining the significance of a work). (2006, 157)

The idea of Kunstwollen also builds on the subjective conception of value established by the Second Austrian School, as Margaret Olin points out:

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Unlike the Austrian economist Carl Menger thirty-two years earlier, Riegl does not need to argue that values are not grounded in objects themselves. He can simply assume their subjectivity. He reinstates a hierarchy intended to be compatible with this subjective view, however, by postulating… a historical development in values themselves… (1992, 176)

Along with Riegl, another influential thinker that Eisler began to engage in this period was Giovanni Morelli, a trained physician and patriot who was active in the nineteenth-century struggle to unify the Kingdom of Italy, eventually becoming a senator. Much more of a traditional art historian than Riegl, Morelli was a fixture in the Italian art world, publishing a series of essays in Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst [The Journal of Fine Arts] between 1874 and 1876 in which he argued that European museums were full of misattributed Italian paintings. He penned his provocative articles under the pseudonym Ivan Lermolieff and presented them as translations from the Russian by the equally pseudonymous Johannes Schwarze. The reason for this subterfuge was, at least partially, to protect his position and reputation as he skewered the smug and pretentious critics of his day for their errors with his “sharp and often acid” wit (Wind 1965, 139n62). Morelli’s recommendations for determining the true creators of these misattributed works is described by Carlo Ginzburg: [We] should not depend, as was so often the case, on the most conspicuous characteristics of a painting, which are the easiest to imitate: eyes raised towards the heavens in the figures of Perugino, Leonardo’s smiles, and so on. We should examine, instead, the most trivial details that would have been influenced least by the mannerisms of the artist’s school: earlobes, fingernails, shapes of fingers and of toes. (1989, 96–97)

Like Morelli, Eisler frequently wrote to museums instructing them to change the names on paintings he ascertained were incorrectly identified. He even unsuccessfully pitched a book called New Titles for Old Paintings that would compile all these corrections. Adherence to the principles of Morelli’s method goes some way toward explaining Eisler’s general tendency to fixate on seemingly quotidian elements that were commonly overlooked by other scholars and holding them up as the most telling forms of evidence.

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To take one example, in the preface to The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, Eisler took Biblical scholarship to task for its myopic vision of textual criticism and its lack of attention to pieces of evidence hidden in plain sight: The persistent failure to solve what is known as the Johannine problem is entirely due to the fatal neglect of all the information supplied by the Gospel manuscripts themselves. While the few obiter dicta of the earliest Church Fathers on the origins of the Gospels were carefully gathered and all the old bones of contention chewed and gnawed again and again ad nauseam, nobody ever thought, throughout the whole 19th century, of analysing carefully the various old prefaces to the Gospels which profess to impart to the reader all the information he needs about the authors of these precious books. This lack of interest in what has now been proved to be the most valuable source of information is all the more astonishing in view of the fact that the bulk of all the data in ancient and modern histories of Greek and Latin literature can be shown to be, in the last instance, derived from the little bio-bibliographical introductory notices which the librarians of the great Hellenistic libraries… systematically inserted into the standard editions prepared for these central treasure-houses of classical and contemporary thought. (1938, 4)

Eisler’s years spent educating himself in art history in the first decade of the twentieth century were responsible for shaping the development of his unique methodology, which would be reshaped yet again by his encounters with the comparative mythology of Hermann Usener, Frazerian anthropology, and the psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung. But his activity in this period also had another major consequence, and this one would go on to throw a long shadow over his career. For reasons that will become obvious, he never wrote about this incident, but I have pieced together an account from contemporaneous newspaper reporting. On June 9th, 1907, Eisler was staying at the Croce di Malta Hotel in Udine, Italy. After eating breakfast, he left the hotel with his camera and went to the library of the Archbishop’s Palace, where he met with the librarian, Don Nicolò Pojani. Eisler asked permission to photograph some of the library’s codices and Pojani agreed, laying out the requested volumes on a table. Pojani later claimed that as he was turning to put some of the codices that Eisler had already photographed back into their storage envelopes he saw Eisler make a sudden movement out of the corner of his eye, but thought nothing of it.

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After Eisler had finished taking photographs and left, Pojani noticed that a fifteenth-century codex called the Virginis et Passionis was missing and called the authorities to report the theft. The police picked up Eisler for questioning, upon which he produced a check for 5000 lire to deposit as a guarantee that he had not stolen anything. After he was taken to the station, one policeman recognized Eisler as the same man who had asked him for directions to the post office earlier that day. The police then went to the post office, where they found the package Eisler had dropped off. It was addressed to Vienna and contained the missing codex. After the policemen had left for the post office, Eisler, who was still being held at the station, grabbed a pen knife from a desk and stuck it into his throat. The guards took the knife away from him and brought him to the hospital, where the wound, which must have been superficial, was dressed. When he was brought back to the police station, Eisler confessed to taking the codex but claimed that he had been compelled to commit the crime by an unconscious and irresistible force. Upon his confession, Eisler was confined to await trial and, as a foreigner, he was held without bail. In his jail cell one night, Eisler broke a bottle of disinfectant and tried to slash his left wrist with a shard of glass. This wound, too, was stitched up by a doctor, who also diagnosed Eisler with malaria. Eisler retained a local attorney named Druissi to represent him and must have also contacted his mother, because she arrived shortly thereafter with Eisler’s friend, a lecturer (or a student, accounts vary) at the University of Florence named Augusto Majer. Around the same time, a telegram came from Vienna informing the authorities that Eisler was implicated in a second Italian scandal, having been caught earlier in his travels with a pornographic photograph in Trieste. Melanie Eisler insisted that all that was being said about her son was false and the so-called pornography was merely a woman’s portrait. On June 14th, Benedetto Croce, the Italian philosopher whose 1904 Aesthetic Eisler had reviewed the year before in Kunstgeschictliche Anzeigen [Art History Report] (see Eisler 1906), wrote to Eisler in jail and told him to take courage, offering to testify in his defense (Cassani and Castellani 2017, 111n4). Croce also wrote to his colleague Giovanni Gentile and characterized Eisler’s actions as “a real stroke of madness, in a truly distinguished young man in all respects” (Cassani and Castellani 2017, 111). At his trial on June 19th, Eisler, speaking Italian, confessed to having taken the codex but blamed the librarian for his negligence in letting him do so, causing outrage in the courtroom. According to a memo sent to the

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Austrian Minister of the Interior to inform him of the case, the prosecutor also produced evidence that Eisler had previously been suspected of “bookkeeping irregularities” at another library in Vienna and had once been stopped for suspicious activities at the Vienna Art Museum (see “Interpellation…” 1907). One of the character witnesses testifying in Eisler’s defense was Majer, who described Eisler as “a brilliant person who comes every day upon new discoveries in vast fields” and claimed that “he was about to discover one of the most obscure points in human history, that is, the genesis of myth.” Another character witness, the soon-to-befamous Austrian poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (whose poetry Eisler’s brother-in-law Charles Wharton Stork would later translate into English), told the judge that Eisler had “a lot of imagination,” and “great talent” but also possessed “an excitable and nervous nature” and was a “pessimist.” In his testimony, a psychiatrist blamed the incident on Eisler’s malaria, compounded by travel fatigue. He was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to six months in jail, reduced by the judge to 50 days because of extenuating circumstances. When Eisler heard the sentence, he passed out in the courtroom. In the end, Eisler was allowed to pay his court costs and avoid jail time so that his family could take him to a sanitarium in nearby Gorizia (Burello 2015). What are we to make of this bizarre story? First of all, why did he take the codex? In Jung’s telling of the story decades after the fact in 1953 (as recorded by the historian of religion Mircea Eliade), Eisler later explained that he had received a telegram saying that his mistress (presumably his future wife Lili) was leaving him and rushed home without noticing that he had slipped the codex into his pocket (Eliade 1990, 189). This, of course, leaves out the fact that the codex was found at the post office in a package addressed to Vienna. In 1922, 30 years before Jung’s recollection but still 15 years after the events in question, Mary Warburg reported in a letter to her husband, the art historian Aby Warburg, that Eisler had admitted that he did take the codex intentionally but only wanted to borrow it and planned to return it after he had completed his research (see Warburg 1922). In his cell in 1907, just days after the incident, Eisler reportedly told Majer that he could not explain why he had done it (see “Il bibliomane…” 1907, 4). The incident raises a second question: Why did a man who would go on to win medals for his courage in battle and endure a brutal regime of forced labor in Nazi concentration camps make two suicide attempts when charged with a relatively minor crime? The preservation of his honor is a possible motive, but this seems out of character. Did he have a mental

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breakdown? Could Eisler have contracted cerebral malaria, per the Italian doctor’s diagnosis, and been experiencing the kind of personality change observed among others exposed to the illness, such as British troops in India and American soldiers in Vietnam? This could explain the depression, another long-term symptom of malaria, into which he descended in the 1940s, although that can also easily be attributed to his painful and humiliating living conditions (see Eisler 1941). In the end, no matter what the cause of his actions, Eisler’s attempted theft in Udine left a black mark on his reputation for the rest of his life. The incident was reported in Italian and German-language newspapers and even made the back pages of a Polish-language newspaper in Chicago, the Dziennik Chicagoski (see “Uwięzicnie uczonego” 1907). In 1922, when the incident came up as a subject of gossip at the Bibliothek Warburg, it undermined what should have been a moment of triumph, coming just hours after he had given an especially well-received talk there to an unprecedented spontaneous ovation. The stories continued even after his death, as evidenced by the aforementioned 1953 conversation between Jung and Eliade recounted in the latter’s diary. But Eisler himself never wrote about it or attempted to clear his name, at least to my knowledge. Instead, he seems to have quickly moved on with his life. In 1908, the year after his brush with the law in Italy, Eisler married Rosalia “Lili” von Pausinger, an Austrian baroness and the daughter of the landscape painter Franz von Pausinger. In Habsburg Vienna, the institution of civil marriage did not exist and interfaith marriages were illegal. And so, for a Jew to marry a Catholic, he would either have to convert to Catholicism or become konfessionslos, giving up his religion without taking up a new one. Although Eisler was a self-described agnostic for whom becoming konfessionslos would have seemed like the natural choice, he became a Catholic instead. His wife’s family was landed Austrian nobility, though they had probably not been ennobled for very long. It is likely that Eisler’s new father-in-­ law, a baron, received his title for his services to art, having accompanied the Crown Prince Rudolph as an illustrator on the prince’s trip to Asia in 1881, eight years before Rudolph took his own life in a suicide pact with his seventeen-year-old mistress.2 However recent their nobility, the von Pausingers were nobles nonetheless. And they were probably less well-off than the Eislers, so that the marriage was a way for one family to increase their wealth and the other to increase their prestige. Lili and Robert Eisler were married for 41 years, and Lili would go on to outlive her husband by more than 30 years before dying in 1980 at the age of 98.

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Notes 1. Scholem quips that he got the second doctorate because “it had never occurred to anyone that the two Eislers could be one and the same person” (1980, 43). 2. The Crown Prince’s suicide initiated the succession crisis that culminated with the assassination of the heir presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serbian Black Hand, pulling more than a million Austro-Hungarians (Eisler included) into the First World War.

References Il bibliomane arrestato a Udine. La Stampa. 21 June, 1907, 4. Burello, Lucia. “Ammanettato in città un uomo geniale.”E-paper. 25 July, 2015. http://www.e-paper.it/ammanettato-in-citta-un-uomo-geniale/. Last accessed July, 2020. Cassani, Cinzia, and Cecilia Castellani, eds. 2017. Benedetto Croce-Giovanni Gentile Cartaggio III, 1907–1909. Torino: Nino Aragno Editore. Eisler, Robert. 1902. Studien zur Werttheorie. Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1906. Benedetto Croce, Ästhetik als Wissenschaft des Ausdrucks und allgemeine Linguistik; Theorie und Geschichte. Nach der zweiten, durchgesehenen Auflage übersetzt von Karl Federn. Im Verlag von E.  A. Seemann, Leipzig 1905. Lexikonformat, XV u. 494 S.  In Kunstgeschictliche Anzeigen: Beiblatt der ‘Mittheilungen des Instituts für Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung’, ed. Franz Wickhoff, 116–130. Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagnerschen Universitäts-Buchhandlung. ———. 1938. The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel. London: Methuen & Co. Eisler, Lili. 1941. Lili Eisler to Rosalie Regen. 8 June. Archive, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore College. Eliade, Mircea. 1990. Journal I, 1945–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.” In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 87–113. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Gombrich, E.H. 1999. Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods: An Anniversary Lecture. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 62: 268–282. Accessed July 3, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/751389. Gubser, Michael. 2006. Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Interpellation Abgeordneten Sturm und Genoffen an Seine Exzellenz den Herrn Minister des Innern, July 19, 1907. In Anhang zu den stenographischen

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Protokollen des Hauses der Abgeordneten des österreichischen Reichsrates. Vienna: Staatsdruckerei. Olin, Margaret. 1992. Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Peaker, Giles. 2001. Works That Have Lasted…: Walter Benjamin Reading Aloïs Riegl. In Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield and Hans Sedlmayr, 291–310. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International. Scholem, Gershom. May 1980. How I Came to the Kabbalah. Commentary 69 (5): 39–53. “Uwięzicnie uczonego.” Dziennik Chicagoski, 11 June, 1907, p. 8. Von Schlosser, Julius. 2001. Aloïs Riegl. In Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield and Hans Sedlmayr, 33–48. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International. Warburg, Mary. 1922. Mary Warburg to Aby Warburg. 19 December. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence. Wind, Edgar. 1965. Art and Anarchy: The Reith Lectures 1960, Revised and Enlarged. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Wood, Christopher S., ed. 2000. The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method. New York: Zone Books.

CHAPTER 4

“Ladies’ Coats and Beach Cabanas in Light of the History of Religion:” Cosmology, Gershom Scholem, and Walter Benjamin

Abstract  This chapter looks at Robert Eisler’s first work in the history of religions, 1910’s World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldview, a two-volume history of cosmology, that argues that two distinct and incompatible cosmological systems spread from the Near East, one that pictured the vault of heaven held up over the flat earth by a tree or pillar, and another that pictured the cosmos as spherical. The chapter also examines Eisler’s difficult relationships as a Baptized Jew with his fellow Jewish intellectuals, especially Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism whose early work on Kabbalah was published by Eisler, and Walter Benjamin, who visited Eisler with Scholem in Paris when he was working with the League of Nations. Keywords  Gershom Scholem • Walter Benjamin • History of Religions • Ancient Cosmology • Comparative Mythology • Kabbalah • Ancient worldviews In 1910, after several years of “familiarizing [himself] with the most diverse resources,” (ix) Eisler produced Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes [World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldview], a sprawling two-volume © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_4

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history of religious cosmology. And in what would become his usual infuriating (for publishers) pattern, Eisler had continued to insert new material well after the printing began in 1908, slowing down the process and earning him a reputation among the academic presses as something of a difficult man. In the foreword, Eisler describes the indebtedness of his project, and his approach to myth and religion generally, to Aloïs Riegl’s method of worldview reconstruction and the “truly universal-historical conception of history” he inherited from both Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. The choice of myth as a subject seems to go back to Eisler’s observation in Studies in Value Theory that mythology “appears to be historically burdened with rudiments of a lost worldview in an excellent way” (1902, 8). In applying Riegl’s methods to the history of religion, Eisler was also influenced by the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whom he would later meet in Hamburg. From Cassirer, Eisler took the idea that philosophy (and later, science) had emerged out of the dialectic structure of myth, so that myth is a kind of deeper layer of thought to be mined for the seeds of what comes later. It is precisely the attainment of a deeper and clearer insight into the developmental conditions of the oldest Greek philosophy, the most historically important output in terms of cultural history, which I had hoped for from the beginning of these studies of the oldest cosmologies, and for this alone might have been worth the trouble of dedicating a number of years almost exclusively to dealing with this problem. The first collections of material were still archaeological for art historical purposes, at a time when I had hardly any other task than the more thorough research into the stylistic forms and the presuppositions of the cosmic sacral construction in ancient Near Eastern and Western medieval art, which was intended as a depiction of the whole world—a problem to which, even during the university years, the historical outlook of my unforgettable teacher Aloïs Riegl pointed me… (1910, viii)

Eisler also drew on the work of the mythologist Hermann Usener. Foreshadowing the methodology Eisler would use still later in Man into Wolf, Usener argued that “classical tropes presented responses to the primal human experiences of terror and fear” and had used “anthropological techniques to connect the primitive premises of myths, rituals, and linguistic forms to more modern religious custom” (Levine 2013,

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53). Focusing on the Götternamen (“names of the gods”), Usener had developed a linguistic understanding of myth that was akin to, but not as reductive as, the solar mythology of F.  Max Müller’s “Disease of Language” theory (see Dorson 1955). Describing Usener’s scholarship, Cassirer writes: [In Usener’s] work, analysis and critique of the names of the gods are shown to be an instrument which, if correctly used, can open up an understanding of the process by which religious concepts are formed. In this way he arrives at a universal theory of signification in which linguistic and mythical elements become inseparable correlates. (1965, 22)

In the foreword to World Cloak and Sky Canopy, Eisler writes that his own research method is best explained with this quote from Usener’s 1904 essay “Mythologie”: I see the actual center of the required formal teaching of the religious ideas in the process of visualization. To identify emerging laws, it is indispensable to conduct investigations through whole branchings out of especially fruitful individual images that reach back to the earliest times. (Usener 1907, 61 quoted in Eisler 1910, v)

World Cloak and Sky Canopy begins with the “set piece” of the coronation robe of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry II, richly embroidered with astrological symbols, which functions in Eisler’s argument as a point of departure, much like the priestly rite at Nemi described at the beginning of J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough. And as in The Golden Bough, World Cloak and Sky Canopy’s somewhat Quixotic thesis recedes in importance when one begins to appreciate the dazzlingly hubristic scope of its methodology and source material. The book’s first volume is dedicated to the history of the Weltenmantel (“world cloak”), a type of traditional royal garment decorated with a representation of the cosmos, examples of which include not only Henry II’s coronation robe described above, but also Aaron’s priestly mantle in Exodus 28:4 and the cloak of Demetrius Poliorcetes described by Plutarch. Eisler argues that this type of garment reflects an ancient cosmological tradition, originating in the Near East, in which the cosmos was understood to be woven out of space and time and the stars in the heavens were capable of revealing the future to those who could read them. Representing

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this truth, the “world cloak” was bestowed upon kings to show their divine power and heavenly mandate. The second volume treats the mythical trope of the Himmelszelt (“heavenly canopy”), something like a cosmically enlarged version of the “world cloak” held up by a tree or pillar to form the “vault of heaven,” as mentioned in Hesiod and represented in seals and monuments from Assyria, Syria, and Anatolia. Eisler concludes that the heavenly canopy is connected to the starry mantle described in the first volume because the image as a whole represents the marriage of heaven and earth, portraying the King, wearer of that mantle, as the male creator god and the possessor of knowledge of the future. In this myth–ritual complex, Eisler identifies the creator as the Indo-European god of time, represented by the Greek Chronos in the obscure and fragmentary theo-cosmology of Pherykedes of Syros, as well as by the Iranian Zurvan of the Zurvanite form of Zoroastrianism and the classical Hindu Kala, identified with the Supreme Lord Kṛsn ̣ ̣a in the Bhagavad Gı̄tā. In his conclusion, Eisler argues that two distinct and incompatible cosmological systems spread from the Near East into the Hellenic world, one that pictured the vault of heaven held up over the flat earth by a tree or pillar, and another that pictured the cosmos as a spherical shape, like the Hiraṇyagarbha (“Golden Egg”) described in the Sanskrit Matsya Purāṇa. The first of these systems has been dominant for most of history (and has now apparently regained some popularity among conspiracy theorists on the internet), but was eventually supplanted by the spherical model, which gave rise to a scientific picture of the universe. In World Cloak and Sky Canopy, Eisler takes on the ideas of a previous generation of major historians of religion like Friedrich Creuzer, William Dupuis, and Karl Otfried Müller. And the method he employs, while indebted to Morelli, Riegl, Cassirer, and Usener, is uniquely his own. Using Henry II’s coronation robe as a starting point, he attempts to “reverse-engineer” the Kunstwollen of successive civilizations from Sassanian Persia to the Holy Roman Empire. This whole series [of cosmological myths], which can easily be continued to the hundredth, seems to me to offer the best possible awareness that the long and varied path that these investigations had to take… from a world-­ famous artistic monument of the western Middle Ages, backwards to the beginning of the ancient view of the world. (1910, 754)

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It is easy to see how this model is repeated in Man into Wolf, where, instead of uncovering the “developmental conditions of the oldest Greek philosophy” through the historical analysis of forms, Eisler wanted to uncover the origin of human cruelty, starting with the attention-grabbing phenomena of sadism and masochism and working backward into evolutionary prehistory. At the time of its publication, responses to World Cloak and Sky Canopy were generally good; though some reviewers did question the unusually large amount of material Eisler drew on to support his thesis. Using words that would be echoed by reviewers of Eisler’s subsequent works, J.  Toutain wrote in Revue de l’histoire des religions [History of Religions Review]: When we reach the end of these two volumes, so dense, so full of facts and ideas, we feel a double impression. It cannot be denied that there is a considerable effort to explain obscure facts and enigmatic documents, to find their origin, to discover their meaning, either religious or eschatological or mystical. Nor can it be denied that Mr. Eisler has displayed in this work very brilliant qualities, an ingenuity that is clever in turning difficulties, a great flexibility of mind, a subtlety of thought, and a vivacity of dialectic which cannot be faulted other than to be sometimes excessive. And, on the other hand, we are not without worry about the direction taken on the lines which the author follows; we fear constantly to lose our foothold, to wander through digressions or into the labyrinth of ingenious deductions… The reconciliations made through space and time, reckless etymologies, the arguments derived from astrology, all these processes of a science which moves too easily away from the solid ground of strictly historical facts and whose lack of rigor precludes granting solutions formulated by Mr. R. Eisler an indisputable value. At least we must recognize that his work is one of those which call for the most kind attention; it deserves to be discussed, and criticisms that we address to him must only prove to the author the interest we have taken in reading his two volumes. (1913, 58)

Today, World Cloak and Sky Canopy is still used as a reference by art historians (e.g., Garrison 2012; Deacy and Villing 2009; and Gautschy 2007) and is almost certainly the inspiration for another controversial but famous work of scholarship, Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend’s (1977) magnum opus Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth.

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Most importantly for us, the publication of World Cloak and Sky Canopy represents a major turning point in Eisler’s career when he successfully slipped through the still-permeable (but beginning to harden) disciplinary boundaries of the history of religions. It began Eisler’s trajectory as a self-­trained historian of religions, a trajectory that fatefully intersected the lives and careers of Gershom Scholem, Aby Warburg, the Eranos group, Mircea Eliade, and other major figures in the study of religion. Having discussed Orphic religion at length in World Cloak and Sky Canopy, Eisler next focused his attention on the more circumscribed research area of the presence of Orphic symbolism in early Christian art, specifically images of fish and fishermen. Between 1910 and 1914 he wrote a series of articles on the subject for The Quest, a journal published by Eisler’s friend, the former theosophist George Robert Stow Mead.1 In 1909, Mead and some other former Theosophists had founded The Quest Society with the mission of producing serious scholarship about esotericism and mysticism. Eisler continued to write articles for The Quest on many subjects for as long as it was published, and for the October 1914 issue he wrote a piece called “Recent Experiments in ‘Clairvoyance’ by Psychologists” to document tests performed on two professed psychics. This appears to have been Eisler’s only foray into psychical research. But all of Eisler’s scholarly pursuits, like nearly everything else in Europe, were temporarily interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War. Beginning in 1914, Eisler served as an officer in Austria–Hungary’s 59th “Erzherzog Rainer” Infantry Regiment, a “house regiment” dating to the foundation of the Austrian army in 1682 (Bennighof 2016). The regiment fought first on the Russian front and later on the Italian, ending the war in South Tyrol. For his bravery in combat, Eisler was awarded the silver medal and was made a knight of both the Order of Francis Joseph and the Iron Cross. For his own part, Eisler wrote that he had “done his military duty in the first line until the day of his complete disablement in 1917” (1921, iii). After the war, and thanks to the publication of World Cloak and Sky Canopy and his articles in The Quest, Eisler was established as a historian of religion. He could not, however, secure a teaching position, a fact that seems to have had less to do with either his scholarly eccentricities or any

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notoriety he acquired from the incident in Udine than with his being a baptized Jew. When Eisler had tried to publish an article in the influential Jewish scholar Martin Buber’s journal, Der Jude [The Jew], Buber told him that, while the journal could print articles by Jews or Gentiles, it could not print an article by one such as him. Eisler explained that he was intent on reconverting to Judaism in any case and would get back in touch with him when he had done so, but he never did (Scholem 1980a, 127). Gershom Scholem, whom he first met through Buber around this time, later recalled: “Gentiles were made uneasy by his markedly Jewish appearance, and the Jews by his apostasy” (1980b, 43) (Fig. 4.1). Partly because of his ambivalence toward his Jewishness, Eisler’s relationship with Scholem may have been the most complicated one in his life. “In his dealings with me, Eisler was completely Jewish,” Scholem recounts. “His store of Jewish jokes and anecdotes was virtually inexhaustible, and he felt Fig. 4.1  Portrait of Robert Eisler in Paris in 1925, signed and given to Gershom Scholem. (Courtesy of the Abraham Schwadron Collection at the National Library of Israel)

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free when he was with me to pour out that Jewish heart which he kept carefully under wraps when dealing with non-Jews” (1980b, 43). When they met in 1919, Eisler must have already known something about Scholem’s reputation, since he was friends with the Assyriologist Fritz Hommel, Scholem’s dissertation adviser (Rosenstock 2017, xxxiiin37). In any case, Eisler was overjoyed to be in the presence of a true scholar of the Kabbalah possessing a mastery of Hebrew. For his part, Scholem was charmed by Eisler, although somewhat hesitant about casting his lot with him. The previous year, Eisler had founded the “Johann Albert Widmanstetter Society for Kabbalah Research, Inc.” (named after a sixteenth-century Orientalist and collector of Kabbalistic manuscripts) and appointed himself the secretary. He had also persuaded ten scholars, including Buber, to be on the board, but their membership was nominal. In reality, Eisler himself was the only active member. The home at which Scholem visited him in 1919 was Eisler’s villa near Munich at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg. Eisler’s inherited fortune had been erased by the hyperinflation that plagued the Weimar Republic and all he had left were family properties like the villa. Scholem recalls the impression Eisler made on him at the time: In general, Eisler’s eloquence, as fantastic as his education, was somehow not quite serious. I at any rate had never before come across such a compelling yet at the same time suspiciously glittering kind of erudition. He was, incidentally, quite without rancor at being challenged, a trait I found particularly endearing, especially since I was bound to detect the regrettable gaps in his Hebrew sooner or later. He once said to me, “I suppose you think I’m a nebbish philologist,” but he really did not seem to take offense at my judgment of him. His fanciful syntheses overcame all the hurdles of historical criticism, and the one thing that could truly not be said of him was that he was lacking in ideas, and ideas, moreover, in such diverse areas as the proto-Semitic inscriptions in the Sinai Peninsula, the Greek mysteries, the origin of the Gypsies, the history of money, the origins of Christianity, and many others which had one thing in common: they were all rich enough in unsolved problems to allow the widest possible scope to his particular genius for synthesizing. (1980b, 43)

Correspondence between Scholem and Eisler during this period suggests a much warmer relationship than the lopsided portrayed in this recollection. Eisler was responsible for publishing Scholem’s dissertation, Das Buch Bahir: Ein Schriftdenkmal aus der Frühzeit der Kabbala [The Book of Bahir: A Historical Text from the Early Days of Kabbala, 1923] which, along with Scholem’s second book, Bibliographia Kabbalistica (1927), comprised the first, second, and only volumes ever published in Eisler’s edited series, Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte der Jüdischen Mystik [Sources and Studies in the History of Jewish Mysticism].

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Not only did Eisler publish Scholem’s early work, he also introduced him into the circle of the wealthy and highly influential Aby Warburg. But in his memoirs, Scholem, though he was usually gracious if somewhat condescending in his actual letters to Eisler, tells the story of Eisler’s publication of his books as if he had been the one doing Eisler a favor by lending legitimacy to his vanity book series. “After all,” he writes, “I was, so to speak, the heaven-sent angel who would breathe kabbalistic life into his paper society” (1980a, 129). And when Scholem and his friend Walter Benjamin were having an inside joke at Eisler’s expense, they mutually agreed to put him on the faculty list for the “University of Muri,” a kind of imaginary academic dîner de cons, where he would teach a course called “Ladies’ Coats and Beach Cabanas in Light of the History of Religion” (1980a, 129). In Scholem’s accounts, Benjamin seemed to see Eisler as a freakish object of fascination, frequently asking for more news of his exploits, presumably because he found them amusing. Significantly though, all of what Benjamin supposedly had to say about Eisler comes to us second-hand through Scholem, who made it no secret that he considered Eisler to be second-rate. With this in mind, it is worth asking whether Scholem has given us an accurate picture of Benjamin’s attitude. There are some indications that he has not. To begin with, we know that Benjamin was an admirer of Eisler’s teacher Riegl, and we know that his diverse scholarly interests, especially as represented in The Arcades Project, made him more qualified to teach “Ladies’ Coats and Beach Cabanas in Light of the History of Religion” than even Eisler was. It seems possible then, that Benjamin was not in reality as dismissive of Eisler as Scholem made him out to be. When Scholem writes that Benjamin, “who had a special feeling for situations of that kind,” was “spellbound” upon visiting Eisler and “was interested in him for a long time,” it may not have been because Benjamin was intent on indulging in some train-wreck schadenfreude at Eisler’s expense like Scholem implies (1981, 131). Instead, it might have been because Benjamin felt a genuine affinity with Eisler; he was certainly not averse to seeking Eisler’s help, asking for his Paris address when he needed to establish some French contacts and find employment (Scholem 1989, 82).

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Note 1. Mead was once personal secretary to Helena Blavatsky but left in protest after the Theosophical Society’s president, Annie Besant, reinstated the membership of C. W. Leadbetter after the latter was pressured to resign over his admission that he had advised pubescent boys under his tutelage in India and England to masturbate. Mead was already skeptical of the Theosophical belief in communications from enlightened beings called the “Mahatmas” and his outrage over Leadbetter pushed him over the edge.

References Bennighof, Mike. 2016. Edelweiss Division: Designer Preview. Avalanche Press. com. http://www.avalanchepress.com/EdelDivision.php. Last Accessed July 5, 2020. Cassirer, Ernst. 1965. Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume II: Mythical Thought. New Haven: Yale University Press. Deacy, Susan, and Alexandra Villing. 2009. What Was the Colour of Athena’s Aegis? The Journal of Hellenic Studies 129: 111–129. Dorson, Richard M. 1955. The Eclipse of Solar Mythology. In Myth: A Symposium, ed. Thomas Sebeok, 25–63. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Eisler, Robert. 1902. Studien zur Werttheorie. Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot. ———. 1910. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. Two Volumes. Munich: Oscar Beck. ———. 1914. “Recent Experiments in ‘Clairvoyance’ by Psychologists.” The Quest 6 (1), pp. 127–143. ———. 1921. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. London: J. M. Watkins. Garrison, Eliza. 2012. Ottonian Imperial Art and Portraiture: The Artistic Patronage of Otto III and Henry II. London and New York: Routledge. Gautschy, Rita. 2007. Eine Hydria Mit Einer Astronomischen Darstellung. Antike Kunst 50: 36–50. Levine, Emily J. 2013. Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Rosenstock, Bruce. 2017. Transfinite Life: Oskar Goldberg and the Vitalist Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. de Santillana, Giorgio, and Hertha von Dechend. 1977. Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth. Boston: Godine.

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Scholem, Gershom. 1980a. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1980b. How I Came to the Kabbalah. Commentary 69 (5, May): 39–53. ———. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. New York: New York Review of Books. ———. 1989. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York: Schocken Books. Toutain, J. 1913. Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt by Robert Eisler. Revue de l’histoire des religions 67: 55–58. Usener, Hermann. 1907. Mythologie. In Vorträge und Aufsätze, 39–65. Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner.

CHAPTER 5

Orphism, the Afikoman, and Conflicts with the Hamburg Circle

Abstract  This chapter discusses Robert Eisler’s first book in English, Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Symbolism, in which he identifies “Orphism” as a pre-Hellenic religion based on a divine fisher or hunter that was suppressed by the Greeks because of its bloody sacrificial rites. It also examines Eisler’s theory that the bread Jesus broke with his disciples at the Last Supper was actually the afikoman, the piece of unleavened bread routinely eaten at the end of a Passover meal, and Jesus’s breaking of the bread had been a coded gesture to reveal himself as the Messiah. Finally, it looks at the anti-Semitism Eisler continued to experience in the 1920s and his strained relationship with art historian Aby Warburg and his Hamburg Circle. Keywords  Orphism • Orpheus • Iconology • Aby Warburg • The Hamburg Circle • Christian symbolism 1921 saw the publication of Eisler’s first book in English, Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Symbolism, published by John M.  Watkins, the famous London esoteric bookseller (and friend of Aleister Crowley), who had apparently seen Eisler lecture on Orphism in 1908 during the Third International Congress of the History of Religions at Oxford. Containing 63 plates, the book relies heavily on art history as well as philology. The structure of Orpheus the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_5

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Fisher resembles both World Cloak and Sky Canopy and Frazer’s The Golden Bough, with short chapters bearing essay-like titles such as “Fish-­ Totemism in Hellas, in Syria, in Latium and in Egypt.”1 It is also based in part on the essays he had published in The Quest before the war, which already contained references to the forthcoming book in 1909. But history intervened before that could happen, as Eisler explains in the preface to Orpheus the Fisher: As the paper and printing betray at first sight, this book had been printed and almost finished before August, 1914. The enlarged and illustrated edition in book form of the long series of papers which I have been allowed by the editor’s kindness to contribute to The Quest from 1910–14 was about to be published when the fatal war began that finally buried the author’s native land, the ancient realm of the Hapsburgs, under the ruins of an unfortunate oriental policy. (1921, iii)

When he began the work, Eisler was jumping onto a bandwagon of sorts. The figure of Orpheus, the poet-singer who sails with the Argonauts, plays Apollo’s lyre, and unsuccessfully tries to rescue his wife Eurydice’s shade from Hades with the power of his music, was a beloved mythic figure, having been a legendary mystic revered by the Neoplatonists since Antiquity and a favorite subject of operas since the time of Monteverdi. A body of fragmentary hymns ascribed to Orpheus and offered as evidence of an ancient mystery-based religion called “Orphism” was first published by Johann Matthias Gesner in 1764, kicking off a major scholarly discussion. In the nineteenth century, classicists and scholars of religion argued about what in these texts belonged to “authentic” Orphism and what could be attributed to Neoplatonists or Gnostics invoking the name of Orpheus to lend some authority to their teachings, always assuming, though, that there was a coherent religious system called Orphism to begin with (see Edmonds 2013, 49–55). This assumption was just that, since there was no direct evidence than anyone ever understood themselves as belonging to any kind of Orphic sect or cult. In 1879, excavators discovered small gold tablets bearing short verses like “Recompense I have paid on account of deeds not just” and “I am the child of Earth and starry Heaven,” in tombs in Southern Italy. Three years later, based on what he saw as references in the tablets to the transmigration of souls (believed by scholars to have been a tenet of Orphism) Domenico Comparetti identified the tablets as “Orphic,” despite the fact

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that none of them mentioned Orpheus. As Radcliffe Edmonds explains, this new “evidence” of Orphism came at a very opportune time in the history of the history of religions: The reason Comparetti’s explanation is so rapidly accepted is that it plays into one of the dominant questions of the day–the origins of Christianity, particularly the ideas of the soul. The origins of Christianity and the differences between Christianity and other religions were questions of vital interest, since the authority and validity of Christianity were being brought into question by the “culture wars” of the period… Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859 had shaken the faith of many, contributing to the social upheaval. Nietzsche’s 1872 Birth of Tragedy diagnoses Christian ideas as a sickness that killed the spirit of the Greeks, while Frazer’s 1890 Golden Bough places the death and resurrection of Christ in the context of dying and rising god stories all over the world, from contemporary primitives to the ancient Greeks. Comparetti himself notes the significance of the tablets as evidence for the “origins and precedents” of Christian doctrines of the soul… (2013, 56)

When Eisler inserted himself into the conversation about Orphism in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was a hot topic indeed and a central issue in the study of religion. In 1909, Salomon Reinach published Orpheus, histoire générale des religions [Orpheus: A General History of Religions] in which he characterized Orphism as a sort of mystical substrate that underlay all religious traditions, arguing that “Orphism did not have common points only with Judaism and Christianity, but also with more distant religions, such as Buddhism, and even with the quite primitive beliefs of contemporary savages” and “[when] one looks close, one finds a bit of Orphism in all religions” (quoted in Stroumsa 2012, 139–140). This idea resonated with the approach Eisler had developed in World Cloak and Sky Canopy, viewing myth and symbols as formative elements of a worldview that exert an influence on that worldview as it develops into a metaphysical and then a scientific one. In his earliest take on Orphism, formulated at the same time as publication began on World Cloak and Sky Canopy, Eisler identified Orphism as a pre-Hellenic religion that was suppressed by the Greeks because of its bloody sacrificial rites, ham-handedly comparing it to the British suppression of “gentle rites such as the burning alive of widows and other equally amiable ceremonies” in India (1909, 131–132).2 But rather than disappear, argued Eisler, Orphism only went

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underground (so to speak) and gave rise to various esoteric movements, including the Pythagoreans. He also proposed an etymology in which “Orpheus” means “Fisher” or “Hunter,” and speculated that, over time, this figure was tamed and transformed into a good shepherd. The associations with Jesus (the “good shepherd” who makes his disciples into “fishers of men,” multiplies fishes and loaves, and walks on water) are obvious, and Eisler spells them out in his follow-up article. But, like most, if not all, of the scholarship on Orphism of the time, Eisler’s theory was big on speculation and small on evidence. And Eisler knew it, because by the time Watkins was ready to publish the book, he had abandoned his original idea. But Watkins (and probably G.R.S. Mead) was still keen for the book to come out, so Eisler made some changes with Mead’s help and published it, even though it no longer represented the new ideas he was developing about Christianity. Eisler explains in the preface: When I first published in 1908 (in a paper read before the Third International Congress of the History of Religions in Oxford) the conjectural new etymology of the name Orpheus, which forms the starting point of the following work, I was quite confident that by pursuing this hypothesis into all its consequences I should find out a great many hitherto overlooked points of contact between early Christianity and Paganism, or that I should at least be able to throw new light on other such points, which had been noticed before but not satisfactorily explained until now. I believe that indeed that anticipation has come true. But, on the other hand, I have certainly been deceived in my expectations of discovering early extensive and important Pagan influences on the initial formation of Christian ritual and cult symbolism. In 1908 I was still under the illusion—which, I am afraid, is even to-day cherished by many students of comparative religion—that primitive Christianity was, to a great extent, a syncretistic religion. (1921, iv–v)

Eisler had been trying to connect the water immersion rite associated with John the Baptist and the Last Supper described in the gospels with the sacrificial rituals of the fisher god: In particular I had been strongly impressed by the statement of Eichhorn and other scholars, that we must look out for a pagan, or, more exactly, an oriental prototype for the Eucharist, since a sacramental, not to speak of a theophagic rite is unknown to the Jewish cult-system. This apparently plausible syllogism induced, or, rather, seduced me to build up an elaborate

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hypothesis about a plausible connection between the obviously sacramental eating of fish and bread in the pericope on Jesus feeding the multitude and the hypothetically reconstructed cult ritual of the prehistoric Cananean bread- and fish-, or fish- and corn-god. A paper on this subject, which should originally have been included as a special chapter in the present volume (a now meaningless reference to it could not be effaced in the text of page 49, note 1) was also read in Oxford, privately printed and distributed to a great many members of the Congress. I hope that none of these copies survive to-day, for I very soon came to the conclusion that the objections which [Ernst von Dobschutz] raised against that hypothesis in the discussion following my lecture were perfectly justified. I had to give up the greater part of this premature construction and I am perfectly convinced now that the Eucharistic rite arose out of a purely Jewish ritual. That there are Pagan parallels to the later developments of it into a mystic theophagy, can scarcely be denied, but I do not believe any more that pagan influences were at work in the initial stage of Christian origin. (1921, v, emphasis in original)

By the time Orpheus the Fisher was published, Eisler had developed a new theory of Christian origins in which Jesus had been a self-­proclaimed— if ultimately failed—political Messiah, which required him to be able to explain certain events associated with Jesus in historical and Jewish terms. Accordingly, Eisler backed off of the associations of Jesus with a dying and rising god and instead pushed the mystery religion elements of Christian ritual onto the preexisting movement associated with John the Baptist: We know that Jesus underwent the baptism of John, and that he never thought of instituting another different baptism of his own. We know further that no authentic saying of Jesus connects the figure of the fish or the fisherman with the baptismal rite instituted by John. On the other hand, no Rabbinic saying has ever been discovered in which the Pharisaic ‘baptism of the Proselytes’ is described as a ‘fishing of man.’ If therefore we find as early as in Matt. 17—that is under the reign of Domitian—the newly baptized Christian spoken of as ‘a fish that cometh up from the water’ there is, as far as I can see, only one explanation for this fact and for the whole fish-symbolism in the Christian initiatory rite: namely, that this allegorical way of speaking has been taken over, together with the baptism of repentance itself, from the school or rather sect of John into the ‘Christian’ Church by such teachers as Apollō s from Alexandria, Andrew bar-Jonah, the brother of Simon Peter, and John bar-Zabdai, who are represented in our sources… as having been disciples of

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the Baptist before they discovered the ‘mightier one,’ who was to come after John, in the humble person of Jesus the Nazarene. (1921, 174–175, italics in original)

Having abandoned the idea of a pagan theophagic ritual, Eisler decided that the bread Jesus broke with his disciples at the Last Supper was actually the afikoman, the piece of unleavened bread routinely eaten at the end of a Passover meal (1921, v). Deborah Carmichael explains the significance of this interpretation: [In] a future-oriented, messianic sense, the unleavened bread stood for the whole of the Jewish people. A broken-off piece of bread represented a longed-for redeemer who had not yet appeared. During the Passover celebration of redemption, this messianic figure was symbolically brought into the midst of the company and united with the Jewish people through a ritual involving the afikoman. (1991, 93)

He would go on to further develop this idea later, but Eisler’s argument about the Last Supper being a coded gesture to reveal that the Messiah is among his people is the beginning of his new project to reinterpret the entire New Testament as a heavily distorted narrative about a Jewish holy man seeking to lead a rebellion against the Roman occupation. Eisler had been writing about the Last Supper in The Quest since 1922, but he ignited a new controversy when he published his account of the afikoman theory in “Das letzte Abendmahl” [“The Last Supper”], a two-­ part article that appeared in volumes 24 (1925) and 25 (1926) of Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche [Journal of New Testament Studies and the Customs of the Early Church] (hereafter ZNW). Again, Eisler found himself on the wrong side of everyone. After the first half of the article came out, the ZNW editor, Protestant church historian Hans Lietzmann, decided that Eisler’s thesis was untenable and refused to print the second half. In response, Eisler hired a lawyer and sent a registered letter threatening a lawsuit if the article were not published and promised further legal consequences if ZNW published it but somehow made known to its readers that they were being compelled to do so. Lietzmann relented, or seemed to, although when the second part of Eisler’s article came out in 1926, it was preceded by an introduction from Lietzmann undercutting its argument and followed by a critique from the Jewish scholar Arthur Marmorstein. Eisler then demanded space in the next issue to publish his riposte, but Lietzmann refused and instead

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printed a short explanation of the whole affair for his readership, concluding that, “[after] these events, further scholarly contact with Dr. Eisler is no longer possible for me” (1927, 96.) David Daube, one of the few scholars who (belatedly) concurred with his assessment of the Last Supper, described Eisler’s situation this way: Forty years ago the basically correct understanding of this ritual was furnished by a scholar—or shall I say madman? he was both—named Robert Eisler, who noticed that it was a Messianic ceremony. The Messiah is a broken off portion of the Jewish people, existing but as yet concealed, and his coming at the end of this Passover supper will make the people complete, whole. The reaction, however, to this thesis was of extreme violence, from both sides, the Christian and the Jewish. Lietzmann, a leading Christian scholar, and Marmorstein, a leading Jewish one, came down on poor Eisler in a fearful pincer movement and just crushed him. There were three reasons at least for being annoyed with him. First, he did include in his argumentation a good deal that was speculative or even wild. Secondly, I have already indicated that he was impossible. But, thirdly, the principal motivation for the fierceness of the assault (whatever its merits in substance), I am sure, lay far deeper. (1966, 6)

This deeper motivation was the same one that would later prompt one Christian scholar to dedicate an entire book to refuting Eisler, namely, distaste for the picture of Jesus that Eisler was determined to create. Like the frustrations of publishers with Eisler’s demanding habits, suspicion and condemnation from both the Jewish and Christian scholarly communities would also become a recurring issue in his career. Eisler’s expansive interests did not appeal to narrowly parochial Jewish scholars like Scholem (and later, Solomon Zeitlin) and, to make matters worse, those scholars were more likely to be taken seriously by Christians than he was on the subject of Judaism. He would later complain that “non-Jewish students of classical philology are always inclined to accept a learned Talmudist’s statements as an authoritative ex cathedra pronouncement of Jewish science about a problem of Jewish history” (1930, 1). Meanwhile, having surrendered his own authority to make such pronouncements about Jewish history by converting to Christianity, he found that he was nevertheless still counted as a Jew when it was the most inconvenient. At least, this was the case in 1926 when he was being considered for a position at Heidelberg University. In a letter from that time, the Heidelberg historian of philosophy Ernst Hoffmann (who was himself

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eventually driven out of his named chair by the Nazis’ racial purity laws) confided to Aby Warburg that he was opposed to Eisler getting the job because it might stir up anti-Semitism, already on the rise in reaction to the political agitations of the pacifist mathematician Emil Gumbel. Needless to say, Eisler did not get the position. It is hard to imagine that these experiences did not influence the growing pugnaciousness of his personality. It was becoming increasingly clear to Eisler that he could not even expect fair treatment from publishers or universities. Doubly damned, he would always be perceived as a kvetching Jew by Christians and an opportunistic would-be Gentile by Jews, no matter what he did. If he wanted any measure of success, he was going to have to fight for it. When Eisler finally made it to England in 1939, where anti-Semitism peacefully coexisted with a hatred of the Nazis, the insistent, if not strident, self-promotional habits he had developed to overcome the obstacles he faced in Europe would clash badly with British decorum and marginalize him even further, leading to a series of public humiliations. But even before the rise of the Nazis, what others saw as Eisler’s chutzpah was causing problems for him with a circle of seemingly like-minded mostly Jewish scholars in Hamburg associated with the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg [Warburg Library of Cultural Studies]. Eisler’s contacts with the “Hamburg Circle,” which included Warburg, Cassirer, Fritz Saxl, Gertrud Bing, and Erwin Panofsky, began in the early 1920s, following the publication of Orpheus the Fisher. In many ways, Eisler was a natural fit for this group of philosophers, art historians, and historians of religion. He came from a similar background, was interested in classical and Renaissance art, and had a broadly comparative project shaped by many of the same thinkers that influenced Warburg and company. However, he seems to have rubbed the mercurial Warburg the wrong way very early on, even though Warburg’s particular interests in the “function of artistic creation in the history of a civilization [and the] variable relation that exists between artistic expression and the spoken language” were so obviously resonant with Eisler’s scholarship (quoted in Ginzburg 1989, 21). When Eisler went to Hamburg to give a lecture titled “Orphische und altchristliche Kultsymbolik” [“Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism”] at the Bibliothek Warburg on December 3, 1922, Warburg himself was taking a leave of absence, having suffered a nervous breakdown in 1918. It was Saxl, Warburg’s secretary (and an accomplished scholar in his own

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right), who had read Orpheus the Fisher and invited Eisler. As they were setting the date, Eisler began to try Saxl’s patience with his frequent requests. Before he had even arrived, Eisler wanted to set up two more lectures, one on ancient seafaring and another on the history of money, the latter being an area of his scholarship that he seemed convinced would be of special interest to Warburg, whose brothers were major figures in the world of finance. A month out from the day of this arrival, he wrote Saxl to request that someone lend him a frock coat, since his had been stolen, prompting Saxl to scribble in the margin “ein grauenhafter Quatsch!” (“dreadful rubbish!”) Warburg was much concerned with professionalism and distinguishing himself from the gentleman scholars and armchair antiquarians of his day. Writing to Saxl from the Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen, he vehemently opposed Eisler’s invitation. He later complained about Eisler’s excessive “chutzpah” and insisted that he did not want to attract “such people” and provide “a stage for immodest dilettantes.” Some of the venom Warburg directed toward Eisler can be attributed to his mental state: he was suffering from severe depression and was subject to “terrible tantrums and phobias, obsessions and delusions which ultimately made him a danger to himself and his surroundings and lead to his confinement in a closed ward” (Gombrich 1970, 215). This may be why, in 1924 when he had recovered from his breakdown, Warburg actually sought Eisler’s help with his own work and corresponded with him on the topic of the Zoroastrian god Zurvan, a subject Eisler had treated in World Cloak and Sky Canopy. But in spite of Warburg’s negative fixation on and general disdain toward him, when he died in 1929, Eisler asked to write Warburg’s obituary for a scholarly journal. And upon his own death, Eisler’s widow donated most of his papers to the archive of the Warburg Institute (the library’s new location in London). When Eisler arrived in Hamburg for the 1922 lecture he dined with Warburg’s wife Mary, who later commented to her husband that he looked “very Jewish” but acknowledged that a thing like that “could not be helped.” Although she did not find Eisler “an agreeable man,” Mary admitted that his lecture was fluent, knowledgeable, and in keeping with the mission of the Bibliothek. He spoke without a text in front of him and received spontaneous applause at the end of his lecture, something not even Cassirer, the leading light of the Hamburg intelligentsia, had done. But it was not an unmitigated success for Eisler. The classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, a skeptic on the question of Orphism but also

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a scholar for whom Eisler expressed great admiration, had publicly snubbed him, and Saxl had apparently raised the embarrassing issue of the stolen codex in Udine in conversation (Warburg 1922). Regardless, Eisler was extremely enthusiastic about the reception he had received and about the Hamburg Circle in general. He maintained close contact with Saxl, with whom he developed a friendship in spite of the latter’s frequent exasperation at Eisler’s repeated requests. At the time, Eisler was working on three separate projects. The first, presumably an offshoot of his work on Orpheus, was a study of fishing customs. The second was a study of the history of money, which he presented throughout Europe (though not at the Bibliothek) as a lecture with accompanying slides. In 1924 he would go on to publish Das Geld: Seine geschichtliche Entstehung und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung [Money: Its Historical Origin and Social Significance], a short book based on the slide lecture, and was insistent that Warburg should send a copy to his brothers in the banking business. The third project was a new, expanded book about Orpheus. After much going back and forth and insistently but unsuccessfully trying to limit the size of the text to two hundred pages, Saxl eventually published Eisler’s new book in 1925 in the Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg [Warburg Library Lectures] under the title Orphisch-dionysische Mysterien-­ Gedanken in der christlichen Antike [Orphic-Dionysian Mystery Thought in Early Christianity], which ended up having 424 pages and 24 plates and required a supplementary volume. During their correspondence, Eisler responded to Saxl’s editorial warnings about anticipated criticisms of his work by declaring that he had the “courage to err.” But it was to the consternation of his critics (and some of his friends) that Eisler did not always err when they expected him to. Time and again, scholars, some of whom were annoyed by Eisler’s trying personality, tried to dismiss his work and were frustrated when he turned out to be right about things they believed he should have gotten wrong. In his 1961 addendum to The Open Society and Its Enemies (which cites Eisler’s work throughout), the philosopher of science Karl Popper reports that, shortly before his death in 1949, Eisler suggested to him that Plato’s Theaetetus predated the Republic. At the time, Popper thought it was highly unlikely and kept the conversation to himself after Eisler’s death so as not to cast aspersions on the departed. But years later, when corroborating evidence had surfaced, Popper politely and in print acknowledged the priority of Eisler’s assertion (Popper 2013, 192). And in 1922, when Warburg complained to Fritz Saxl about Eisler being brought to lecture in

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Hamburg because his work was “bluff,” Saxl had to remind him that in the case of the lion-headed, goat-legged statue in Modena that their friend Franz Cumont identified as a Mithraic figure and Eisler identified as the Orphic god Phanes, it had been demonstrated that Eisler was right and Cumont was wrong (see also Quispel 2008, 256–257). Warburg’s reservations eventually became a moot point though, because by 1924 Eisler was turning down invitations to Hamburg. His lectures in England, attended by large crowds that included luminaries like J. G. Frazer and Gilbert Murray, were so successful that he no longer felt the need to address such small audiences as those of the Bibliothek Warburg. In addition, Eisler’s contacts in England had led him to a new career in diplomacy, which he anticipated would demand a great deal of his time and energy.

Notes 1. In the 2010s, print-to-order companies like Kessinger Publishing, LLC began to advertise and sell each chapter as a separate book on the internet for $8 or so. 2. Obviously, Eisler’s description of satı̄ is ironic; but it is even more ironic than he knows, since satı̄ is nearly as much a product of the British colonial imagination as Orphism.

References Carmichael, D.B. 1991. David Daube on the Eucharist and the Passover Seder. Journal for the Study of the New Testament 42: 45–67. Daube, David. 1966. He That Cometh. London: Tolley. Edmonds, Radcliffe G. 2013. Redefining Ancient Orphism: A Study in Greek Religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisler, Robert. 1909. Orpheus-The Fisher Part One. The Quest 1 (1, Oct.): 124–139. ———. 1921. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. London: J. M. Watkins. ———. 1926. Das letzte Abendmahl [Part Two]. Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche 25 (1, Jan.): 5–37. ———. 1930. Flavius Josephus on Jesus Called the Christ. Jewish Quarterly Review 21 (1/2): 1–60. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. “From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method.” In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 16–53. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Gombrich, Ernst. 1970. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. Leiden: Brill. Lietzman, Hans. 1927. Erklärung des Herausgebers über sein Verhalten gegen Herrn Dr. Robert Eisler. In Zeitschrift fur die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der alteren Kirche, vol. 26, 96. Popper, Karl. 2013. The Open Society and Its Enemies. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quispel, Giles. 2008. Hermann Hesse and Gnosis. In Gnostica, Judaica, Catholica: Collected Essays of Gilles Quispel, ed. Johannes van Oort, 243–261. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Stroumsa, Guy G. 2012. “The Afterlife of Orphism: Jewish, Gnostic and Christian Perspectives.” Historia Religionum 4: 139–157 Warburg, Mary. 1922. Mary Warburg to Aby Warburg. 19 December. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence.

CHAPTER 6

The King Who Did Not Reign: The League of Nations and the Slavonic Josephus

Abstract  This chapter looks at Robert Eisler’s first foray into the field of research on the historical Jesus, contained in a massive two-volume German work, published in English as The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources. Based on his own “reconstruction” of Slavonic manuscripts of the first century Roman historian Flavius Josephus’s The Jewish War, Eisler argues that Jesus was a political messiah who wanted to overthrow the Romans and produces a very controversial physical description of Jesus. The chapter also examines the responses to Eisler’s work on Jesus and John the Baptist and his aborted diplomatic career at the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris. Keywords  Flavius Josephus • The Jewish War • The Historical Jesus • The League of Nations With the recommendation of Gilbert Murray, a well-known scholar who had also been the chairman of the League of Nations Union in Britain, Eisler took a diplomatic post as a deputy chief of the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle [International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation] (hereafter IICI) in Paris in 1925. The IICI had been created at the invitation of the French government to work with the League © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_6

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of Nations’ International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), an organization that counted Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Henri Bergson among its members. Unfortunately, Eisler accepted the position and moved into a large rented apartment in Paris without first obtaining the permission of the Austrian government, who lodged a complaint with the League of Nations. Despite having been disavowed by his own government, Eisler appears to have stayed on in Paris for two years and frequently identified himself as having been a deputy chief thereafter. In later years, he would describe his position as having been in the University Interrelations Office and recount that he had been tasked with writing a report on the possibility of creating an international university network and had attended the last lecture of the excommunicated former priest and Christian humanist Alfred Loisy “as official representative of the Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle—this particular office of the League of Nations being gratefully aware of the apotheosis bestowed by Loisy upon the ideal of mankind united in peace and brotherly love…” (Eisler 1948, 304). In a diary entry describing a visit to Eisler’s quarters in Paris that he and Walter Benjamin made during this period, Gershom Scholem recalls: The visit we paid Eisler in the deserted rooms of his luxury apartment—the “official people” already had dissociated themselves from him—was a depressing experience for us. Eisler, however, cheerfully discussed his great discoveries about the person and role of Jesus as the leader of a political revolt, the subject of the cours libre he was then giving at the Sorbonne. At that time he was developing the ideas he later wrote down in his voluminous work Jesus Basileus ou Basileusas [ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ]. It was an eerie scene. Benjamin, who had a special feeling for situations of that kind, was spellbound. We also attended a session of Eisler’s course, which was taken by Salomon Reinach’s pupils and friends. The highly un-­Christian hypothesis with which Eisler took up [Karl] Kautsky’s theories on the origin of Christianity (in an uncommonly ingenious, self-assured manner), supporting them with unexpected interpretations of equally unexpected sources, was received with considerable acclaim by the freethinkers of the Cercle Ernst Renan [sic]. But we realized that we were witnessing a sad turning point in the life of an unusual human being. (1981, 132)

If Eisler seemed to be taking his diplomatic misadventure in stride, it was partially because he was happy to be giving lectures on his new theory

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of the historical Jesus and rubbing elbows with important people of all kinds, including Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, George Bernard Shaw, and the Grand Rabbi of France Israël Lévi. While in Paris, he was engaged to speak at the Sorbonne’s Société Ernest-Renan [The Ernest Renan Society] and La Société des Études Juives [The Society of Jewish Studies]. The core of the lectures was his reconstruction of a lost textual tradition of the first-century Roman Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, which he believed held a reliable account of the life and death of Jesus, revealing him to have been a would-be political messiah who led a failed revolt against the Romans. This argument became the basis for yet another two-­ volume work in German (this time with the title in Greek for some reason), ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ: Messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechtenn ach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen [Jesus, the King Who Did Not Reign: The Messianic Independence Movement from the Appearance of John the Baptist to the Downfall of Jacob the Righteous after the Newly Discovered “Conquest of Jerusalem” by Flavius Josephus ​​ and the Christian Sources, 1929–30]. In his work on Christian origins, Eisler does not rely on the encyclopedic cross-cultural comparative methods he used in World Cloak and Sky Canopy or the early sections of Orpheus the Fisher, but on a philology informed by the hermeneutic of suspicion, as he lays out in a preface declaring his intention to part ways with the traditional mode of researching the historical Jesus: The present work is fundamentally different in method, scope, and outlook from any “Life of Christ” or any other book dealing with Christian origins, or any ‘History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus,’ that I know of. For it claims to show: First. That there once existed a rich fund of historical tradition about the Messiah Jesus both among the Jews and the non-Christian Greeks and Romans. Second. That this precious material was deliberately destroyed, or falsified, by a system of rigid censorship officially authorized ever since the time of Constantine I and reinstituted in the reigns of Theodosius II and Valentinian III (477 A.D.). Third. That, in spite of the tireless efforts of ecclesiastical revisers, enough has been preserved in certain out-of-the-way corners of the world, among Jews and heretics as well as in quotations occurring in Christian polemic and

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apologetic literature, to allow us to reconstruct with sufficient clarity and plausibility, and even with a certain amount of picturesque detail, the fundamental features of Jesus’ personality and his mission, particularly as they appeared to his enemies. Fourth. That through a careful comparison of this mercilessly cold, detached, and unsympathetic pen-portrait of the man Jesus with the naively idealizing presentation of the Kyrios Christos by the writers of the early and later Christian Church, it is possible to come quite close to the historical truth about the Naṣō raean prophet-king and about his elder relative, the schismatic high priest of the Jews, Johanan “the Hidden One,” better known as the Baptist. (1931, vii)

Eisler had begun his research into the historical Jesus in 1912, about the time he was moving away from his project of reading the narratives surrounding the ministry of Jesus through the lens of comparative mythology, but his initial work was interrupted by his service in World War I.  In a footnote in Orpheus the Fisher about how the apocryphal Christian traditions described John the Baptist as a vegetarian, Eisler made his first print reference to a group of Slavonic manuscripts of Josephus, discovered by Western scholars in Russia in the nineteenth century and partially translated into German by the Estonian-German scholar Alexander Berendts in 1906. Sometime in 1923 or 1924, Eisler undertook some research into more recent German scholarship on the manuscripts at the request of G. R. S. Mead, who was preparing an article on John the Baptist for The Quest. Unhappy with the lack of progress since Berendts (who had died in 1912), Eisler decided to take matters into his own hands and resumed his studies of Josephus with a new emphasis on the seventeen extant manuscripts in Russia. It was early December 1924 when he first began publicly lecturing on the “Slavonic Josephus,” addressing the Anglo-Palestinian Club at Jews’ College of London on the subject (see Eisler 1926). Eisler’s theory about the significance of these texts is an enormously complicated one that I will try to explicate in the most succinct way that I can, beginning with the author. Flavius Josephus was born into a priestly family in Jerusalem around the year 37. He had been a general who fought against the Romans in Galilee during the First Jewish–Roman War. But he surrendered to a Roman commander named Flavius Vespasian in 67 after a siege that ended with the death of all but one of his men in a suicide pact that he himself had been divinely inspired to break. Josephus was then imprisoned

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for two years, during which time he had a divine revelation from the God of Israel that Vespasian would become emperor. When his prediction came true, Vespasian released him and Josephus became an advisor to the emperor’s son Titus (see Goodman 2019, 1–7). Eventually Josephus became a Roman citizen, while remaining a Jew, and began writing histories for Roman audiences. The most well-known are Against Apion, a philosophical defense of the Jewish religion; Antiquities of the Jews, which is famous for containing a reference to Jesus, the oldest one not from a Christian text; and The Jewish War (c. 75) a military history of the conflict in which he had participated. The Jewish War was written in Greek with the help of some scribes who were fluent in the language, since Josephus had only learned it late in life and could not write up to Roman standards. But in the Greek text he refers to a version he wrote earlier for Jews in the Diaspora: “Parthians, Babylonians, and the most remote tribes of Arabia, with our countrymen beyond the Euphrates and the inhabitants of Adiabene” in Thackeray’s famous translation (1966, 80). This earlier version would presumably have been in Aramaic, the old lingua franca of the Achaemenian Empire, and has never been discovered. Josephus’s writings had not been overly popular among the Romans, who mostly knew him as the Jewish prophet who predicted the reign of Vespasian rather than a historian. But early Christians found Josephus’s books helpful for understanding the growing division between Jewish and Christian communities. This was especially true of The Jewish War, which describes the catastrophic destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. According to Josephus, the God of Israel had helped the Romans to conquer Jerusalem as a punishment for the sinful actions of Jewish tyrants and infighting among the Jews. Besides that, the description of Jesus in The Antiquities of the Jews, referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum, was cited as independent confirmation of the Gospels as far back as the third century (Goodman 2019, 20). From about the fourth century, a Latin paraphrase of The Jewish War was circulating in Christian communities. Eisler refers to this text as Hegesippus, which is the pseudonym of the author that the text is attributed to, and also probably a corruption of the name “Josephus.” Aimed at Christian audiences, the Hegesippus inserted a large amount of new material explaining how God used the Roman army to destroy the Temple and punish the Jews because they had rejected Christ (Goodman 2019, 24–25). Around the same time, there was a Hebrew version of the text called the Sefer Yosippon that put together bits and pieces of Latin versions

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of the Christianized text but removed the obvious anti-Semitic propaganda. This text was well known among Jewish, Christian, and Muslim audiences and is still a sacred text to Ethiopian Christians. Some even claimed it was based on the original (presumably Aramaic) text Josephus wrote for Jewish audiences, but no scholars believe this today (Goodman 2019, 31–33). Eisler, however, would claim that a version based on that Aramaic original did exist, and had been preserved in the Slavonic language. It is useful at this point to think about how books circulated in the ancient world. Some books were copied out by scribes to make a duplicate of the original. But others were shortened or combined with other books or parts of other books, like the Sefer Yosippon, which combined parts of Josephus’s text with the work of the Roman authors Virgil and Livy. The Slavonic Josephus manuscripts in which Eisler was interested came from the fifteenth century, which is obviously very far from the time of Josephus. And like the Sefer Yosippon and the Hegesippus, they contained additions. But these additions were unusual. They were not found in other manuscript traditions and were not necessarily the kind of thing one would expect to have been added to an old book. For instance, there are detailed descriptions of battle scenes and even the amount of oil used by the people defiling the temple, passages that appeared to some scholars as if they had been copied from somewhere else (see Goodman 201, 41). Significantly, the Slavonic manuscripts of The Jewish War also contain a version of the description of Jesus from The Antiquities of the Jews. Scholars (Berendts included) had assumed, as with the Christian Latin version of the text, that the interpolations in the Slavonic Josephus manuscripts about Jesus and John the Baptist were just the result of Christian scribes trying to create a fake independent source for the Gospel story. But Eisler thought that Josephus himself had written them and that, if he read it carefully, he could tell which parts were inserted later by Christians, take those parts out, and be left with a recreation of the earliest version of The Jewish War and Josephus’s unbiased account of Jesus. But the Slavonic texts were unknown until the nineteenth century and they were only made available outside of Russia when Berendts translated parts of them—the passages relating to Jesus, John the Baptist, and the early Christian communities—into German in 1906. Along with his translation, Berendts had also produced the radical theory that this text was a more or less direct translation of the original and no longer extant Aramaic manuscript of The Jewish War. His argument

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was based partially on what he identified as “aramaicisms” in the text, like the use of the word maglavije for “whip,” derived, Berendts thought, from the Aramaic maglab, which has no cognates in either Greek or Slavonic (Josephus et al. 2003, 41). Eisler seems at first to have been in agreement with Berendts that the source material for the Slavonic manuscripts was the Aramaic original mentioned by Josephus, but then he changed his mind. Instead, Eisler settled on the idea that the source had been a rough translation of the Aramaic written in Josephus’s own imperfect Greek, which he then handed over to some Greek-speaking scribes for revision. Eisler claimed that this process resulted in three Greek editions of The Jewish War. The first, called by Eisler “The Capture of Jerusalem,” was written in 71 or 73 and had been translated by some unskilled Greek scribes from two copies (one in better shape than the other) of Josephus’ own rough Greek translation of the Aramaic original. The second, written in better Greek by a more proficient collaborator and taking into account events of the last decade, appeared during the reign of the Emperor Domitian (r. 81–96). Eisler also hypothesized a third and later edition now lost to us. Eisler claimed that the earliest edition, “The Capture of Jerusalem,” had been translated more or less word for word by scribes whose Greek was as poor as Josephus’s was. The Slavonic Josephus manuscripts, according to Eisler, made use of this poorly translated Greek exemplar, and so the Slavonic translation retained the sense of the Aramaic original that the Greek rough draft had so faithfully reproduced (even leaving words in Aramaic where the scribes did not know the Greek equivalent), which contained the passages about Jesus as a political revolutionary. The reason for the Slavonic translators retaining all of the unflattering language about Jesus and his followers and not editing it out as other Christian scribes did was, according to Eisler, the fact that the translation was done by a group of “crypto-Jews” in the Orthodox Church (Eisler 1931, 163). These “pseudo-converts,” whose Jewish tradition dated to the rule of the Khazars, a Central Asian dynasty whose rulers had become Rabbinic Jews in the eighth century, were secretly trying to convert (to Judaism) the Lithuanian king Mindowgas, who had recently been a pagan and converted to Christianity for the sake of a military alliance (1931, 148–149). The supposed survival of this old text lost to the rest of the world was due to the lack of linguistic skills of Josephus’s scribes, which would have

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caused them to act more like Google Translate than actual translators. To extend this metaphor, if one knew the algorithm and dictionaries used by Google Translate, as well as the source language, it would be possible to reconstruct the source of a translated passage as it probably appeared originally. That is the task Eisler set for himself. Answering criticisms that he was self-deluded and under the spell of his own “combinatory magic” if he thought he could perform such a reconstruction, Eisler compared his work to that of the nineteenth-century art historian and archaeologist Adolf Furtwängler, who undid the botched and wrongheaded “restoration” of the Aegina marbles undertaken by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorwaldsen a generation before: The attempted reconstruction is in no way more difficult or more uncertain than the average restorations of badly damaged inscriptions or papyri. I am doing for the Testimonium Flavianum what [Furtwängler] did for the Aegina sculptures when he freed them from the awkward restorations of Thorwaldsen and attempted to recover the original compositions. Neither is there any ‘combinatory magic’ […] about it, nor do I cherish any illusions about the result. I know that parts of the original are irrecoverably lost. (Eisler 1931, 57n1)

In 1938, Freud drew a different metaphor out of Eisler’s work in his essay, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable:” Let us imagine what might have happened to a book, at a time when books were not printed in editions but were written out individually. We will suppose that a book of this kind contained statements which in later times were regarded as undesirable—as, for instance, according to Robert Eisler (1929), the writings of Flavius Josephus must have contained passages about Jesus Christ which were offensive to later Christendom. At the present day, the only defensive mechanism to which the official censorship could resort would be to confiscate and destroy every copy of the whole edition. At that time, however, various methods were used for making the book innocuous. One way would be for the offending passages to be thickly crossed through so that they were illegible. In that case they could not be transcribed, and the next copyist of the book would produce a text which was unexceptionable but which had gaps in certain passages, and so might be unintelligible in them. Another way, however, if the authorities were not satisfied with this, but wanted also to conceal any indication that the text had been mutilated, would be for them to proceed to distort the text. Single words would be left out or replaced by others, and new sentences interpolated. Best of all,

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the whole passage would be erased and a new one which said exactly the opposite put in its place. The next transcriber could then produce a text that aroused no suspicion but which was falsified. It no longer contained what the author wanted to say; and it is highly probable that the corrections had not been made in the direction of truth. Without pressing the comparison too closely we may say that repression is to the other methods of defense what the omission of words or passages is to the corruption of a text, and in the various forms of this falsification we can discover analogies to the manifold ways in which the ego may be modified. (1953, 209–254)

Eisler went on to publish a shortened English edition of ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ titled The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources in 1931. Both the German and English versions of his work on Jesus got Eisler a lot of attention. And once again, he found that being a baptized Jew meant he was subject to hostility from Gentiles on one side and scorn from the “learned Talmudists” on the other. Between 1927 and 1931, he conducted a rancorous debate with the well-respected Jewish scholar Solomon Zeitlin in the pages of The Jewish Quarterly Review. Zeitlin was four years younger than Eisler and his career was on a very different track. He was a Russian Jew who had studied in Paris and then come to America to get his PhD at Dropsie College, the first degree-granting institution for postdoctoral Jewish studies in the United States. Zeitlin became the Distinguished Professor of Post-Biblical Literature at Dropsie, served as editor of the Jewish Apocryphal Literature series, shaped the field with the many students he trained, and edited the Jewish Quarterly Review from 1940 until his death in 1976 at the age of 90. Reflecting on his 30 years as editor of the Jewish Quarterly Review in 1970, Solomon Zeitlin explained his gatekeeper role as he saw it: Some of my reviews were quite severe in tone. Instead of analyzing the contributions which the authors made I have had to record flagrant errors, which were due to the authors’ lack of knowledge and the usage of second hand literature and encyclopedias…I am firmly of the opinion that works which are superficial and show lack of knowledge of the sources are dangerous to genuine scholarship. Intelligent laymen may be deceived by such works. (1970, 274)

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Examining one point of contention in particular between Zeitlin and Eisler will illustrate the tone of their exchanges. In his 1928 article “The Christ Passage in Josephus,” Zeitlin first brought up the issue of the names of the months in the Slavonic Josephus manuscripts (which he had examined firsthand in Russia) as evidence against Eisler’s (later abandoned) 1926 theory that the text was written in Aramaic for a Babylonian Jewish audience and, might have been “translated with the help of some converted [Khazar] rabbi into the old Slavonic” (Zeitlin 1928, 244). “Now if this Slavonic text is a translation from the Aramaic,” asked Zeitlin, “why are the months given Macedonian names, since the Jews in Babylon had no conception whatsoever of these names?” (245). Eisler complained that Zeitlin had failed to keep up with him and was criticizing “two years after I had modified and even abandoned it—an earlier hypothesis of mine concerning an [Aramaic] exemplar of the Russian text” (1931, 628). Zeitlin’s (1929) response was characteristically harsh, commenting, “I doubt whether my previous criticism would have been altered after reading the new articles of Eisler” and reiterating: “I have shown clearly, by the usage of the Syro-Macedonian names throughout the Slavonic Josephus, that this book could not have been translated from Hebrew, or from Greek which in turn had been translated from a Hebrew account of the War by Josephus supposedly written for the Jews of Babylonia…” (1929, 3). Practically fuming, Eisler shot back: Although Prof. Zeitlin “doubts whether his previous criticism would have been altered after reading E.’s later articles” the fact remains that his precious argument about the Syro-Macedonian names of the months being used in the Slavonic version can only be quoted against my old hypothesis— based on the scanty and necessarily incomplete information at that time available…It has no value whatever against the theory which I explained to him personally in 1926 on the basis of more recent investigations of the Slavonic text… (1930, 31–32).

Later in that same essay, Eisler expressed resentment about the bad faith with which Zeitlin, who, unlike him, had been allowed to see the manuscripts in person, had entered into the debate: Every one interested in this question and I more than anybody else, would have welcomed the honest collaboration of a Russian Jewish scholar fortunate enough to be allowed to work on the spot for the elucidation of the many still unsolved problems of our text. What I object to is the posing on

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the strength of a few hours of study in a Russian library as an authority, or rather as the sole authority on these matters and to presume to discredit the laborious work of others based on a large number of photographs, collations and trustworthy apographs, as “conclusions based on a translation without examining the MS. in the original.” (55–56)1

Eisler’s dispute with Zeitlin underscored for him the fact that he was treated as an outsider by Jewish scholars of Jewish studies, as he had learned from his experiences with Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem. But, when he also waded into the study of Christian history, he found himself an outsider there as well. With the publication of The Messiah Jesus, Eisler gained a new Christian adversary in J. W. Jacks, who wrote an entire monograph dedicated solely to refuting his arguments point by point. Clearly in mortal terror of Christendom slipping all at once into an Eislerian abyss, Jacks begins The Historic Christ with this ominous line: “It is well that Christian people understand what changes would be involved in our hitherto accepted view of Jesus of Nazareth, if the assertions of Dr. Robert Eisler should come to prevail” (11). Jacks continues, highlighting the potentially destabilizing effect of Eisler’s scholarship on Christian faith: New Testament scholars, through the patient researches of the last century and a half—since the Gospels began to be treated as historical documents and not as a collection of infallible texts—have built up bit by bit on solid foundations what they believe to be a correct theory of the Person and Work of Jesus. They have succeeded in doing this by their use of careful, critical sense, which has led them to reject uncertain or untrustworthy evidence. The theory of Eisler would overturn this well-built structure… What is the theory? It is well known that in Josephus’ Antiquities… the accepted text mentions the appearance in Jewish history of a certain Jesus who was the Christ, a wise supernatural man of marvelous works, who was crucified by Pilate owing to the charges made against Him by the Jewish leaders, but who reappeared alive the third day afterwards, as the prophets had foretold, and became, through the zeal of those who had loved Him from the first, the founder of the fruitful race of Christians. This is the celebrated Testimonium Flavianum, which led Eusebius and all later Christian writers to regard Josephus, in spite of his strong Jewish bent, as an outstanding witness to the Christian faith…In the Slavonic Version of Josephus’ Jewish War, however, there are at least some seven or eight remarkable fragments—what Berendts has called Zusätze or ‘additions’—on Jesus, John the Baptist, and the early Christians. According to Eisler, this version is the

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genuine original one on [sic.] the War issued by Josephus, and the fragments shew that Jesus was little more than a revolutionary against the Roman authority—a political messiah who aspired to the Jewish throne, and who paid for His folly by His life… If Eisler is right in this “tumultueuse intervention,” as Père Lagrange calls it, he must be regarded as the author of a formidable religious revolution, and future ages will be entitled to call him the father of Christian history. But, if he is wrong, his theory, in spite of his immense scholarship and dialectical skill, can only exhibit, as Maurice Goguel says, “one of the most prodigious errors of judgement and method ever made in the domain of historic studies.” It involves such a vast change in our religious outlook that it might be taken as a mere humorous fancy if it were not so terribly serious, for it is nothing less than the replacing of the Founder of the Christian religion, the supreme ethical teacher of the world, by a vulgar insurgent against the Roman authority, who put himself at the head of a band of lawless followers in an effort to raise sedition, but was captured and crucified. (11–14)

And Jacks’s conclusion makes it clear what motive he believed Eisler had for writing this scandalous book: The Jewish people have had numerous pretended messiahs who have dragged them into sanguinary struggles. At last One presented Himself whose spiritual doctrine has been admired by all pure-minded souls, One whose only object was to establish the kingdom of God, to teach men to love their Father in heaven, and to love one another. Now Robert Eisler, Saloman Reinach, and some other learned Jews would efface this marvellous page of history. (275)

In the general public, Eisler especially provoked outrage (mixed with a healthy dose of barely masked anti-Semitism) with his reconstruction of Josephus’s description of Jesus as a man of “simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, with a long face, a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose, so that spectators could take fright, with scanty hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazireans, and with an undeveloped beard” (1931, 427). Almost two decades later, Mircea Eliade made this cryptic remark in his diary: Robert Eisler was perfectly happy to reconstruct, what, in his opinion represented the physical portrait of Jesus. A man, a little man, like Eisler’s Jesus—

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this Jewish scholars can accept… in order to calmly reject Christianity, the religion created by an ordinary human being. (1990, 11)

When Eisler’s description of Jesus appeared in The New York Times after his Paris lectures, it prompted no less than three Americans to experience visions of the pulchritude of the Christ, then write to Eisler to demand he retract his calumny. One man (who also identified himself as a fallen angel trapped on the earthly plane) wrote to Eisler and described Jesus as a very handsome man who bore himself very upright. He was clean shaved with tender sweet lips, a delicately chiseled nose while his face was round though bearing the slight oval shape of the patrician, he looked to be: the face was even proud in its quiet celestial beauty whose striking charms were softened and wonderfully sweetened by the soft tender beauty of his clear lovely eyes, his brow was neither too high nor too broad, softened as it was by the clinging abundance of his waving hair. He was about the middle height of a healthy man yet in his striking appearance one thing stood out and that was a special roundness of the outstanding chest and the breadth of the shoulders which gave him the appearance of a person of great strength—great physical strength and he walked with the alert carriage and carried himself with the air of a competent very much alive man of business. (Glover 1926)

Not all of the attention Eisler received for his description of Jesus was negative. Rabbi J. L. Zlotnik, executive director of the Zionist Organization of Canada, having just read Eisler’s (1930) article “Flavius Josephus on Jesus Called the Christ,” wrote to him in 1931: I have not read your book, nor have I yet seen the book of Dr. Zeitlin, but I found your article most interesting, not only because of the wealth of information it contains, but also because of the vigorous stand you have taken against your antagonists. I know the kind of “scholarship” and methods some of our younger generation try to display, and you are to be congratulated for your courageous attitude. It will do them a world of good when they will see that the world is not HEFKIR [“undisciplined”]. (Zlotnik 1931)

Eisler found another influential admirer in the Bolshevik sympathizer and Member of Parliament Morgan Phillips Price, who found The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist to be “one of the greatest works which has appeared in our time” and was “horrified that so little attention has been paid to it” (Price 1938). Phillips was probably not the first radical

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firebrand to see an ally in Eisler’s Jesus, and maybe in Eisler himself, given these lines Eisler wrote in the preface to The Messiah Jesus: It has been suggested, and will doubtless be suggested again, that this work is itself inspired by a revolutionary Messianist tendency. To this accusation I can only say that I wish it were true. I wish I could honestly plead guilty to being moved in the depths of my conscience by the most powerful religious impulses of my race. Yet for the sake of plain truth I must own that in the unravelling of the mysterious history of this movement I was actuated almost exclusively by a boundless curiosity and a passionate desire to get at the real truth of this maze of documents, authentic and spurious, falsified in part or altogether forged. (1931, x–xi)

For his part, Phillips expressed his conviction to use Eisler’s book as the basis for the occasional semi-religious speeches he was expected to make as a parliamentary candidate, adding that “even if it should prejudice me politically I propose to run the risk.” But his correspondence with MP Price was not the full extent of Eisler’s involvement in political matters during this period. He was also determined to find an audience for his ideas about monetary policy, preferably one that could put them into action on a large scale.

Note 1. See also Collins (2017).

References Collins, Brian. 2017. By Post or by Ghost: Ruminations on Visions and Epistolary Archives. Jewish Quarterly Review 107 (3, Summer): 393–404. Eisler, Robert. 1926. The Russian Josephus: Recent Studies of the Text. The Times, April 17, p. 8. ———. 1929. ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ: Messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechtenn ach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen (Jesus, the King Who Did Not Reign: The Messianic Independence Movement from the Appearance of John the Baptist to the Downfall of Jacob the Righteous after the Newly Discovered “Conquest of Jerusalem” by Flavius Josephus and the Christian Sources). Volume I. Heidelberg: C. Winter.

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———. 1930. Flavius Josephus on Jesus Called the Christ. Jewish Quarterly Review 21 (1/2): 1–60. ———. 1931. The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources. New York: The Dial Press. ———. 1948. Review of Das Vater des katholischen Modernismus, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940). By Friedrich Heiler. Munich: I. and S.  Federmann, 1947. Pp. 252, la. octavo, D.M. 12s. The Hibbert Journal 47–48: 303–305. Eliade, Mircea. 1990. Journal I, 1945–1955. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund. 1953. Analysis Terminable and Interminable. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 23 (1937–1939). Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-­ Analysis and Other Works. London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Glover, Alfred. 1926. Alfred Glover to Robert Eisler. 14 May. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence. Goodman, Martin. 2019. Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Josephus, Flavius, H.St.J. Thackeray, Ralph Marcus, and M.I. Finley. 1966. Josephus: The Jewish War, and Other Selections from Flavius Josephus. London: New English Library. Josephus, Flavius, Henry Leeming, Katherine Leeming, and Nikita Aleksandrovič Meščerskij. 2003. Josephus’ Jewish War and Its Slavonic Version: A Synoptic Comparison of the English Translation by H. St. J. Thackeray with the Critical Edition by N.  A. Meščerskij of the Slavonic Version in the Vilna Manuscript Translated into English by H. Leeming and L. Osinkina. Leiden: Brill. Price, Morgan Phillips. 1938. Morgan Phillips Price to Robert Eisler. 19 January. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence. Scholem, Gershom. 1981. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. New York: New York Review of Books. Zeitlin, Solomon. 1928. The Christ Passage in Josephus. Jewish Quarterly Review 18 (3, Jan.): 231–255. ———. 1929. The Slavonic Josephus and Its Relation to Josippon and Hegessippus. The Jewish Quarterly Review 20 (1, July): 1–50. ———. 1970. Eighty Years of the ‘Jewish Quarterly Review. Jewish Quarterly Review 60 (4, Apr.): 271–274. Zlotnik, J.L. 1931. J.L. Zlotnik to Robert Eisler. 11 February. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence.

CHAPTER 7

Negative Interest: The Dual Currency Model and the Journey to America

Abstract  This chapter breaks down Robert Eisler’s plan for creating a dual currency system with one currency for small cash payments and one for the unit of account, so that, in times of deflation, a central bank could create an effective negative interest rate by manipulating the rate of exchange between the two currencies and thereby penalize the hoarding of cash. It also looks at Eisler’s presentation of that plan to the US Senate’s Committee on Banking and Currency in Washington, D.C. in 1934 and the reevaluation of Eisler’s ideas by twenty-first century economists. Keywords  Monetary policy • Fiat Currency • Zero Lower Bound • The Great Depression In the early 1930s, as the world was suffering the Great Depression, Eisler turned his attention back to economics, the subject in which he earned his first doctorate. At the time, he was surviving off what little remained of the family money, supplemented by income from lectures and odd jobs as a financial advisor. Having devised a plan to reverse inflation and stave off future financial crises, he wrote three books for popular audiences on how to reform the banking system: This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_7

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World Crisis (1931), Stable Money (1932), and, with economist Alec Wilson, The Money Machine: A Simple Introduction to the Eisler Plan (1933). All of these works relate back to his earlier work on the history of monetary systems, Das Geld: Seine geschichtliche Entstehung und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung [Money: Its Historical Origin and Social Significance]. The conclusions from the lessons of history can be made comprehensible to the layperson, in particular to the intellectual and manual worker in the business world, but one should not try to draw him into the complicated conceptual controversy of the specialists… One can be content to show how what has been called “money” has come to be, how it has influenced the development of human society, and how it has been influenced by it in retrospect; ultimately how it has changed, could, or should develop in the future according to the lessons of the past. (1924, 3)

This expressed desire to educate the public about the history of money and to draw an economic program from the lessons of that history was a constant in Eisler’s economic thought. He was also part of a larger group of economists who wanted to counter the dangers of currency deflation by creating “stable money” that would not be subject to the fluctuations of commodity levels. Drawing on a historical practice from the Italian Renaissance called “banco-money,” Eisler argued that this could be done by adopting a currency system in which: [There] would be two sorts of money: (1) legal tender, called a pound, or a U.S. dollar of “current money,” or money proper, and (2) bank or contract money of account, called a pound, or a dollar banco. Money banco would be obtained by concluding a contract about a future payment of money proper, or by depositing “current money” with a bank or similar institution. Current money would be exclusively used for small transactions between persons not well known to each other, or not in possession of a bank account… All other payments would be effected by means of bank-money, that is, by cheques or traveller’s cheques or transfers of money banco. (1932, 34)

The purpose of creating two parallel systems of currency, one for small cash purchases such as one would pay with one’s wallet, and the other for large purchases such as one would pay with direct deposits, is to allow central banks to get around the problem economists call the “zero lower bound.” Interest rates are the most effective tools that central banks have for regulating the economy, and the “zero lower bound” refers to the fact

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that lowering interest rates becomes less and less effective the lower they get. If there were two parallel currency systems, one for payments and one for exchange, then a central bank could create an effective negative interest rate by manipulating the rate of exchange between the two currencies. For example, if the exchange rate of cash to banco was one to one, the central bank could set a future exchange rate (for one year hence, let us say) of 0.95 to one, effectively taxing those who hold cash at 5 percent and thereby compelling them to lend, invest, or convert their cash into banco. It is what is referred to as a fiat system, in which currency values are set through a decision-making process instead of rising and falling according to the value of the commodity that backs the currency (typically gold or silver). Eisler’s currency system is similar to the one developed by the left-wing anarchist Sivio Gessel, (1862–1930), who lived on a vegetarian commune for a time and conceived the idea of what he called Freigold, or “free money.” In Gessel’s plan, paper currency would begin losing value as soon as it was printed, requiring those who wanted to hold on to their money to purchase stamps and stick them on to the bills to maintain their value. His dual currency model, like Eisler’s, was designed to discourage hoarding money by making cash less valuable the longer one held on to it (see Rosalsky 2019). Gessel’s plan is remembered today mostly because it was mentioned by John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, in his 1936 masterwork, The General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest (Kimball, personal communication). Reviewing This Money Maze, one economist of the period dismissed its proposals and refused to even address them, writing, “It is difficult to answer the arguments of a nightmare” (Canaan 1932, 78). But if Eisler’s ideas were out of step with those of other economists, it may have been because they were ahead of their time. In the rethinking of the banking system that followed the global economic crisis of 2008 and the development of viable virtual currencies like Bitcoin, major economists like Miles Kimball, the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Chair in Economics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, have championed Eisler’s ideas as remarkably prescient. Kimball opines that “[it] is indeed unfortunate that [US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt] did not pick up on… Robert Eisler’s timely suggestions of how to eliminate the zero lower bound and use negative interest rates to escape the Great Depression…” (2016). And as Europe and the United States have become increasingly cashless, the idea of using money that has

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no physical form seems like common sense. Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics and Thomas D.  Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, writes that Eisler’s model “merits serious attention and must be understood as a real option, if possibly only as part of a transition to a lesscash society” (2016, 173). The twenty-first century economist most responsible for picking up and dusting off the Eisler plan was Willem Buiter, former chief economist at Citigroup. Buiter points out that the core of Eisler’s plan is the unbundling of two distinct functions of money: numéraire and medium of exchange. Numéraire refers to the function of money as a unit of account, that is, its function of expressing the value of a ton of wheat or a barrel of oil or some other commodity. The medium of exchange refers to the function of money in purchasing goods and paying for services. In Eisler’s plan, the numéraire function of money would be assigned to money banco. And the value of money banco would be determined by what is sometimes called the cost of living—the average value of necessities and commonly purchased goods and services like electricity, bread, fuel, etc. Current money would continually depreciate in value compared to the cost of living, which would incentivize consumers to either purchase goods or convert their current money into the more stable money banco. Eisler presented his system to the British Parliamentary Finance Committee Review in 1932 and to the US Senate two years later. On April 5, 1933, Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 6102, which made it a criminal offense to hoard gold and required all US citizens to sell all their gold coins, bullion, and certificates to the Treasury in exchange for the mandated price of $20.67 per troy ounce. In January of 1934, Congress was debating the Gold Reserve Act, which would give control of the gold supply to the US Treasury Department, directly under the authority of the executive branch, so that the President could raise the price of gold, thereby increasing the money supply, devaluing the inflated dollar, and lowering interest rates in order to encourage investments. On January 20, the Committee on Banking and Currency, chaired by Florida Democrat Duncan Fletcher, was in session to hear from experts on monetary policy.1 Eisler’s was the last scheduled testimony before the committee’s two-day break, and he began with an introduction:

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Mr. Chairman, and gentlemen, my name is Robert Eisler. I am a doctor of philosophy, a member of the Austrian Historical Institute, and the author of a general history of the monetary system; the author of a book on “Stable Money”; and I am considered an authority on the Continent on the question of real monetary stabilization. I have had the honor of being heard before this committee in executive session on the main program of reflation, that is to say, of raising the price level. (Gold Reserve Act of 1934, 239)

After the stock market crash, deflation was causing prices to fall at up to 10 percent each year, making commodities so cheap that it was not profitable for companies to produce them, leading to massive layoffs and unemployment. But experts in the congressional hearings were warning of the dangers that inflation could bring if the money supply were increased too much. If prices rose much too quickly, commodities would become unaffordable for the average American, leading to poverty and even more layoffs when manufacturers were unable to sell what they had produced. Eisler addressed this concern directly: This question has come up again this morning, and a number of witnesses as well as members of the committee have said, with perfect propriety, that the process of raising the price level would defeat itself and give no benefit to the country if, at the same time, incomes were not raised in proper proportion. I am entirely in agreement with those witnesses who have stated that the present bill contains, in itself, possibilities of inflation such as have never existed before in this country or in the British Empire. If these possibilities are fully used—and I believe that in the course of time they cannot fail to be used, because of the situation of the Budget, because of the obligations to which the present administration is already committed—in this case prices will rise. They will rise, in my opinion, which is based on definite mathematical analysis, much more than by 50 percent. They may rise by much more than 200 percent. If wholesale prices are raised to such an extent the cost of living must go up, the cost of living will go up considerably. (239)

Eisler argued that this seesaw effect, in which commodities were always either becoming too cheap to produce or too expensive to buy, was endemic to the gold standard itself. He warned the senators that “if this country returns to a gold standard, modified or not, to a gold standard under which the monetary unit is convertible (either into a fixed or into a variable amount of grains of gold) this country must have, according to

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stringent mathematical demonstrations, periodical crises such as have occurred every 6, 7, 8, or 9 or 10 years all through the industrial system” (242). Eisler’s exchange with Senators Alban Barkley of Kentucky and Carter Glass of Virginia is evidence both of his hostility to the gold standard and the skepticism with which his ideas were greeted in Washington. [Mr. EISLER:] If this country returns to gold either in the old or the new form, these crises will occur, the next one occurring not very late after 1936, maybe before, the date of these recurrent crises being perfectly calculable by the new mathematical methods. Senator BARKLEY. In other words, you think we are likely to get into another fix before we get out of this? Mr. EISLER: Quite. I am entirely convinced of that. Senator GLASS.  Why on earth should you make it in 1936, when we want to reelect another Democratic President and Congress? [Laughter.] Mr. EISLER: I cannot help the fact that according to the formulas worked out in my bureau of mathematics we think that this is about the margin, the latitude which you can achieve by expanding credit in one of the forms which have hitherto been suggested. I think that if this country returns to gold instead of returning to a stabilization of the exchanges by means of mutual credit, if it returns to a gold standard instead of returning to a perfectly acceptable sterling-dollar standard, the greatest opportunity in history would be missed and another generation will have to carry the weight of an unfortunate and entirely obsolete monetary system… Senator BARKLEY.  Have you a definite system or monetary program that you care to submit? Mr. EISLER: I have, Senator. I have worked out not only this one-line amendment, which could easily and in a short time be passed, but at the end of this mimeogram you will find a definite and complete draft of a monetary law explaining the way in which a modern reserve bank ought to expend credit and currency, both for the stabilization of the exchanges and for the achievement of an optimum price level. Senator BARKLEY. Have you submitted this plan of yours? Mr. EISLER: I have submitted it in executive session. Senator BARKLEY. No, I mean to different nations. Mr. EISLER: Oh, yes; it has been submitted to the British Parliamentary Finance Committee on the 10th of February 1932. I was introduced at that time by Sir Robert Horne, former Chancellor of the Exchequer and a vote of thanks was moved by the former Minister of Colonies, Mr. Leo Amery.

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Senator BARKLEY. Has any nation adopted it? Mr. EISLER: No nation has adopted it. It can be adopted not by any nation of the small size of my own—I am an Austrian—it can only be adopted by a sufficiently large and independent economic unit. The unit must be self-sufficient to the extent that it needs no essential imports from outside. The United States are self-sufficient to the extent of 94 and probably 95 percent. The British Empire is self-sufficient to the extent of 93, probably 94, percent. Each one of them could adopt a perfectly sound scientific monetary system and have no unemployment ever after. If the two Anglo-Saxon nations were to work conjointly they could completely revolutionize the world and achieve such prosperity and such wealth as cannot be dreamed of under present circumstances. (243)

In order to raise prices without raising the cost of living, Eisler’s dual monetary system would allow for a kind of compensated deflation. As prices inflate and the value of currency goes down, the money with which laborers are paid depreciates in value. Eisler explains that all laborers are creditors in that they are loaning their labor in exchange for future payment, so that if they lent one week of labor on Monday in exchange for $100 on Friday, they would expect that the $100 they will receive on Friday will have the same purchasing power that it had on Monday. If it does not, they are doubly losing. For example, if the cost of living is $100 a week on Monday, but has gone up to $150 a week on Friday, then that $100 paycheck is really only worth $66.67. On Monday the worker expects to have her cost of living met by Friday’s paycheck, but when Friday comes the worker finds that her paycheck is actually $83.33 ($150– $66.67) less than it needs to be to maintain her standard of living. Mr. EISLER: Every laborer, every officer, every white-collar worker, is a creditor to the extent to which he lends his work for 1 week, 1 month, or 1 year, to his employer. There is no other way of increasing his nominal income in such a way that his real income remains unimpaired but to give him constant compensation for the loss which he otherwise would suffer through the depreciation of the money which we have to face for the immediate and for the further future. This could be done by inserting a one-line amendment into the Thomas-­ Rankin amendment [to the Gold Reserve Act], on which the present discretionary powers of the President in monetary matters is based…

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[If] a 1-line amendment could be inserted into the Thomas-Rankin amendment declaring all these coins and notes hitherto issued or coined by or under the authority of the United States legal tender for all debts, public and private, to the extent of their purchasing power on the day of payment, every creditor would have to be constantly compensated for loss occurring through depreciation of the currency. The bank would have to pay 110 cents to the depositor of $1 as soon as the cost of living has gone up from 100 to 110. You would have a circulating medium worth, not the face value of the bank note or the coin, but the face value divided by a suitably constructed, scientific cost-of-living index. Under this system every single worker, every single trader, would get every week exactly the amount of compensation in currency which would make it possible for him to buy, in spite of raised prices, what he had bought the week before. Only by such compensated reflation, the detail of which is explained in further detail in published books of mine, could you add constantly to the total purchase power of the United States and all other nations. (241)

Needless to say, Eisler’s plan was not adopted by United States or any other country (though President Richard Nixon did move US currency off the gold standard in 1971). But the fact that he was called to testify before such a body at such a critical time speaks to the reputation he enjoyed as an economist in the 1930s. He also seems to have put his ideas to work in the private sector. In February of 1939, when Eisler was imprisoned in a concentration camp, an exchange between his old friend the Reverend W. A. Wordsworth and David Cleghorn Thomson, the general secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, hints at what kind of financial activities Eisler was involved with. In his letter suggesting that the Nazis might release Eisler if enough money were offered to them, Wordsworth writes: It is perhaps possible that if the German authorities are hoping to drive a hard bargain in the financial negotiations, they would be disposed to pave the way by some concession that would cost them nothing but will give a good impression in England. Doubtless you know that Eisler’s visits to England were partly in connection with some financial theories. I think he persuaded one of the investment banks to experiment on his ideas. He had worked out some ideas with a French mathematician by which they were confident that they could forecast a year in advance the trend of the rise and fall of values of various types of investments. He believed that if the government would act upon those principles it would go far to solve the

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­ nemployment problem. It is all beyond me, but I think he told me that the u investment trust company (I forgot which it was) had got good results from their year’s trial of it. Perhaps the financial method of approach may be a dangerous one to try on the German authorities, but if you can get at the facts, it might be worth considering, as the plea of scholarship has been unsuccessful so far. (Wordsworth 1939)

Cleghorn Thomson replied, “Frankly, I do not think it wise to get into [sic.] touch with the financial people, as I understand that Dr. Eisler’s chief crime was that he went on a financial mission” (Cleghorn Thomson 1939). Of the two men, Wordsworth knew Eisler best, which makes me more inclined to credit his story of Eisler’s investing career than Cleghorn Thomson’s explanation that Eisler’s arrest had something to do with his travels to England and the United States. Whether it attracted any unwanted attention or not, Eisler’s trip to America was significant. The record of Eisler’s testimony paints a picture of a man who was on the cusp of prominence, but ultimately unable to get his ideas taken seriously by the right people. This is especially unfortunate in the case of his dual currency model, since it seems to have been the most potentially useful of all his lines of research and is also the one that has earned the most approval from subsequent generations of experts in the field. Eisler’s Senate testimony and the brief possibility of his monetary program being put into practice were happening alongside other events that were similarly earning him mixed reviews. His work on the historical Jesus, which had begun with the broadly comparative analysis of Orpheus the Fisher and narrowed to the text-critical historical speculation of The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, was leading Eisler toward the New Testament itself and (in an indirect way) also opening up an entirely new front for his intellectual work in the field of psychoanalysis.

Note 1. Besides providing a platform for his economic theories, it also brought him to America for the first and last time. While there, he stayed in Philadelphia with his wife’s relatives, the Storks. His sister-in-law Elisabeth Von Pausinger Stork had translated the classic children’s book Heidi into English and was married to the American poet, editor, and University of Pennsylvania professor Charles Wharton Stork. It was in Philadelphia that Eisler became acquainted with his 24-year-old niece, Rosalie Regen (née von Pausinger), who would later become a prominent Quaker peace activist.

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References Cannan, Edwin. 1932. This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis by Robert Eisler. The Economic Journal 42 (165, Mar.): 77–78. Cleghorn Thomson, David. 1939. David Cleghorn Thomson to W.A. Wordsworth. 25 February. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries. Eisler, Robert. 1924. Das Geld: Seine geschichtliche Entstehung und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung. Munich: Diatypie. ———. 1931. This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. ———. 1932. Stable Money: The Remedy for the Economic World Crisis: A Programme of Financial Reconstruction for the International Conference. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. Eisler, Robert, and Alec Wilson. 1933. The Money Machine: A Simple Introduction to the Eisler Plan. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. Gold Reserve Act of 1934: Hearings Before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United States Senate, Seventy-Third Congress, Second Session on S. 2366: A Bill to Protect the Currency System of the United States, to Provide for the Better Use of the Monetary Gold Stock of the United States, and for Other Purposes, Revised January 19–23. 1934. Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office. Kimball, Miles. 2016. Pro Gauti Eggertsson. Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal, June 27. Last Accessed July 7, 2020. https://blog.supplysideliberal.com/ post/148084197684/pro-gauti-eggertsson. Rogoff, Kenneth. 2016. The Curse of Cash: How Large-Denomination Bills Aid Crime and Tax Evasion and Constrain Monetary Policy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rosalsky, Greg. 2019. The ‘Strange, Unduly Neglected Prophet.’ Planet Money: The Economy Explained, August 27. Last accessed July 10, 2020. https://www. npr.org/sections/money/2019/08/27/754323652/the-strange-undulyneglected-prophet. Wordsworth, W.A. 1939. W.A. Wordsworth to David Cleghorn Thomson. 23 February. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries.

CHAPTER 8

Dreamwork: The Fourth Gospel, Eranos, and the Turn to Psychoanalysis

Abstract  This chapter analyzes Robert Eisler’s The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, in which he argues that the Gospel of John consists of a core narrative written by Jesus’s “Beloved Disciple” Lazarus, supplemented with the recollections of John of Ephesus, the former High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the heterodox interpellations of the heretic Marcion. In 1936 Eisler presented this theory at Eranos, an annual meeting of scholars of religion held in Ascona, Switzerland, where he connected with Carl Jung, whose idea of the collective unconscious would play an important role in Eisler’s Man into Wolf. Finally, the chapter looks at a psychoanalytic case study of a vision of Jesus recorded and published by Eisler and a dream he had at his mother’s house. Keywords  Psychoanalysis • The Gospel of John • Eranos • Carl Jung • John of Ephesus • Marcion Continuing his pattern of proposing counterintuitive answers to high-­ profile unsolved problems, in 1930 Eisler moved from his work on the historical Jesus to one of the most enduring puzzles in Biblical scholarship: the identity of “John the Evangel,” the author of the Fourth Gospel, a problem that dates to the second-century Church Father Clement of Alexandria. The Fourth Gospel is an entirely different kind of narrative from the books of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the Synoptic Gospels. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_8

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Clement claimed that John told the spiritual story of Christ and the Synoptic Gospels told the historical story. Tradition has identified its author as John, the son of Zebedee. John was one of Jesus’s inner circle and is named in all four lists found in the New Testament (Matthew 10:2, Mark 3:17, Luke 6:14, and Acts 1:13). Strangely, though, the episodes from the Synoptic Gospels that describe John as being present are described nowhere in his Gospel, and the two sons of Zebedee (John and his brother James) are mentioned only in 21:2. It is clear from reading the text that John’s Gospel is drawn from more than once source. For example, in chapter 21, the author tells a story about Jesus performing some miracles involving fish for his disciples, and then says that this story came down from the disciple, who swears that it is true. It is clearly not the writer, then, who witnessed these events. Unlike Matthew, Mark, and Luke, who are all named in the Gospels attributed to them, the author of Fourth Gospel is only referred to as the Beloved Disciple. But some scholars have also argued that this title belongs to Lazarus, which will become Eisler’s position as well. In the preface to The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, Eisler describes how his work on John slowly took shape, “unwittingly and unwillingly” following the classical author Horace’s prescription to wait nine years before publishing anything you have written: Not until [the author] sat down to write this preface did he realize that he had had the original draft of this little volume on his desk for a full nine years ever since he received on an auspicious day in 1928 Dom de Bruyne’s essay on his startling new discovery. He has been altering and increasing it by following up every side-issue of the problem, answering in advance all possible objections to this new solution of the age-old Johannine problem, analysing every source in the most minute detail, until the manuscript had grown to such a bulk, containing so much Greek text and so many footnotes, that no publisher would so much as look at it. (1938a, vii)

As Eisler notes in the quote above, in 1928, the Benedictine scholar Dominic de Bruyne made a highly conseqential claim about a collection of Latin summaries of the Gospels that he had discovered in 1910 in Munich and the Vatican. Summaries like these were typically included with New Testament books held in libraries in the early Christian era, but these particular specimens were striking in expressing a bias against Marcion, the second-century heretic who claimed Jesus was totally unrelated to the

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God of the Old Testament. De Bruyne was able to convince Adolf von Harnack, one of the foremost scholars of the Gnostics and other heretical groups, that they had been translated from Greek and were the oldest such summaries in existence (see Eisler 1938a, 5–7). When Eisler learned of this discovery, it was the last piece of the puzzle for his theory of the origin of the Fourth Gospel. Here is that theory in a nutshell: In the early second century, Marcion (not yet declared a heretic by the Church) obtained a previously uncirculated document about the ministry of Jesus composed by his Beloved Disciple, Lazarus (not John), whom he was supposed to have raised from the dead in John 11:1–44. Marcion then took this text containing Lazarus’s first-hand accounts of Jesus’s ministry to the last living witness to the life of Christ, John of Ephesus, the former High Priest of the Temple in Jerusalem. Marcion wanted to supplement Lazarus’s narrative with John’s recollections, and so he acted as a scribe for the old man, who was in his eighties. But as he was transcribing John’s words, Marcion began to make slight changes to them in order to reflect his own views about the God of Israel as a cruel demiurge to be repudiated by true Christians. For an example of what Eisler is talking about, consider John 8:42–47, which seems to imply that the being the apostles thought of as God (“your father”) is in fact the Devil: 42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I have come here from God. I have not come on my own; God sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? 47Whoever belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” (All quotes from the New International Version)

Eventually, John read Marcion’s transcription of his words, noticed heresies like the one above, and sent him away. He then tried to edit out Marcion’s interpolations and inserted material to contradict him directly. An example of what Eisler might call an anti-Marcionite interpolation is found in John 1:9–13, where the author seems to be saying that those who would deny the connection of Jesus to the God of the Old Testament

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do not understand that Jesus’s father is the creator of the world described in Genesis: The true light that gives light to everyone was coming into the world. 10He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. 11He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. 12Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—13children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God. 9

The resulting text from all this editing and counter-editing, with a core narrative from Lazarus, interpellations by Marcion, and counter-­ interpellations by John of Ephesus, is what we know as the Fourth Gospel. In the preface to The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel Eisler makes it clear that his two large projects on Christian origins were conceived at the same time and the nine-year gap between them was unplanned, which explains the similarity in methodology. In both cases, he took treasured sacred narratives of the Christian tradition and uncovered what he believed to be their heretical origins. But while his work on Josephus led to contentious relationships with his fellow historians of religion in the 1930s, his work on John would receive a more muted response due to being overshadowed by the political events of 1938. And while his theory that Jesus was a failed political messiah with a hunched back and a unibrow could be easily understood by a general audience as an attack at the heart of Christianity, the question of which “John” was the author of the Fourth Gospel must have seemed less consequential to run-of-the-mill Christians. Rather than leading him into high-profile controversies, Eisler’s work on John led him to a different group of religion scholars. And this meeting paved the way for his later reliance on the idea of the collective unconscious as the repository for ancestral memories in Man into Wolf. In 1935, he was invited to lecture on the topic at the Eranos conference, an annual meeting of scholars of religion held in an upscale chateau in Ascona, Switzerland that had begun two years before. The ethos of the conference was informed by what Steven M. Wasserstrom calls a “mythocentric and mystocentric approach [that] posited generic features of religion, with an emphasis on the centrality of mystical experience, myth, gnosis, esoterism, and eschatology” (1999, 5). In later years, after Eisler’s death, Mircea Eliade and Gershom Scholem would become mainstays at Eranos.

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The entire project was inspired by the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, and founded by one of Jung’s patients, the wealthy heiress Olga Fröbe-­Kapteyn. Jung himself had already been reading Eisler and cited his work on Orphic symbolism in his 1935 essay “Dream Symbols and the Individuation Process” (1960, 383) and subsequently in a lecture series on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, among other places (1989, 1165, 1440). But Eisler’s 1935 lecture marked the beginning of his engagement with Jung’s ideas. At Eranos, Eisler was received warmly and found himself in the company of such giants in the history of religion as the Hungarian mythologist Karl Kerényi, the German Indologist Heinrich Zimmer, and the British Buddhologist Caroline Rhys Davids. His reputation as a serious scholar was well and truly established, even if it was in constant competition for prominence with his identity as a baptized Jew and his notoriety as the man who drove his publishers to exasperation and once tried to steal a fifteenth-century codex from an Italian library. Fröbe-Kapteyn reported to Jung that one of her cats had allowed Eisler to witness her birthing a litter, which apparently raised him in her estimation. Another Eranos attendee, Ernst Robert Curtius, called Eisler “a real aufklärer [enlightener].” Then he described Eisler in terms that distinctly foreshadowed the pessimistic outlook the author himself would go on to express in his later work on Ecclesiastes after World War II. [Eisler] showed with uncanny clarity, where the cold dialectic of the white man’s intellect leads—to a petrifaction, a rigor mortis of the world as a concept. What remains is the inner malaise of Solomonic world-weariness. (Hakl 2013, 102) 1

The 1935 edition of the Eranos Jahrbuch [Eranos Yearbook] published the paper he had presented in the form of an essay titled “Das Rätsel des Johannesevangeliums” [“The Riddle of the Gospel of John”]. True to form, the essay was 180 pages long, far longer than any other in the series. But Eisler was never invited back to Eranos, probably because FröbeKapteyn had begun to look on him less favorably, suspecting that “he sometimes used his outstanding intellectual abilities to prove something that he knew to be untrue, simply for the sake of intellectual amusement” (Hakl 2013, 102). Eisler’s ideas on the authorship of the Fourth Gospel reached the wider public on February 12, 1936, when The Times published a letter he wrote laying out his theory. Eisler was living in London at the time, presumably engaged in the investment scheme reported by his friend Wordsworth. He

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included his London address at the bottom of the letter and received “postbags full of letters with every mail for days on end” in response to his newest provocation as well as a communication from Methuen, publishers of The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, now interested in a new book on his theory. The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, published by Methuen in 1938, is relatively short and straightforward. Eisler was convinced that it needed to be to reach his audience. He was also convinced that once they read it, publishers and public alike would clamor for his planned second and third volumes, The Book of Lazarus and The Gospel of the Paraclete. On the question of John, even Eisler’s critics admired his ingenuity, erudition, and style, though they did not accept his conclusions. A 1938 review by Sir Norman Angell presents a typical reaction to Eisler’s style of argumentation. This passage was underlined by Eisler himself in his personal copy of the press cutting: “Upon one reader at all events this book has exercised a strange and almost hypnotic fascination, and it is only at the last, when one lays it down and is freed from its spell, that little doubts as to the validity of the argument begin to insinuate themselves.” Similarly, Wordsworth wrote to Eisler: Though I am more than ever convinced that John of Zebedee is the only substantial claimant of the gospel, I find your book immensely stimulating & expect its ultimate effect will be to lay the ghost of John the Elder. If so the Church ought to canonize you someday. What will your ghost think of that? (Wordsworth 1938)

Wordsworth was clearly being ironic. No one would ever have mistaken Eisler for a saint. However, since the time of his death, Eisler has sometimes been misidentified as a psychiatrist or a Jungian psychoanalyst. This is probably because of his reliance on Jungian psychology in Man into Wolf and the fact that he delivered the lecture on which it was based to the Royal Society of Medicine. But Eisler neither practiced psychoanalysis clinically nor had any formal training in it. Nevertheless, he did psychoanalyze at least one man (by mail), though the way in which he proceeded was clearly more Freudian than Jungian. Robert Whitehead of London, a self-described “Business Man” who was “no Churchman and not a Jesus worshipper, much as I admire him,” read Eisler’s 1930 article, “The Paraclete Problem” in The Quest and wrote to him on New Year’s Eve of 1929,2 asking “if it is a frequent occurrence that men see The Christ; and are there occasions known when the visions are free from religiosity and at the same time full of life and

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power[?]” These questions came in light of Whitehead’s dramatic experience on November 25th of the previous year when he had seen a blazing vision of Christ in his home: I became conscious first of someone, as it were close by wanting to see me, I was aware of movement, the person was about to withdraw when I made a big effort, born of courtesy, I think and nothing else, and to my astonishment the Christ blazed before me. I say “blaze” for indeed it was an astounding sight. I gazed and gazed. I had no sense of worship. I was keenly observant. No picture of Christ was ever like that. It gave me many new ideas particularly of life. Living raised to the [Nth] power. The Christ took not the slightest notice of me. Then he retired through a long series of rooms with the glass partitions until he disappeared as something within me, doubtless some subconscious calculating part of me, said “14.” (Whitehead 1929)

Eisler responded promptly to Whitehead, first asking whether the man that appeared to Whitehead resembled the hunchbacked, long-nosed Jesus whose description he reconstructed in The Messiah and John the Baptist (“which you can order for 2/3rds of the net price by quoting this letter”). Then Eisler launched into his first attempt at analyzing the vision, concluding that Whitehead must have read Eisler’s reconstructed description of Jesus somewhere, probably in a 1929 article by G. R. S. Mead: You were probably subconsciously offended at the “coldly objective description of Jesus” reproduced by Mr. Mead on p. 34. A powerful wish to see Jesus’ glorified self with your own eyes developed in your subconscious mind… According to the rules of psycho-analytic interpretation, which apply to visions and day-dreams as well as to ordinary nocturnal dreams, I should take your sentence “The Christ took not the slightest notice of me”—and the corresponding feature of the vision to be the counterpart to your statement, “I am no churchman and not a Jesus worshipper, and why he should visit me I could not tell.” These are thoughts which were present in your subconscious mind when the vision was forming itself; they were the resistance, which your imaginative powers had to overcome, the part of yourself which my forefathers would have called [“yetzer hara”] (the evil impulse) and your forefathers, Satan or the devil. The one would say to the other part: if you were a religious minded person and a Jesus worshipper you could see him, but why should such a favour be granted to a secularist or indifferent or doubting or unbelieving person? This objection was overcome by your creative imagination through the vision’s taking the shape of Jesus taking no notice of you,

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because you would not worship him. This is how I should explain your (notwithstanding any possible explanation) highly interesting experience. As to your question whether such visions are frequent, I think they are rare. Still I have got two letters from America from unknown female correspondents violently protesting against my reconstruction of Flavius Josephus’ description of Jesus as it was reproduced by the New York Times in a [telegram] about my first lecture on the subject before the Paris Academy. I still possess these letters; to both ladies Jesus had appeared in radiant beauty in order to enable them to deny what they called my slandering him. (Eisler 1930a)

Eisler ends by asking Whitehead to allow him to publish his analysis of his vision in “the psycho-analytic paper ‘Imago,’ which is only read in Austria and Germany.” In his reply Whitehead wrote: I would gladly give my consent to your use of the incident in your proposed article for “Imago” if I felt you were provided with the whole of the data necessary for that purpose. I follow quite well the course of your argument, but there is error in the conclusion because there has been only a partial statement of the case. For instance, you do not know me and my mode of thought and action. That would not matter if these three: myself, my thought, my action were those usually expected. But in the degree in which these depart from the normal—you not being made aware of that variation—there is a factor of error in the result. (Whitehead 1930)

He then proceeded to explain how he was different from other men in that he had “two overwhelming interests, Men (not women), Men and God.” I find men mightily hungry for God, just common men like myself, and, account for it as one may, I am able to help. So men come to me, to my office, to talk of God and even to make confessions. Men come to me. I do not seek them. I do not think I have much to say. I have one remedy for all evils, I tell of the “Eternal Presence.” I say that as men look for it their troubles, sins, disasters, impediments one by one fall away. As they grow in the power of cognition of that presence they become healthy in body, mind, soul, and—though probably after much trouble—in estate also. For the psychics—I discourage phenomena hunting and seek to lead them to contemplation of that in which all phenomena arise but treating them as

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[­illegible, possibly “adventitious”]. So in time they come to distinguish between the self-created and the not self-created. (Whitehead 1930)

In a reply that refined his earlier analysis of the vision in light of Whitehead’s further revelations about himself, Eisler prefaced his remarks by asking Whitehead to remember “the old adage that ‘science has no heart,’” recalling his earlier description of Josephus’s mercilessly “cold, detached, and unsympathetic pen-portrait of the man Jesus” (1931, vii). After preparing Whitehead for the blow, Eisler concluded that his vision of Christ was a result of his disavowed homosexual desires. He wrote, footnoting a reference to Freud’s early collaborator Wilhelm Fliess: Science is now convinced that all men are bi-sexual beings and that male and female individuals are not absolutely different, as ignorance would have us believe, but polar types with an infinite variety of transitions between them. Nobody is absolutely “normal” in sexual matters, the word “normal” being itself a conventional word devoid of objective meaning. (Eisler 1930b)

Eisler seized on one bizarre Freudian slip that Whitehead made when he wrote “not women” in parentheses next to “men.” Clearly, in the pairing “men and God,” what is generally understood is “human beings and God,” not “males and God,” so the addition of “(not women)” is indeed remarkable. Whitehead’s subsequent emphasis on males and masculinity in his letter only drives home the point: After this necessary preliminary you will not think it a want of respect or proper discretion, if I call your attention to the fact, that you have written an absolutely uncalled for parenthesis in your sentence [on] p. 2. “I have two overwhelming interests, Men (not women), Men and God.” This sentence should normally run “men and women, Men and God” (there being two possible contrasts, in Latin vir and mulier[,] homo and deus). It is not normal, [that] a kind and helpful, religious, altruistic person should have no interest in women, whose relation to God is the same as that of male men or he-men, as the Americans like to say. Your emphasis on virility in all you like and admire is patent in your letter; sons doing “a man’s work[,]” “healthy virile people,” the daughter having given you a grand son, your business being agreeable to you because of the contact with men (women being of no interest to you, etc.)… The most convincing feature of your letter pointing in that direction is the line added ex posteriori—as an afterthought— between two lines: Men come to me, I do not seek them. Why this

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protestation? Who would reproach you for seeking men and carrying to them your gifts? (Eisler 1930b)

In Eisler’s explanation, Whitehead’s natural erotic ambivalence had attached to the person of Jesus because he was made uncomfortable by his unwilled response to the feminine appearance of Christ in William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Light of the World,’ which shows a feminine Christ carrying a glowing lantern. Whitehead’s long-suppressed ambivalence was then brought to the surface by reading Eisler’s reconstructed description of Jesus from Josephus, resulting in a wish-fulfillment fantasy of seeing a masculine Christ figure. The number “fourteen,” which Whitehead heard spoken by an unseen voice (“doubtless some sub-conscious part of me”) during the vision, Eisler suggested was a “cryptomnemonic reference of 1 Cor. 15, ‘…after that he was seen of James, then all of the apostles and last of all… of me also.’ James and the 12 apostles = 13, you are the 14th.” Over the course of a long correspondence between the two men that lasted until 1931, Eisler obtained Whitehead’s consent to use his vision as a psychoanalytic case study. Whitehead, a self-styled mystic and practitioner of yoga, thought Eisler was missing the spiritual significance of his vision, but had no objection to the article, even supplying Eisler with two photographs of himself (“without hat” as Eisler requested) to publish along with it.3 After being rejected by Jung for Imago in 1937 (Whitehead had died in 1936), the article was published under the title “Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht” [“A Twentieth Century Vision of Jesus Psychologically Examined”] in Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie [Journal of Psychology of Religion] in 1938b, the same momentous year in which he published The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel and was sent to Dachau. While his article on Whitehead’s vision was the only public foray Eisler ever made into psychoanalysis, it was preceded by another attempt, which has never seen publication (until now). Two years earlier at his mother’s house on the shores of Lake Attersee, Eisler, like Freud, had performed some self-analysis using one of his own dreams. What follows is an unpublished essay titled, “A Dream Poem,” found among his papers at the Warburg Institute. All my life I have wanted to excavate some archaeological site in the Near East. For one reason or another I have never been able to do it. Asleep in my mother’s house in Unterach am Attersee in Upper Austria in the night preceding the 25th of August 1936 I dreamt I was digging with my bare hands into a steep sand-dune in a blindingly sunlit desert. I could distinctly feel the

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gritty sand under my nails. Suddenly I got hold of a bit of papyrus and extricated in slowly, with great care, hoping all the while it would prove to be one of the rare literary texts and not one of the thousands of business documents most often encountered. Lo and behold, it was a Greek poem unknown to me! Having read it, I thought, If I am to publish this text, I must translate it first into verse. I sat down and did it on the spot. While I scribbled into my notebook, there was a terrific noise, almost like an earth-­ quake and the whole sand-dune I had undercut by my digging came down chokingly all over me. I awoke half suffocated only to realize that the noise had come from a peasant’s cart rumbling over the stones of a lane below the open window in the early morning. Saying to myself, I must not, at any cost, forget the poem, I rose, went to the adjoining library to write it down on a bit of paper and returned to my bed to go on sleeping deeply. When I woke up finally I had actually forgotten the poem. When I told the dream to my wife she suggested I might have dreamt even the final effort of putting it down on paper. But we did find on my desk the German verse-translation with a Greek title “Eros Invincible in Battle” taken from Sophocles’ Antigonē (781): EPΩC ANIKATE MAXAN Zweierlei Waffen schleudert der unbesigbare Eros: Speere, die leicht oder tief eindringend, aber von eigener Schware herausgezogen wieder zu Boden fallen. Diese Wunden—die heilen. Die Hand der Zeit streicht leise Glättend über die Narben, die bald und völlig gesunden. Aber—fürchte die Pfeile, mit Widerhaken geschnitzt, die Brennend das Herz versehen und wieder herausgerissen, Leben und Seele des tötlich Getroffenen mit sich reissen! The following is an English version given to Léon de Sousa at his request on the 1st of May 1948: Two kinds of missiles throws invincible Eros: Pointed javelins penetrating lightly or deeply, Yet easily dropping out from the quivering flesh and Falling down to the ground by their own dead weight. Clean wounds slain by these darts heal easily. Gently caressing them the hands of Time Will smooth out the scars till they vanish. Dread thou, however, the bow and incendiary arrows Of Eros, barbed and fired with flames Which burn and seer man’s bleeding heart!

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If these are ripped out, the mortally wounded Victim will perish, a shadow drifting down to Hades. I have never found anywhere a Greek or classicist poem corresponding to these lines which I might have remembered by what is known as cryptomnesia. Otherwise the dream is a transparent wish fulfillment. The digging with bare hands occurs in Shaw’s “John Bull’s Other Island” which I have read time and again. In this play two poor settlers are mentioned who dig the ground for their first potato-field with their bare hands and buy their first spades and hoes from the proceeds of their first harvest. Therefore, in the dream, this action means defiance of the financial difficulties. The caving in of the undercut sand-dune signifies the [bankruptcy] resulting from over-­ expenditure on such a venture, even if successful.

In my reading, there is much latent content in this dream that has gone unexamined by Eisler, beginning with the title of the buried poem, “Eros Invincible in Battle,” a line that is the beginning of the chorus’s famous speech to Antigone in the Sophocles play as she walks toward the cave where Creon has ordered her to be buried alive (781). At the time of this dream, Eisler was working on the Fourth Gospel, the core of which he believed to have come from Lazarus, the “Beloved Disciple” whom Jesus raised from his tomb. There is an inverted, mirror-image symmetry here between Antigone walking into her tomb, where she will be found to have hanged herself when Creon has a change of heart and tries to free her, and Lazarus, who, after Jesus commands him, comes alive out of the tomb in which his dead body had been placed: Antigone goes into the cave alive and comes out dead, while Lazarus goes in dead and comes out alive. The familiar womb-imagery of the cave itself corresponds to the place where Eisler was having the dream (“my mother’s house”) an identification supported by his distinct recollection that in his dream that he is digging in the “blindingly sunlit desert,” representing the harsh reality outside of that womb-cave into which he is trying to tunnel back. The papyrus he digs up contains the reference to Antigone, which suggests Eisler’s fear of dying in the cave as she did rather than miraculously emerging from it like Lazarus (“the whole sand-dune I had undercut by my digging came down chokingly all over me”). But he also wants to come out of the cave into which he is digging himself with something of value in the eyes of his peers (“one of the rare literary texts and not one of the thousands of business documents most often encountered”) and perhaps to become, like Lazarus, a “Beloved Disciple.” In this context, the javelins

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and arrows of Eros in the poem seem less like the proverbial Cupid’s darts and more like the “slings and arrows of outrageous critics” (as Shakespearean actors like to say). In Eisler’s case, these would be harsh critical appraisals of his work and persistent trouble finding an academic position. For a man as steeped in learning and inwardly conflicted as Eisler was, there is practically no end to the possible referents of each dream element, which leads to a whole host of questions: To what “venture” might he be referring when the Eisler writes that “the caving in of the undercut sand-­ dune signifies the [bankruptcy] resulting from over-expenditure on such a venture, even if successful?” Recall that in 1936, Eisler was involved in some financial speculation in London, where he was attempting to demonstrate the value of his ideas by earning money with them. Is the desert in the dream meant to be the Greek island of Lemnos, which is famous for its sand dunes and, besides, is the only desert in Greece? Lemnos is where the wounded hero Philoctetes is abandoned in another Sophocles play, about which David Gordon White makes some very useful observations that relate to Eisler’s own liminal status: Through a contagious play of associations, the outside, as a place of exile, comes to have a defiling effect on those who venture into it: living in a marginal space renders one marginal. Sophocles’ Philoctetes is a fine example of the ambiguity of this relationship between inside and outside, between citizen and exile, between homeland and wilderness. In this drama, the punishment appears to occur before the crime—that is, an innocent Philoctetes is struck with an inhuman, polluting contagion that renders a continued “political” life an impossibility. Once exiled in the savage wasteland (agrios), he becomes as wild and inhuman as his environment, as his place or nonplace of exile. He has been condemned to hear no human voice, the desert land makes it impossible for him to cultivate any sacred grain, and he would be a victim of the ferocious beasts that he hunts were it not for his wonderful bow. Philoctetes’ plight is that of the archetypal social pariah or barbarian whose wildness is as much a result of his exile as his exile is of his wildness, but whose presence at a distance is tolerable as soon as he proves useful to the center. (1992, 7)

When he wants to preserve it, why does Eisler translate the text into German rather than copying it out in Greek? What does it even mean to translate a Greek text one has made up into one’s native language, especially for a man who spent so much of his waking life trying to reconstruct the Urtext of translations whose originals had been lost? Does the

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reference to John Bull’s Other Island, a play about an Irishman who has “gone English” and finds himself completely alienated when he returns to his hometown, speak to Eisler’s own ambivalence toward his identity as a Jew? Regarding this last unconscious conflict, he was soon to find a resolution. Because, regardless of how he felt about it himself, the question of Eisler’s Jewishness would soon be settled for him in the affirmative.

Notes 1. It is unclear whether Curtius saw Eisler as a prophet who was warning against this “Solomonic world-weariness” or as an example of it. 2. Presumably the January 1930 issue of journal was available some weeks before its publication date. 3. In a strange twist of fate, when the catalogers at the Warburg Institute found these photographs among Eisler’s papers, they assumed that they were photographs of Eisler himself and recorded them as such. When I later requested whatever photos of Eisler they had and received these photos of a tall, thin, balding man with sad eyes and mustache, I could hardly believe they depicted the man who had been described as “very Jewish” by Gershom Scholem and Mary Warburg. When I uncovered the published article of “Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht” the mystery was solved.

References Angell, Sir Norman. 1938. Who Wrote ‘John’?: The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel. By Robert Eisler, PhD. Methuen. 12s. 6d. The Christian World, May 16 Eisler, Robert. 1930a. Robert Eisler to Robert Whitehead. 5 January. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. ———. 1930b. Robert Eisler to Robert Whitehead. 20 January. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. ———. 1931.The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources. New York: The Dial Press. ———. 1935. Das Rätsel des Johannes-Evangeliums. In Eranos-Jahrbuch l935: Westöstliche Seelenführung, ed. Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, 323–511. Zurich: Rhein-Verlag. ———. 1938a. The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel. London: Methuen & Co. ———. 1938b. Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht. Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie 11: 14–41. ———. 1948–1949. “A Dream Poem.” Unpublished manuscript.

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Hakl, Hans Thomas. 2013. Eranos: An Alternative Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Jung, Carl Gustav. 1960. Dream Symbols and the Individuation Process. In Spiritual Disciplines: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, vol. 4. New York: The Bollingen Foundation. ———. 1989. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934–1939 by C. G. Jung. Part Two. London and New York: Routledge. Shaw, George Bernard. 1936. John Bull’s Other Island: In Four Acts. London: Constable. Sophocles. 1994. Antigone. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wasserstrom, Steven M. 1999. Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade, and Henry Corbin at Eranos. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Whitehead, Robert. 1929. Robert Whitehead to Robert Eisler. 31 December. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. ———. 1930. Robert Whitehead to Robert Eisler. 4 January. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. White, David Gordon. 1992. Myths of the Dog-man. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Wordsworth, W.A. 1938. W.A. Wordsworth to Robert Eisler. 2 May. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence.

CHAPTER 9

Dachau and Buchenwald

Abstract  This chapter describes Robert Eisler’s arrest following the Nazi annexation of Austria and his subsequent confinement for 15 months in Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. In the camps, Eisler made friends with like-minded prisoners like the rare book dealer Hans P. Kraus and the historian of bread and baking Heinrich E.  Jacob, as well as a Jehovah’s Witness who had read his book on the historical Jesus. The chapter also looks at what Eisler wrote about Hitler and the Nazis in the ten years he lived after leaving Buchenwald, and narrates the strange story of the S.S. officer Friedrich Murawski, who was expelled for having plagiarized Eisler’s work on the historical Jesus. Keywords  Nazis • Dachau • Buchenwald • Holocaust • Anschluss • Scholars imprisoned by Nazis I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that they might see that they themselves are beasts. —Robert Eisler, “Vanity of Vanities: The Book ‘Ecclesiastes’ Restored to Its Original Form.”

As anti-Semitism was on the rise in Austria in 1938 in the lead-up to its annexation by Nazi Germany (known as the Anschluss), Eisler recognized © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_9

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the danger he was in and tried to set up a lecture tour based on The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel that would secure him an entry visa into some friendlier territory. Following the Anschluss in March, Eisler wrote to Oxford asking about being appointed to the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, thereby gaining a way out of Nazi-controlled Europe. On the day after Hitler held a rally at the Heldenplatz in Vienna attended by 200,000 Austrian supporters, a letter came expressing regret that Oxford was unable to offer any assistance. Desperate to find an escape, Eisler wrote to friends all over Europe and America, asking for help. Finally, Gilbert Murray, Eisler’s old friend from his days with the League of Nations, stepped in and secured him the Oxford readership, which he was to have taken in October and held for three years. But on May 20th, Eisler was arrested and sent to Dachau, where he became prisoner 16547. Dachau had already been in operation for five years, but most of its inmates were political prisoners, along with gypsies, homosexuals, Jesuits, and a large number of Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are known in German as Bibelforscher or “Bible Students,” which Eisler, as we will soon see, remembered as “Biblical Scientists”). The 2,000 Jews arrested after the Anschluss—many through the extra-judicial practice of schutzhaft, or “protective custody”—were the first large group of Jewish prisoners sent to the camp. In an essay titled “The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation,” published in 1949, Eisler gives an idea about the kind of treatment he received there. The isolated individual can never be certain whether he is right or wrong, and not even whether he is sane and reasonable or insane and mad. We all know—just as well as we know that we dream by night—that on the margin of our social organism there live those terrifying beings who have no social comprehension any more and are confined within a wholly private dream world. You may take this from me who have been not indeed in a lunatic asylum but in the solitary confinement of the “black bunker” in a concentration camp for a time that seemed endless: the completely isolated individual hangs on precariously and only perilously to reason and sanity. His situation is so terrible that he cannot help feeling it must be unreal, a mere nightmare. Men, he feels, cannot be so cruel as to inflict this horror upon a fellow creature. (1949, 80)

The “black bunker” must refer to the garrison at Dachau that was built by the prisoners themselves at the time Eisler was there. After he was transferred out, the bunker was remodeled to contain four narrow standing

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cells like the “rooms of little ease” used by the Inquisition, but the confinement Eisler is probably talking about would have taken place in slightly larger cells in the east and west wings where the prisoners were locked away under constant surveillance for weeks or months at a time with greatly reduced rations, sometimes getting warm food only on every fourth day. Eight months later, in the weeks following Kristallnacht (November 9th and 10th), the number of Jews in the camp swelled to exceed 13,000, prompting the authorities to release most of the prisoners after their property was confiscated and they agreed to leave the country. Eisler was not among these and was instead sent 250 miles away to Buchenwald, where he had ample opportunity to witness more of the sadism and brutality that later inspired Man into Wolf. Prisoners worked from first light until dark, and during the period when Eisler was there, after dinner they were often made to continue working under floodlights until one in the morning (see Hackett 1995, 152). Despite the physical hardships, scholarly topics were never far from Eisler’s mind in the camps, where he made friends with like-minded prisoners like Hans P. Kraus, who would reestablish his rare book business in New York City after the war, and Heinrich E. Jacob, author of a landmark 1944 study of the history of baking and bread, who acknowledged the help of his “friend Robert Eisler, historian of religion, who in the dark days of Dachau and Buchenwald, kept awake my hope to finish and to publish [my] book” (2007, 381). During his confinement, Eisler was presumably a witness to the public hanging, on Heinrich Himmler’s orders, of the escaped political prisoner Peter Forster on a gibbet erected in the middle of the camp on December 21st (see Wachsmann 2015, 140). While he was imprisoned, Eisler’s wife (whose land had been confiscated because she refused to divorce him), his friends, and the officials at Oxford University all made repeated attempts to get Eisler released through diplomatic channels. W. A. Wordsworth was especially persistent, writing to the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, a British organization that had formed in 1933 as the Academic Assistance Council to try to help scholars displaced or imprisoned by the Nazis. In his letter, Wordsworth offered to take full responsibility for Eisler if he were released. The Society’s general secretary, David Cleghorn Thomson, actually knew Eisler personally and seems to have done everything he could to help him, but without result, writing back to Wordsworth on February 25, 1939: “I

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am very sorry that it will not be possible for me to take any further steps regarding Dr. Eisler.” In March of 1939, when Eisler had been imprisoned for ten months, a man named A. M. Ruff wrote to the Society that a Mr. W. E. D. Allen was willing to pay Eisler’s fares to England, give him and his wife a place to live, provide them with an allowance, and then get Eisler a job in Istanbul. But Ruff was understandably confused about exactly how to describe Eisler and identified him as a professor of Slavonic languages at the University of Vienna. The Society’s assistant secretary Esther Simpson wrote back: There is no professor of that name at the University of Vienna, but I think you must mean the economist and historian Robert Eisler, who is now in a concentration camp. I am afraid that the guarantee which Mr. Allen very kindly offers will not assist Dr. Eisler. There is a position available for him at the University of Oxford, and a visa ready for him to come to this country. The sole difficulty lies in the attitude of the German authorities. The officials at the University of Oxford have taken every possible step to secure Dr. Eisler’s release, but without success, even though they had the prestige of Oxford and the assistance of the Foreign Office. (Simpson 1939)

Eventually and for reasons that are not recorded, Eisler was released from Buchenwald in August of 1939 (just before the invasion of Poland) and made his way to England via Italy and Switzerland. Lili remained in Austria until June of 1940. Years later, in a 1948 letter to Eisler, his friend Martin Harvey wrote that one of their mutual acquaintances, Baron Otto Leithner, “was under the impression that you had died in a concentration camp, but I told him that you were a very difficult man to kill” (Harvey 1948). Eisler’s younger brother Otto had not been so lucky. He was murdered along with 65,000 other Jews in the notorious Maly Trostenets death camp in 1942, possibly in one of the gas vans the Belarusians called dushegubki (“soul killers”), which were brought in to speed up the exterminations. After Eisler was freed, the New Testament scholar Wilbert Howard sent him a clipping of a review he had written for The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, along with some words to the effect that he was glad Eisler was alive and that, under the circumstances, the identity of John the Evangel was probably the last thing on his mind. Eisler responded: To me these problems will never sink into a subordinate place. I have been speculating a good deal about them while working in a labour-gang to the limit of my physical powers and it may interest you that I have had some

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very fruitful and comforting discussions with one highly educated and intelligent member of the primitive Christian adventist community of the so-­ called Biblical Scientists, the members of which are mostly in the German concentration camps (about 500 in Buchenwald) and more cruelly treated even than the Jews because they believe Hitler to be the foretold Anti-­ Christ, the Kingdom of God as a political organisation to be realized here on earth as a reign of justice and loving kindness and because they refuse military service. I was greatly surprised to learn that this man who had studied Hebrew and Greek as well as theology in order to be a preacher and teacher among his brethren (they have no clergy) should have read my German ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ and derived from it what he felt to be the strongest possible confirmation of his own and [the founder of the sect] Judge Rutherford’s interpretation of the gospels! I had no inkling of the very existence of this sect and was deeply touched to witness the exact counterpart to the Roman persecution of the catacomb Christians going on before my own eyes. (Eisler 1939)1

Eisler wrote about Nazis on several occasions in the years after he was released from the camps. In Man into Wolf, he drew a parallel between an atrocity committed by the SS in Prague and the practice of flagellation in Dionysian rituals depicted in Italian paintings: When the German occupation authorities closed down the Czech University of Prague, a considerable number of students, girls and boys, went in an orderly procession to the entrance doors, rhythmically shouting their demands that the doors should be re-opened so that they could continue their studies. After this had been going on for some minutes, a flying squad (Rollkommando) of S.S. men drove up in lorries, surrounded the students and drove them through the doors which had suddenly been opened from the inside by other S.S. guards. The students were herded into the largest lecture-hall with blows and kicks. Then they were told to strip completely…When the order had thus been carried out the doors were opened and the prisoners were told they “could go”, indeed “run out”, “girls first”. In rows on both sides of the door stood S.S. men who had taken off their own leather belts weighted with the regulation metal buckles. The stripped victims had to run the gauntlet between them, while they were savagely beaten up with these belts and pursued with relentless blows through the long, empty, resounding passages of the house into the arms of other S.S. men posted at the end of the run to stop the girls. (1949, 257–258)

In May of 1945, responding to Adolf Hitler’s obituary in the The Times, Eisler combined his philological expertise with his dry wit in a

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letter to the editor explaining the confusion over why Hitler’s surname was changed from his family name of Schicklgruber: The often alleged change of name by Hitler’s father amounts to this: — Austrian peasants have regularly two names, one derived from the name of their freehold—the “house name” (Hausname)—transmitted from owner to owner in case of inheritance or sale of the property, the other the family name a man signs on documents (Schreibname). A man is “called” (heisst) by his house-name as long as he dwells there and owns his place; he signs himself (schreibt sich) with his family name. The change from the one to the other is evidence of the sale or cession of property rights to a new owner. “Hitler” (from Hutte, Hitten, diminutive Hittel) means “small cottager” or “little Cotman,” and is originally an expression of contempt on the part of the bigger landowners in the neighborhood. So is Schicklgruber, “the owner…” “the man of the chequered pit”—i.e., a low-lying patch of land, piebald with sandy patches and dark scrub. (Eisler 1945)

Rather that his usual “Fellow of the Austrian Historical Society,” the letter is signed, “Robert Eisler, lately of Dachau and Buchenwald.” Although he was unaware of it, Eisler did eventually get some small measure of indirect revenge on one of the “enemies of humanity,” as he called them, who tormented him and executed his brother. The recipient of that retribution was Friedrich Murawski, a priest who had risen through the ranks of the Nazi movement, beginning with the Sturmabteilung (S.A.) in 1933 and then joining the S.S. and landing a position at the Reich Security Main Office, where he worked on “opposition research” (Dierker 2002, 556). He also belonged to Himmler’s Hexen Sonderauftrag [“Special Witch Unit”], tasked with demonstrating that the European witch hunts were an anti-Aryan extermination campaign undertaken by the Catholic Church (Leszczynska 2009, 66). In 1941, Murawski, having been a prolific scholar, was put in charge of a special unit devoted to building a Judenbibliothek consisting of volumes confiscated from synagogues, bookstores, and the private libraries of Jews. The work of cataloging and shelving the books was performed by conscripted Jewish scholars, who worked while their S.S. overseers insulted and harassed them. When their work setting up the library was complete in 1943, the captive librarians were sent to Auschwitz, where all but two perished (Schidorsky 2007, 23–29). The unlikely agent of Eisler’s revenge was Walter Grundmann, one of the founders of the Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen

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Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben [“Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life”], a lickspittle group of anti-Semitic theologians who demanded of their members an oath of allegiance to Hitler and declared him “God’s agent in our day.” This admiration was evidently not reciprocal; the Reich proved itself to be mostly unimpressed by their strident posturing, even forcing them to take the word Bewegung [“movement”] out of their original name because it was reserved for recognized Nazi organizations (Heschel 2008, 67). Despite the sometimes open hostility the Nazi leadership displayed toward his goals, Grundmann was persistent in his entreaties to the Propaganda Ministry to be allowed to publish a journal of scholarship confirming the “racial-völkisch epistemology of National Socialist Worldviews,” until he was finally informed that there was “no interest in synthesizing Christian teachings with National Socialism, nor proving that a reshaped Christianity is not fundamentally Jewish” (Heschel 2008, 150). Grundmann suspected that certain elements within the party were pushing the anti-Christian views that were causing the Reich to keep the Institute at a distance. His suspicions were confirmed by his discovery of a pamphlet titled Jesus der Nazoräer, der König der Juden [Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews] written by Murawski and published in 1940 by the anti-­ Semitic publisher Theodor Fritsch. Reading the pamphlet, Grundmann recognized parts of the argument as having been lifted from Eisler’s ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ and reported to Murawski’s commanding officer that he had plagiarized a Jew. As a result, Murawski was expelled from the S.S. in 1943. He eventually committed suicide two years later along with thousands of other Nazis, the same year Eisler’s article “Man into Wolf” appeared in The Hibbert Journal (Heschel 2008, 150).

Note 1. The “Biblical Scientists” Eisler is talking about are the Jehovah’s Witnesses and they were indeed subjected to brutal treatment under the Third Reich (see Garbe 2008).

References Dierker, Wolfgang. 2002. Himmlers Glaubenskrieger: Der Sicherheitsdienst der SS und seine Religionspolitik, 1933–1941 (Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte). Paderburg: Ferdinand Schöningh.

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Eisler, Robert. 1939. Robert Eisler to Wilbert Howard. 8 September. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. ———. 1945. “Hitler.” The Times. 7 May, p. 5. ———. January 1949. The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation. Ethics 59 (2, part 1): 77–94. ———. 1951. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. Garbe, Detlef. 2008. Between Resistance and Martyrdom: Jehovah’s Witnesses in the Third Reich. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Hackett, David A. 1995. The Buchenwald Report. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Harvey, Martin. 1948. Martin Harvey to Robert Eisler. 8 August. Warburg Institute Archive, General Correspondence. Heschel, Susannah. 2008. The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jacob, Heinrich E. 2007. Six Thousand Years of Bread: Its Holy and Unholy History. New York: Skyhorse Publishing. Leszczynska, Katarzyna. 2009. Hexen und Germanen: Das Interesse des Nationalsozialismus an der Geschichte der Hexenverfolgung. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag. Murawski, Friedrich. 1940. Jesus der Nazoräer, der König der Juden: eine Darstellung nach den Quellen. Berlin: Theodor Fritsch. Schidorsky, Dov. 2007. The Library of the Reich Security Main Office and Its Looted Jewish Book Collections. Libraries & the Cultural Record 42 (1): 21–47. Simpson, Esther. 1939. Esther Simpson to A.M. Ruff. 15 March. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries. Wachsmann, Nikolaus. 2015. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.

CHAPTER 10

Vanity of Vanities: Astrology, Ecclesiastes, and Last Days in England

Abstract  This chapter follows Robert Eisler as he is released from Buchenwald and arrives at Oxford to take his post as the Wilde Reader in Comparative and Natural Religion, only to find that the administration has appointed the Anglo-Catholic philosopher and historian of religions Edwin Oliver James to the readership in his absence. This was the beginning of a long series of disappointments for Eisler in the 1940s, when his health was declining, his fortune was gone, and even his old friends were beginning to see him as more of an eccentric crackpot than a respected scholar. The chapter also discusses Eisler’s book on the history of astrology, his attempted reconstruction of the original text of Ecclesiastes, and his last articles on ethics, folklore, and philology. Keywords  Astrology • Ecclesiastes • Danse Macabre • Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion After his release from Buchenwald, Eisler arrived at Oxford in September of 1939 to find that the administration had appointed the Anglo-Catholic philosopher and historian of religions Edwin Oliver James to the readership in his absence. At first, Eisler was assured that James, a full professor at Leeds, would step down now that Eisler had arrived, since “no Englishman would profit [from] such a situation.” But James, Englishman though he was, declined to give up his post, and so the university made a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_10

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Fig. 10.1  Snapshot of Robert Eisler in England around 1944 taken from the photo album of his nephew G. Frederick Stork (1913–2008). The original caption reads, “Dr. Robert Eisler, scholar, professor, writer and lecturer.” (Courtesy of Richard Regen)

concession to Eisler, allowing him to deliver his scheduled 1938 lectures on the “the pre-Hellenic populations of Crete and the Aegean” in the Michaelmas terms of 1939 and 1940, and to receive a stipend of £156. Eisler also prepared a typescript of a book about classical subjects in Renaissance art but was advised by the faculty that it would be in his “own interest” to confine himself to the subject on which he had been brought

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Fig. 10.2  Snapshot of Robert and Lili in England around 1944 taken from the photo album of G. Frederick Stork. (Courtesy of Richard Regen)

to lecture, to which he responded darkly that his only remaining “interest” was his obituary in The Times (Eisler 1944). Eisler and his wife Lili, who arrived in June of 1940, stayed with a series of friends until Lili found work as a cook in return for modest lodgings and bus fare for her husband’s one day a week in the library. The same month his wife finally joined him in England they were separated again when Eisler was sent to another prison camp, this time by the British government, who had begun interning Jewish refugees on the Isle of Man. Aside from the indignity of being imprisoned for being a foreign Jew by a country who had recently requested his presence as an honored guest, the camp at the Isle of Man was a comfortable situation compared to Buchenwald. Eisler was able to visit museums and to give lectures to his fellow detainees. One of them described him as a “great nuisance, insisting on the best hour and room for lectures and so on” but averred that “his lectures were about the most interesting he had ever heard” (Murray 1947). He was released in September due to his heart trouble and continued to carry on a friendly correspondence with one of his guards, Captain Robert Marshall, whose daughter was an archaeologist.

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The 1940s were years of frustration for Eisler. His body was badly damaged by his 15 months in the camps, probably compounded by earlier war injuries and the long-term effects of malaria. He was suffering angina pectoris as well as severe pain in his hands and shoulders from bone degeneration, and he may have developed diabetes. In this state, Eisler tried to earn a living with a scattering of essays and lectures and occasional employment as a financial consultant or tutor. For extra money and when his health allowed, he sometimes worked stoking the boiler in his building. In September of 1944, Esther Simpson, secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, wrote a one-paragraph note to Eisler asking about his current employment so that she could update the Society’s records. Two days later, she received four pages covered front and back with crabbed handwriting detailing Eisler’s many indignities, humiliations, and rejections since coming to England. On the last page was written: If the Society wanted to do something, one would think that something could be done to alleviate one’s feelings of being utterly useless and unwelcome. I have therefore decided to give you an exact survey of the facts, although I feel sure that the only result will be to convince you more than ever that I am a very square peg impossible to fit into any of the well-­ rounded and polished but rather narrow holes available in this country… I have arranged with the Oxford professor of anatomy who has very kindly undertaken to utilise for teaching purposes and the benefit of science what I shall leave here when I finally depart from this queer world and thus to relieve my guarantors from what I understand might be a final expenditure of at least [£40] to close my account. (Eisler 1944)

He applied for funding for a series of lectures on the Fourth Gospel from the Hibbert Trust, a Unitarian endowment that offered grants to those seeking to “contribute to the education, knowledge or understanding of Unitarianism or liberal religion.” It was denied, prompting him to angrily accuse the board of bias against non-Christians. In 1942, the same year he debated the Anglican theologian Austin Farrer at the Socratic Club on whether Christ rose from the dead, Eisler went to the BBC with yet another of his “reconstructions,” this time of the Book of Ecclesiastes, proposing a broadcast reading of it for Ash Wednesday. It was likewise rejected. In 1946 he approached them once more with the same proposal and when he was rebuffed this time, he again claimed religious

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discrimination and took his case to the Joint Committee on Matters of Religious Liberty, explaining in his complaint: It has been my good fortune to unearth under a mass of debris, the genuine unadulterated text of the greatest poem ever written in Hebrew, the Sadducean “Vanity of Vanities,” misnamed by tendentious Rabbinic misvocalization and consequent mistranslation “The Preacher” in our Bible versions, the true title being “Words to the Assembly…” [It is] a monument of tragic despair, the most topical and moving part of the whole Old Testament… The director of religious broadcasting will not allow this poem—every word of which is in the Bible itself—to be broadcast, with a specially composed musical introduction and finale, and a short, perfectly reverent historical introduction. (Eisler 1946b)

His complaint was unsuccessful. Publishers were unwilling to take on any of his projects, due in part to the severe paper shortage caused by the war. Eisler wished to publish the second and third installments of his Johannine trilogy, but the publisher rejected The Book of Lazarus and The Gospel of the Paraclete, and remained noncommittal about another one of his pitches, a satire about Hitler titled Adolph and Hermann. After reading a newspaper advertisement offering The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel at a discounted price, Eisler wrote to and demanded an explanation from the publisher and learned that of the 1500 copies printed, only 360 had been sold, while 590 were “destroyed by enemy action,” leaving just 500 that remained unbound to be sold “as is.” There was, furthermore, no demand for the 40 bound copies currently in stock (White 1944). Despite his obvious depression and failing health, Eisler was still remarkably productive in the 1940s and publishing some of his most thoughtprovoking work. He was lecturing throughout London on a wide variety of topics, including “The Philosophic Basis of Modern Physics.” The year 1946 saw the appearance of the lavishly illustrated The Royal Art of Astrology, drawn from some of his earlier work in World Cloak and Sky Canopy and motivated partly by Eisler’s fear that astrological newspaper columns were encouraging “totalitarian dictatorship and abject mass servitude to an alleged fatality” (Eisler 1946a). The direct inspiration for the book seems to have been a Mass-­ Observation project on astrology in 1941, after psychic medium Helen Duncan correctly predicted the sinking of a British battleship off the coast of Argentina, setting off alarm bells among British authorities

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about the possibility of newspaper astrology columns undermining the war effort (see Campion 2013, 261).1 This project got Eisler’s attention and probably exacerbated his anger at being unable to publish during the paper shortage, even though astrological columns written by people he considered to be charlatans continued to appear in newspapers. Throughout the book, Eisler argued that not only did astrologers ignore the history of the ancient cosmologicial systems they had borrowed, but they were also ignorant of science, which he prided himself on keeping up with. For instance, he excoriates astrologers for calculating birth charts down to the minute but ignoring the amount of time it takes light from distant stars to reach the earth, which would throw the whole calculation off completely (1946, 207). The following passage from The Royal Art of Astrology gives a clear picture of how Eisler saw his relationship to the people of England in general, now that he was more or less stuck there, and also prefigures the arguments he was later to make in Man into Wolf: The few dozens of living men capable of really understanding the General Theory of Relativity—which cannot be popularised by any means known to us—the few hundreds who could grasp at least the principles of the now obsolete Special Relativity Theory, the few thousands who have mastered the higher mathematics necessary for understanding Prof. [Edward Arthur] Milne’s Kinematic Cosmology are the contemporaries and have to consort in a friendly and helpful way with men and women who cannot and will not even try to understand the intricacies of elementary geometry, with people who cannot be made to comprehend as much of physics and chemistry, as we try to teach in our secondary schools. The scholar steeped in classical culture, conversant with several old Oriental languages and well read in all the literatures which have influenced our own outlook upon this world, dwells in the same street and sometimes in the same block of flats, with otherwise quite efficient and congenial neighbours knowing less than a thousand words of their own English mother tongue and never reading anything but the “tabloid” newspapers and mass-produced detective novels. The “savage” and the “primitive” of the so-called “pre-logical,” more exactly the pre-critical age of homo faber and homo sapiens, unable to distinguish facts from the figments of his imagination, is always with us. What is more important still, he is always within us. (1946c, 260)

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In his last years, Eisler published an essay on ethics, “The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation,” which began its life at a Jowett Society meeting in 1946 at which he was cut off by the end of the meeting before he could answer his respondent’s argument for deontological ethics, a direct contradiction to the principles of value theory. Eisler’s essay beautifully exemplifies the lecture style that hypnotized and delighted his audiences, building on his earlier work as well as foreshadowing Man into Wolf. He also clearly lays out his position vis-à-vis religion, revealing himself as an agnostic (despite having identified as “liberal jüdisch” on his 1939 immigration form): I submit that it was an unfortunate day on which Thomas Henry Huxley “took thought and invented what he conceived to be the appropriate title of agnostics” for free thinkers determined to start their thinking from the radical position of Cartesian skepticism, doubting the whole of our traditional alleged knowledge. As I have tried to show, we are not agnostics who boast of knowing nothing while other people know not even that. (1949, 81)

His last years also saw the publication of essays on ancient navigation, metallurgy, and Greek philosophy, and one final unfinished book on ancient cosmology. In addition, Eisler published two pieces—“Danse Macabre” and “The Passion of the Flax”—that are as densely packed with citations as his earlier work but somehow less feverish in their copious footnotes, even giving the impression of being languid. Both of these essays are still recognized today as authoritative treatments of their subjects; and both can be interpreted as a kind of commentary on Eisler’s circumstances. In “Danse Macabre,” Eisler takes on the contested etymology of the English word “macabre” and traces it to the name of the Hebrew society of gravediggers called the meqabrim, those invisible Jews who performed that unwholesome task in Europe from at least the fourth century (1948, 203). “The Passion of the Flax” is a published version of a lecture Eisler gave to the Folk-Lore Society one month before he died. The essay examines the Christian symbolism and classical antecedents of the European folk tradition of mourning the suffering undergone by the flax plant as it is harvested and pounded into linen, a subject he first treated 40 years earlier in World Cloak and Sky Canopy. In it, Eisler gives a grim synopsis of a related fairy tale that sounds vaguely autobiographical:

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Many of us know Hans Christian Andersen’s children’s story (1843) telling the sad experiences of the flax: how the flax-seed is buried in the dark earth, then to raise its head and penetrate to the light of the sun; how its blue flower has to withstand the sun’s heat and lashing by the sweeping rain, until one day wicked people come and pull the poor plant, root and all, out of the ground by its hair; how then they torture it by drowning in water, roasting over a fire, beating with sticks, breaking and dressing it, heckling and combing it with hackle-combs and thorns, spinning it to thread, weaving it into linen, cutting it, piercing it with needles, sewing it into shirts which are worn till they are rags, drowned and pulped and calendered and dried into the paper upon which its story is written. (1950, 119)

Despite his undiminished productivity, no British university wanted to hire a 65-year-old Jewish refugee with a bad heart. It did not help that Eisler’s reputation for obstinacy had spread far and wide and he did nothing to counteract it. When he received a circular letter from the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning advising refugees to apply for naturalization in England, he wrote back and flatly refused on principle: Dear Sir or Madam, Many thanks for your circular letter of the 29th of March 1946 re: Naturalization, for which I am much obliged. I have not the slightest intention to apply for naturalization because I have the strongest conscientious objections against abandoning the allegiance to one’s native country as a condition of becoming a citizen of another, to whom one owes already, as a resident, the same allegiance as the citizens born into it (as has quite recently been stated by the Lords Justices judging the case of the [American-born] traitor [William] Joyce). I have the intention of applying to the newly appointed representative of the Austrian Government for a new Austrian passport instead of the abominable German document forced upon me in consequence of the fact that the invitation and occupation of my country by the enemies of mankind was tolerated and even de jure recognized by Mr. [Neville] Chamberlain’s Government. On this German passport I had obtained a British visa valid for a sojourn of six months which expired February 1940. I propose to apply for and hope to obtain on my future Austrian passport a new visa, if possible for a longer period than six months, maybe for a lifetime (which in any case cannot be long for a man of 64 suffering from heart disease acquired in Dachau and Buchenwald). I shall be thankful to the society for supporting (if they see their way to doing it) my application for such a new visa, which might be needed quite soon since there is a possibility of my being invited to deliver a lecture or two in

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Switzerland, after which I naturally expect to return to this place. To such a visa I should feel morally entitled under the above described circumstances. In my humble opinion, which I would thank you for submitting to the board of the society, this organization should start a campaign for the restoration of an international res publica eruditorum by re-establishing the medieval ius ubicumque docendi for the holders of a doctor’s diploma of any university anywhere admitted to membership of such an autonomous super-national body. This would involve nothing more than the purely theoretical abolition of teaching and research posts described in the advertisements for public appointments as reserved for natives of the respective country, leaving intact the existing right of every university to choose the candidate they want and to refuse those they do not want for whatever reason they may have… I have also submitted to the committee of the British Archaeological Association in competition for the [Reginald Taylor & Lord Fletcher Essay Prize] a monograph on the (accepted) subject of [Nicholas] Kratzer (i.e. Grazer, hailing from Graz in Styria) educated in the famous Vienna University school of astronomy and mathematics…who became—through another alien scholar’s, Erasmus of Rotterdam’s good offices—tutor of Sir Thomas More’s children, Fellow of Corpus Christi College Oxford, pre-­ ­ lector of astronomy, geography and mathematics, astronomer and clock-­minder and political agent of Henry VIII and can now be proved to be the real author of the first correct map of England, drawn up by means of the methods taught at Vienna for measuring longitudes and latitudes and to have introduced to this country the art of dialing and the science of astronomic horology. The king had procured his immigration because the said arts were most important for the admiralty and the newly organized Trinity House pilot services for the merchant navy. It is not on record that he was expected to apply for ‘naturalisation,’ he was…described as an ‘Almeyn’ and called himself [Nicholas] Kratzer (-of Graz) Bavarus to his end. (Eisler 1946a)

Even his old friend Murray soured on him during this dark period, writing to the Society when they inquired about Eisler’s strange behavior: Robert Eisler is rather a problem… [He] is rather splapdash and often wild in his theories and his more methodisch fellow countrymen are greatly down on him and say he is a charlatan. It would be more true to say he is a very learned and somewhat reckless amateur. (Murray 1947)

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In his final years, with his health declining and his outlook growing bleaker, Eisler was finding that the disciplinary boundaries through which he used to slip were now ever more jealously guarded and that he was more or less shut out of all of them. In 1946, after eight years of silence, he sent a 250-page manuscript to Gershom Scholem outlining his plan to implement Zionism and solve the Palestine problem with a committee consisting of three Anglican theologians and three strictly Orthodox rabbis to rule on the credentials of all Jews living in Palestine. Those who were not deemed kosher enough to be allowed to remain in the country as pious worshippers were to be given the choice of returning to their countries of origin or (if they wanted a Jewish state) of taking possession of the second district of Vienna (the Leopoldstadt) as well as the entire city of Frankfurt am Main; these territories were to be evacuated by the Germans and placed under international guarantees as a Jewish state. (1980, 44)

Scholem mailed it back with a one-word reply: “Genug.” (“Enough.”) They never spoke again and Robert Eisler died on December 18th, 1949, reportedly with the essay he was finishing, “The Passion of the Flax,” at his bedside. Fittingly, he got not one, but two obituaries in The Times. The second one, written by his friend Cyril Goldsmid (the scion of a powerful Anglo-Jewish family) describes him as “possessed of encyclopedic knowledge,” but “entirely devoid of intellectual arrogance” and paints a picture of his final days: He worked hard to the end, even when he knew it was near. “Il faut agir,” he often said, in the words of a Swedish ambassador to the Court of Louis XVI, “comme si on pouvait faire quelque chose, sachant bien qu’on nepeut si rien… [“we must act as if we could do something, knowing that we can do nothing.” (Goldsmid 1950)]

Note 1. Mass-Observation was a projected started in 1937 by the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, who had all met as Cambridge students. The idea was to recruit about 500 untrained volunteers to the general public to record their own thoughts, feelings, and actions as well as everything they saw or heard others saying and doing relating to a particular contemporary event.

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References Campion, Nicholas. 2013. History of Western Astrology: Volume II, the Medieval and Modern Worlds. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Eisler, Robert. 1944. Robert Eisler to Esther Simpson. 14 September. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries. ———. 1946a. Robert Eisler to J.B. Skemp. 1946. 13 April. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries. ———. 1946b. Robert Eisler to Ernest Barber. 17 October. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence. ———. 1946c. The Royal Art of Astrology: With a Frontispiece, Sixteen Plates, Forty-Eight Illustrations in the Text and Five Diagrams. London: Herbert Joseph, Ltd. ———. 1948. Danse Macabre. Traditio 6: 187–225. ———. 1949. The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation. Ethics 59 (2, part 1): 77–94. ———. 1950. The Passion of the Flax. Folklore 61 (3): 114–133. Murray, Gilbert. 1947. Gilbert Murray to Ilse Ursell. 13 September. The Bodleian Collection, Oxford University Libraries. Goldsmid, Cyril J. 1950. Dr. Robert Eisler. London Times, January 18, p. 7. Scholem, Gershom. May 1980. How I Came to the Kabbalah. Commentary 69 (5): 39–53. The Hibbert Trust: Grants for Research, Education and Events. http://www.thehibberttrust.org.uk/apply-for-a-grant/grants-for-research-education-andevents. Accessed July 12, 2020. The Mass Observation Archive. http://www.massobs.org.uk/. Accessed July 12, 2020. White, J.A. 1944. J.A. White to Robert Eisler. 15 May. Warburg Institute Archive. General Correspondence.

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion: Man into Wolf Revisited—The Method and Magic of the Combinatory Mind

Abstract  This chapter looks back at Robert Eisler’s biography and his work across the disciplines of art history, religion, philosophy, and economics. It argues that there are two modes of thinking that Eisler employed: the first mode defined by its goal of determining the simplest laws and relationships underlying a complex phenomenon, and the second mode, specific to the study of religion, defined by its aim to subvert accepted understandings of a text by recovering suppressed voices preserved within it, often the voices of Jews or heretics. It concludes with a discussion of the “combinatory” method as conceived in linguistics and in the work of the thirteenth-century polymath Ramon Llull as a way to understand Eisler’s way of thinking and being in the world. Keywords  Sociobiology • Evolution and human aggression • Ramon Llull • Intellectual history • Archetypes As I hope I have shown in the preceding chapters, Eisler’s biography reveals that he was a very unusual man, at the very least, but one very well worth remembering. He began his life in the same Vienna that produced Wittgenstein, Freud, and Mach. His career started at the center of the city’s intellectual scene, studying philosophy with Franz Brentano’s students Christian von Ehrenfels and Alexius von Meinong and art history with Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff. As he moved from questions of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0_11

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aesthetics to the reconstruction of worldviews, he became a scholar of religion, focusing first on comparing cosmology and mythology and later on the historical development of Christianity and Judaism. As a historian of religions, Eisler found himself in the company of Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, Aby Warburg, and the Eranos group, without ever really finding a place where he fit in. At the same time, he wrote in the fields of economics, art history, sociology, archaeology, philology, philosophy, and intellectual history but only ever maintained tangential and transitory relationships to any established universities, movements, or schools of thought. Throughout his career, Eisler’s identity as neither Jew nor Gentile, his lack of respect for disciplinary boundaries, and his sometimes-difficult personality seem to have gotten in the way of his ideas. And by the end of his life, he had moved far from the center of the scholarly world and been pushed to its margins. It is not easy to find common themes that run through all of Eisler’s scholarship, since his body of work includes topics as divergent as monetary theory and comparative cosmology. But it is possible to identify two modes of thinking that Eisler employed across most of the disciplines in which he wrote. The first mode is defined by its goal of determining the simplest laws and relationships underlying a complex phenomenon, as in Studies in Value Theory and to some extent also in World Cloak and Sky Canopy. A variation of this mode also has the goal of producing a prescription for the common good based on that analysis, as in his work on money and arguably in Man into Wolf as well. The second mode, specific to the study of religion, is defined by its aim to subvert accepted understandings of a centrally important text by recovering suppressed voices that are preserved within it, often the voices of Jews or heretics. This is the mode in which Eisler began Orpheus the Fisher and in which he wrote The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, and “Vanity of Vanities.” It is the mode in which he was most likely to alienate people and the one that seems most closely connected to his self-image. Consciously or not, Eisler was drawn to figures that were historical insider-outsiders in some way: Flavius Josephus, the Jew who became a Roman historian; the heretic Marcion, who (according to Eisler) surreptitiously inserted his ideas into the Fourth Gospel; the Russian crypto-­ Jewish scribes who preserved The Jewish War against Christian censorship; and toward the end of his life, Henry VIII’s Austrianborn court astronomer Nicholas Kratzer.

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Eisler’s focus on these figures gives the impression that he saw in them reflections of his own personality—clever enough to make a place for himself amongst people who did not consider him to be one of them, but also perpetually aware that they could turn against him at any time. In a way, Eisler’s disciplinary promiscuity can be seen as a defense mechanism. He always hedged his bets and was prepared to switch from one field to another when he had worn out his welcome, a polymath by necessity as much as by inclination. But by the time Man into Wolf was published, polymathy was out of fashion. Being suspicious of Eisler’s many footnotes and the unexpected connections he drew was nothing new, but by the 1950s, his eccentricities had gone from being eyebrow-raising to virtually disqualifying. They had also precluded the possibility of him having any intellectual heirs to carry his ideas forward. The first (and, so far, the last) sociologist to seriously attempt to build on Eisler’s work is H. C. Greisman, who observes, “The extraordinary eclecticism which Eisler mastered in a characteristically idiosyncratic way was both the strength and the undoing of his approach in that its very uniqueness prevented other scholars from taking up his work where it left off at his death” (1981, 35). Bemused reviews of Man into Wolf that came out after the author’s demise tell us as much about the way that the world of scholarship had changed as they do about the strangeness of Eisler’s arguments. First of all, there were the questions of the book’s format and the improbable breadth of sources. W.  G. Eliasberg concluded that Man into Wolf was “not a book at all, but an astonishing agglomeration of very worth-while knowledge presented in the form of notes… like a structure consisting of a very widely spread and luxuriously finished basement, and very little above that level” (1953, 198). Some reviewers tended to focus less on what Eisler was saying and more on who he was and what scholarly discipline he was supposed to be representing. This review from The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, which defines itself by its “unique interdisciplinary approach” is actually the most explicit of them all in policing disciplinary boundaries1: An able classical scholar is not expected to contribute to the scientific problems of modern physics. If only to a lesser degree, he also is now unable to contribute to the behavioral sciences of man. (Wood 1954, 638)

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Eisler, of course, expected to be able contribute to both “the scientific problems of modern physics” and “the behavioral sciences of man.” Others wondered where a book like Man into Wolf should have been reviewed and who was capable of evaluating it. This is the question Malcolm Sharp of the University of Chicago Law School asked himself: At one time the reviewer concluded that he was quite incapable of writing about this book; but after putting it aside, and then being reminded of it, he decided to try, at any rate…The learning as learning is far beyond this reviewer’s power to appraise. Its relevance to the reviewer’s own problems is by no means sufficiently clear to lead him into any extended examination of its possible uses. What one can do is make some observations about the central theme and recommend the reader with a taste for odd selections from the classics to browse in the brief lecture and the voluminous notes which make up the volume… In spite of the oddity of the argument, the book is plainly the product of a man of brilliant, if erratic, intelligence and strong character. The writer speaks confidently of many matters, including, for another example, the now discredited matriarchal theory of society (at p. 159). He embellishes his discussion with a fantastic collection of classical and literary learning… Even as a historical study, however, the book is not only incomplete, it is lacking in perspective. It has, for example, no reference to the phenomenon typified by the Crucifixions by Crivelli or to the fascinating elements of devil worship in Calvinism. (1954, 325–327)2

One way to approach the book is as Greisman did, as a precursor to what would later be known as sociobiology.3 Nine years after Sharp’s review of Man into Wolf appeared, so did one of the first works in this nascent field. In 1963, Konrad Lorenz published Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression [So-called Evil: On the Natural History of Aggression], translated into English three years later and released by Eisler’s old publisher Methuen as On Aggression. Lorenz’s book, criticized since its publication but also widely read, highly influential, and continually in print, became so famous that it partially inspired the opening sequence to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (see Zinner and Wheeler 2013, 42). Eisler had been trying to conceptualize a genetic basis for human violence at a very odd time in intellectual history, when the concepts he needed were not yet available. In the early part of the twentieth century, classical genetics and the discovery of chromosomes provided a way to

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account for hereditary traits, which is the consensus Eisler was working with in “Appendix I: Prof. Jung’s ‘Archetypes’ and Neo-Lamarckism” (1951, 247–253). But what Eisler did not know, and what no one could know until James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA in the early 1950s, was the nature of hereditary information and how it worked. Watson and Crick’s discovery ushered in the “Darwinian Synthesis,” in which Darwin’s discovery of natural selection was combined with a new “informational” view of heredity to form a coherent picture of evolution. Following the recognition that DNA coded for proteins, the informational view of heredity became the dominant paradigm. Constructed according to the informational view, a convincing explanation of aggression would suggest that in humanity’s distant past, certain selective forces in the “ancestral evolutionary environment” (such as male-to-female ratios) favored males being aggressive in their pursuit of females. Therefore, the genes associated with those traits were reproduced in generations of offspring and continued to persist in the population as a coded script for behavior that, in subsequent evolutionary environments, is expressed in different ways, like the competitive nature of sports or business.4 Eisler did not have an informational view of heredity. Violence for him was a learned behavior that was preserved in the collective unconscious, and possibly (through some form of what we might now call “epigenetics”) in the genes. He argued that humanity “developed its present predatory, murderous and jealous habits only under extreme environmental pressure by extra-specific imitation of the blood-lustful enemies of its own species” (1951, 51). Nor did he think that human aggression was easily domesticated into some seemingly benign form like the drive to discovery in science and technology. He instead argued that this violence was present in his own day in its raw unmitigated form in places like Buchenwald. And, rather than using proteins and genes to make his argument, he drew on his own accumulated knowledge, in the process revisiting nearly every other project he had ever undertaken. A common criticism of Eisler, dating back to World Cloak and Sky Canopy, accused him of playing fast and loose with the “combinatory” method. Scholem implied that Eisler chose his research subjects because they were “rich in unsolved problems which left the amplest scope to the combinatory mind [kombinatorischen Genius]” (1980, 130; 1994, 161). Likewise, the historian of religion Ugo Bianchi accused him of depending too much on the “‘combinatory’ method which seeks resemblances and

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contacts in the most diverse aspects of the religious thought and practice of the ancient world…” (1975, 130). But “combinatory” was not a word Eisler liked, as he made clear in The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist when he defended himself against the New Testament scholar Hans Windisch (1931, 57n1). Despite his protestations, I think that the word “combinatory” is important when it comes to understanding Eisler. In comparative linguistics, the “combinatorial method” is a way of reading the unreadable, that is, inscriptions in an undeciphered writing system like Linear A, the Indus script, or Rongorongo. Using the combinatorial method, one first identifies the context of the writing (an inscription on the base of a statue is more likely to be a dedication than a shipping manifest), then reconstructs the morphology of the language (extracting the verbal root “X” from supposed forms like “X-ing,” “X-er,” and “X-ed”), and then determines how the words relate to each other in terms of repetition and order. Thereby, the linguist can “read” a text without any semantic content. Differences in methodology aside, Eisler’s hermeneutics also allowed him to read a text that was no longer there, be it the lost original of The Jewish War of Josephus or the primal scene of humanity’s violent origin, and even to determine its meaning. No wonder Freud (a genius at, among other things, explaining complex ideas for the general reader) used Eisler’s method as a metaphor for psychoanalysis. A second relevant use of the term “combinatory”—one that encapsulates the transition from Eisler’s pure abstract reasoning in Studies in Value Theory, to his later interest in Kabbalah and gematria, to the cross-­ referential meta-discourse we find in Man into Wolf—comes from the thirteenth-century Catalan philosopher Ramon Llull. In order to demonstrate the truth of Christianity to Jews and Muslims, Llull developed a unique combinatory system for the presentation and testing of hypotheses. Called the “Ars Magna,” it consisted of three elements: the terms (Platonic forms like the Good and the Beautiful as well as principles of relationship like Difference and Agreement), the figures (squares, triangles, circles), and the alphabet (limited in Llull’s system to the nine letters B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I, and K). By matching up terms to letters and arranging them in the figures, Llull could represent a large number of propositions about the world and God and work them out in a limited system of rule-­ based logic. Llull’s system appears to have been influenced by the hermeneutics of the Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia (a figure who also interested both Eisler and Scholem) and it went on to inspire another great

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polymath, the seventeenth-century scholar Athanasius Kircher (see Bonner 2007; Eco 2016). In many ways, combinatory thinking of this kind is synonymous with polymathy. It is best exemplified in the titular game from Hermann Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game: These rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colours on his palette. (Hesse 1990, 14–15)

A similar idea is expressed in a line from the foreword to The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist that would have been true at any point in Eisler’s career: “I have been working and writing for those who are as convinced as I am myself that no explanation of a single fact is satisfactory which cannot be made to fit into some plausible consecutive scheme enabling us to account for the totality of facts and phenomena” (1931, ix). Polymathy is not a monolithic category. Neither is it an accomplishment. It is more like a way of conceptualizing the relationship of a particular mind to its intellectual milieu. If Aristotle were alive today, he would be considered a polymath. But it makes little sense to describe him in that way. It makes slightly more sense to call Ibn Sina, Leonardo, and Abhinavagupta polymaths, because they lived and worked in environments where there was more of a recognized demarcation between branches of learning. The idea of the polymath as someone who excels in multiple distinct fields of knowledge necessarily takes shape against a background in which those fields of knowledge are becoming increasingly distinct. This was certainly happening in turn-of-the-century Vienna, when art history was splitting off from art appreciation, psychoanalysis was splitting off from medicine, and analytic philosophy was distinguishing itself from what came before. Eisler studied economics, then art history, and seems to have been writing about the philosophy of values even earlier. From that point, his interests grew to encompass philology, mythology, history of science, religion, and ethics. We cannot know what drove this restlessness, although it can probably be traced in part to an early association of

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educational attainment with belonging, a subject of special concern to Jews in central Europe who knew how rapidly they could become targets of the mob if they were insufficiently assimilated. Looking at the subjects Eisler was drawn to and the ones to which he kept returning against the background of his eventful life (see Appendix), we see a mind always searching for a new question (Who was Jesus? Who wrote John?). And for each question, Eisler sought a counterintuitive answer (Jesus was Jewish rebel, a heretic wrote John) that would draw him into a conflict with some authority. Each conflict (and each act of self-­ sabotage) was an opportunity for Eisler to attempt to understand his place in the world a little better. And after the conflict resolved, he went looking for another question. The dream of the Greek poem in the desert crystallizes this process perfectly. He wants to uncover the thing that will bring him recognition. But he knows that, in doing so, he is always in danger of digging a hole that will collapse around him. When Eisler’s remarkable free-associating combinatory mind was subjected to the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, Man into Wolf was the result. In its pages, we can see Eisler facing the problem of human cruelty. And in the footnotes, we can see him working his arcane magic on it. And we now know that his magic is a lost art. It is lost because it has been made all but impossible by the same constrictive intellectual forces that drove its last practitioner out into the wilderness—among the wolves.

Notes 1. See “History of The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology.” https://jclc. law.northwestern.edu/about/about/ (accessed July 14, 2020). 2. No one has ever been able to explain to me what Sharp might be referring to with the phrase “the fascinating elements of devil worship in Calvinism.” 3. Eisler did not live long enough to take part in that conversation, or the conversation on the Dead Sea Scrolls, about which he would have been equally enthused. 4. Adapted from an interview with Myrna Pérez Sheldon, who also points out numerous problems with this approach, June 19th, 2019.

References Bianchi, Ugo. 1975. The History of Religions. Leiden: Brill. Bonner, Anthony. 2007. The Art and Logic of Ramon Llull: A User’s Guide. Leiden: Brill.

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Eco, Umberto. 2016. The Ars Magna by Ramon Llull. Contributions to Science 12 (1): 47–50. Eisler, Robert. 1931. The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist: According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and the Other Jewish and Christian Sources. New York: The Dial Press. ———. 1951. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd. Eliasberg, W.G. January 1953. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy by Robert Eisler. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 285: 198. Greisman, H.C. 1981. Social Structure, Psychoanalysis, and Collective Aggression. History of European Ideas 2 (1): 35–48. Hesse, Hermann. 1990. The Glass Bead Game. New York: Picador USA. History of The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology. https://jclc.law.northwestern.edu/about/about/. Accessed July 14, 2020. Lorenz, Konrad. 1963. Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression. Vienna: Dr. G. Borotha Schoeler Verlag. ———. 1966. On Aggression. London: Methuen & Co. Scholem, Gershom. 1980. From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth. New York: Schocken Books. ———. 1994. Von Berlin nach Jerusalem: Jugenderinnerungen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Wood, Arthur Lewis. 1954. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy by Robert Eisler. Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 44 (5): 637–638. Zinner, Dietmar, and Brandon C.  Wheeler. 2013. Aggression in Humans and Other Primates—Biology, Psychology, Sociology. In Aggression in Humans and Other Primates: Biology, Psychology, Sociology, ed. Hans-Henning Kortüm and Jürgen Heinze, 41–86. Berlin: De Gruyter.

 Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0

127

1904 Age 22

1902 Age 20 1903 Age 21

Late 1890s Late teens 1899–1901 Age 17–19

Visits Crete, where he is hosted by Sir Arthur Evans

Studies with Christian von Ehrenfels and Alexius Meinong. Writes five essays published as Studien zur Werttheorie (Studies on Value Theory, 1902). Receives doctorate in Economics from University of Vienna. Continues studies in Rome and Athens.

Born on April 27 to Friedrich Fritz Eisler, an émigré from Bohemia, and Vienna native Melanie Reitzes. Siblings: Ella Gabriele Weinberger, Otto Eisler, and Grete Weiss. Friedrich’s manufacturing firm Spieler and Eisler wins awards at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago for its “combs, brushes, pyramids of whalebone, [and] barber and hair dresser tools.” Attends gymnasium.

1882 Birth

1893 Age 11

Events

Year

Studien zur Werttheorie (Studies in Value Theory). Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot. “Mantegnas frühe Werke und der römische Antike” (“[Andrea] Mantegna’s Early Works and Roman Antiquity”). Monarsberichte über Kunst und Kunstwissenschaft Vol. 3, No. 6, pp. 159–169. “Der Wille zum Schmerz, Ein psychologisches Paradox” (“The Will to Pain, A Psychological Paradox”). Jahresbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universitat zu Wien, pp. 63–79. “The Bronze Relief in the Wallace Collection.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs Vol. 5, No. 18, p. 597. “Das Titelblatt einer Sponheimer Handschrift van 1129 im Stiftsarchiv von St. Paul im Lavanttal” (“The Title Page of a Sponheim Manuscript from 1129 in the Monastery Archive of St. Paul in Lavanttal”). Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und Historischen Denkmale Vol. 2, No. 2. “Zur Erkenntnistheorie der ästhetischen Kritik” (“On the Epistemology of Aesthetic Criticism”). Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum fünfzehnten Jahresbericht (1902) der Philosophischen Gesellschaft an der Universität zu Wien, pp. 73–77.

Publications

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Receives doctorate in Art History from the University of Vienna Institute of Art History, where he studies under Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff

1905 Age 23

Conversion to Catholicism and marriage to Rosalia “Lili” von Pausinger. Lectures on Orpheus and the Eucharist at the Third International Congress of the History of Religions at Oxford.

1908 Age 26

1909 Age 27

Arrested for attempted theft of a codex in Udine and sent to sanitarium in Gorizia. Hugo von Hofmannsthal is character witness.

1907 Age 25

1906 Age 24

Travels in Mediterranean

1904–1905 Age 22–23

(continued)

“Kuba-Kybele.” Philologus Vo. 68, pp. 118–151 and 161–209. “Orpheus-The Fisher Part One” The Quest Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 124–139.

“Die Landschaftsmalerei in der antiken Kunst” (“Landscape Painting in Ancient Art”). Dissertation, University of Vienna Institute of Art History. “Benedetto Croce, Ästhetik als Wissenschaft des Ausdrucks und allgemeine Linguistik; Theorie und Geschichte” (“Benedetto Croce, Aesthetics as a Science of Expression and General Linguistics; Theory and History”). Nach der zweiten, durchgesehenen Auflage übersetzt von Karl Federn. Im Verlag von E. A. Seemann, Leipzig. “An Unknown Fresco-Work by Guido Reni.” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs Vol. 7, No. 28, pp. 313–323. “Die Hochzeitstruhen der letzten Gräfin von Görz” (“The Wedding Chests of the Last Countess of Gorizia”). Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und Historischen Denkmale 1905, pp. 65–176. “Die Legende vom heiligen Karantanerherzog Domitianus” (“The Legend of the Carantanian Saint Duke Domitianus”). In Mitteilungen des Instituts für osterreichische Geschichtsforschung Vol. 28, pp. 52–116. Beschreibendes Verzeichnis der illuminierten Handschriften in Oesterreich Volume III: Die illuminierten Handschriften in Kärnten (Descriptive Directory of the Illuminated Manuscripts in Austria Volume III: The Illuminated Manuscripts in Carinthia). Leipzig: Verlag von Karl W. Hiersemann. “The Origins of the Eucharist.” Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of Religions, Section VIII.

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129

1912 Age 30

1911 Age 29

1910 Age 28

Year

(continued)

Events

Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes. (World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldview). Two Volumes. Munich: Oscar Beck. “Bildopfer bei Empedokles” (“The Image of Sacrifice in Empedocles”). Archiv für Religionswissenschaft Vol. 13, pp. 625–626. “Orpheus-The Fisher Part Two.” The Quest Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 306–321. “Orpheus and the Fisher of Men in Early Christian Art.” The Quest Vol. 1, No. 4, pp. 625–648. “The Fishing of Men in Early Christian Literature.” The Quest Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 78–97. “Zu den englischen Grabungen beim Silvam und unter der Omarmoschee in Jerusalem” (“The English Excavations at Silvam and under the Oma Mosque in Jerusalem”). No place of publication. “The Symbolism of ‘Miraculous Draught’ Legends in the Gospels.” The Quest Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 255–274. “The Baptism of John the Forerunner.” The Quest Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 146–164. “Further Literature on the So-Called ‘Christ-Myth.’” The Quest Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 195–200. “John-Jonah-Oannes?” The Quest Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 474–495. “The Second Noe: John the Baptist in the Light of a New Samaritan Document.” The Quest Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 688–701.

Publications

130  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

1918 Age 36

1914–1917 Age 32–35

1914 Age 32

1913 Age 31

Serves as an officer in Austria-Hungary’s 59th “Erzherzog Rainer” Infantry Regiment and is awarded the silver medal and made a knight of both the Order of Francis Joseph and the Iron Cross. Eisler fortune is destroyed by hyperinflation. Founds Johann Albert Widmanstetter Society for Kabbalah Research, Inc., of which he is the only active member. Martin Buber rejects his article for Der Jude because he is baptized.

(continued)

“Jahwes Hochzeit mil der Sonne” (“Yahweh’s Wedding with the Sun”). Mitteilungen der Vorderasiatischen Gesellschaft 1917 Vol. 2, Festschrift F. Hommel, Leipzig, pp. 21–70. “Babylonische Astrologenausdrücke Bei Demokrit” (“Babylonian Astrological Phrases in Democritus”). Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Vol. 31, No.1–4, pp. 52–54. “Zu Demokrits Wanderjahren” (“Democritus’ Years of Wandering”). Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Vol. 31, No. 1–4, pp. 187–211.

“The Messianic Fish Meal of the Primitive Church.” The Quest Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 494–508. “Jesus’ Feeding of the Multitude.” The Quest Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 732–744. “The Mystic Epitaph of Bishop Aberkios.” The Quest Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 302–311. “The Catacomb Orpheus and Fish Frescoes.” Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 359–363. “Zur Fusswaschung am Tage vor den Passah” (“Washing the Feet the Day Before Passover”). Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Vol. 14, pp. 268–271. “Recent Experiments in ‘Clairvoyance’ by Psychologists.” The Quest Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 127–143. “Der Fisch als Sexualsymbol” (“The Fish as Sexual Symbol”). Imago Vol. 3, pp. 165–193.

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131

Meets Gershom Scholem for the first time at his villa near Munich at Feldafing on Lake Starnberg.

Applies for a patent for “Diatypie,” a new process for producing slides without glass, used in his traveling lectures on the history of money and explained in Das Geld.

Travels to Hamburg to give a lecture titled “Orphische und altchristliche Kultsymbolik” (“Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism”) at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg on December 3 and receives a spontaneous and unprecedented ovation. Meets Mary Warburg and Fritz Saxl.

1919 Age 37

1921 Age 39

1922 Age 40

1923 Age 41

Events

Year

(continued)

“Jesus und die ungetreue Braut (John 8.1–11)” (Jesus and the Unfaithful Bride (John 8.1–11)”). Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und Kunde der Alteren Kirche Vol. 22, No. 2, pp. 305–307. “The Cup of Wine Symbolism of the Last Supper.” The Quest Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 332–344. “The Origin of the Last Supper Symbolism.” The Quest Vol. 14, No. 4, pp. 496–506. “The Introduction of the Cadmeian Alphabet into the Aegean World in the Light of Ancient Traditions and Recent Discoveries” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Vol. 55, No. 1, pp 35–73 and No. 2, pp. 169–207.

Die kenitischen Weihinschriften der Hyksoszeit im Bergbaugebiet der Sinaihalbinsel und einige andere unerkannte Alphabetdenkmüler aus der Zeit der XII. bis XVIII. Dynastie (The Kenite Inscriptions of the Hyksos Period in the Mining Area of the Sinai Peninsula and Some Other Unrecognized Alphabets from the Time of the 12th to the 18th Dynasty). Freiburg: Herder. Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Cult Symbolism. London: J. M. Watkins. “Jesus and the Blood Sacrifices.” The Quest Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 230–243. “Die Annahme eines ‘arisch’-europaischen Ursprungs des Alphabets im Lichte neuer Funde” (“The Assumption of an ‘Aryan’-European Origin of the Alphabet in Light of New Discoveries”). Unknown place of publication. “The Broken Bread Symbolism of the Last Supper.” The Quest Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 27–47

Publications

132  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

1925 Age 43

1924 Age 42

Publishes Scholem’s dissertation, Das Buch Bahir: Ein Schriftdenkmal aus der Frühzeit der Kabbala (The Book of Bahir: A Historical Text from the Early Days of Kabbala). Aby Warburg seeks his help with his work and corresponds with him on the topic of the Zoroastrian god Zurvan. Gives lecture on Josephus before the Anglo-Palestinian Club in Jews’ College, London, in the beginning of December. Lectures in England are attended by large crowds that include luminaries like J. G. Frazer and Gilbert Murray. With the recommendation of Murray, takes a diplomatic post as a deputy chief of the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle (International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation) in Paris. Accepts the position and moves into a large rented apartment in Paris without first obtaining the permission of the Austrian government, who lodge a complaint with the League of Nations.

(continued)

“Das letzte Abendmahl” (“The Last Supper [Part One]”). Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 161–192. Orphisch-dionysische Mysterien-Gedanken in der christlichen Antike (Orphic-Dionysian Mystery Thought in Early Christianity). In Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 2.2. B. G. Teubner, Leipzig. “Josephus über Jesus” (“Josephus on Jesus”). Als Ms. gedr. f. d. 5. Abtlg d. 55 Versammlg Deutscher Philologen u. Schulmanner. am 29. Sept. 1925, Dieterich, Leipzig. “Der babylonische Ursprung der Alchimie” (“The Babylonian Origin of Alchemy”). Chemiker Zeitung Vol. 49, pp. 5–17. “Zur terminologie der jüdischen Alchemie” (“On the Terminology of Jewish Alchemy” [Part One]). Monatsschrift für Geschitchte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Vol. 69, No. 6, pp. 364–374. “Akkadisch silu- “Gebieter” in Gen 49,10” (Akkadian Silu (“Master”) in Gen. 49:10”). Monatsschrift für Geschitchte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Vol. 69, No. 7, pp. 444–446. “The Babylonian Word ‘Shilu’ (Ruler) Ben. xlix.10.” The Expository Times Vol. 36, p. 477. “The Newly Rediscovered Witness of Josephus to Jesus.” The Quest Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 1–15.

“For Students of Kabbalistic Literature: A Translation and Commentary of the Book Bahir.” The Quest Vol. 15, pp. 379–382. Das Geld: Seine geschichtliche Entstehung und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung (Money: Its Historical Origin and Social Significance). Munich: Diatypie.

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133

Events

Receives visit from Scholem and Walter Benjamin. Lectures on Slavonic Josephus at the Sorbonne’s Société ErnestRenan (The Ernest Renan Society) on January 13, and La Société des Études Juives (The Society of Jewish Studies) on January 17. After the first half of his article on the Last Supper is published in ZNW, the editor, Hans Lietzmann, decides that the thesis is untenable and refuses to print the second half. Threatens a lawsuit if the article is not published and promises further legal consequences if ZNW publishes it but somehow makes known to its readers that they are being compelled to do so. When the second part of the article comes out, it is preceded by an introduction from Lietzmann undercutting its argument and followed by a critique from the Jewish scholar Arthur Marmorstein. Demands space in the next issue to publish his riposte, but Lietzmann refuses. In an April 17, 1926 letter to The Times, lays out the new narrative of Jesus’s ministry and death from the reconstructed Josephus manuscripts: “There is no doubt now that the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and the ‘cleansing’ of the Temple were considered by Jews, as well as by Romans, as a revolutionary rising against the Roman government…” Writes to the New York Times with a “description” of Jesus as having “simple appearance, mature age, dark skin, short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, with a long face, a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose, so that spectators could take fright, with scanty hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazireans, and with an undeveloped beard.”

Year

1926 Age 44

(continued)

“Das letzte Abendmahl” (“The Last Supper [Part Two]”). Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der älteren Kirche (Journal of New Testament Studies and the Customs of the Early Church Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 5–37. “Zür terminologie der jüdischen Alchemie” (“On the Terminology of Jewish Alchemy” [Part Two]). Monatsschrift für Geschitchte und Wissenschaft des Judentums Vol. 70, No. 3, pp. 194–201 “Alchemische Terminologie der Babylonier” (“Alchemical Terminology of the Babylonians”). Zeitschrift für Assyriologie Vol. 37, No. 116, p. 10ff. “L’Origine Babylonienne de l’Alchimie” (“The Babylonian Origin of Alchemy”). Revue de Synthèse Historique Vol. 41, pp. 15ss. “Joshua and the Sun.” The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures Vol. 42, No. 2, pp. 73–85. “Le Mystère du Schem Hammephorasch” (“The Mystery of the Schem Hammephorasch”). Revue des études juives Vol. 82, pp. 157–159. “Nochmals das Josephuszeugnis über Jesus” (“The Josephus Testimony about Jesus, Again”). Neue Züricher Zeitung, September 16th. “Le témoignage de Fl. Josèphe sur l’aspect physique de Jésus” (“The Testimony of [Flavius] Josephus on the Physical Aspect of Jesus”). Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académiedes Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 70, No. 3, pp. 163–164. “The Russian Josephus: Recent Studies of the Text.” The Times. April 17, p. 8.

Publications

134  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

1928 Age 46

1927 Age 45

Three Americans experience visions of the pulchritude of the Christ, then write to him to demand he retract his calumny. Is considered for a position at Heidelberg University but historian of philosophy Ernst Hoffmann is opposed to Eisler getting the job because it might stir up anti-Semitism, already on the rise in reaction to the political agitations of the pacifist mathematician Emil Gumbel. Begins rancorous debate over the provenance of the Slavonic Josephus manuscripts with Solomon Zeitlin. In October, tries to simultaneously publish an abridged English version of his book on Josephus along with the two-volume German edition. Publishes Scholem’s second book, Bibliographia Kabbalistica. Henry St. John Thackeray works on translating the forthcoming Josephus book. Moses Gaster volunteers to do English translation of Josephus book in May. Late in the year, Alexander Haggerty Krappe takes over translation duties.

(continued)

“Les origines de la traduction slave de Josèphe Flavius” (“The Origins of the Slavic Translation of Flavius Josephus”). Revue des Etudes Slaves Vol. 7, pp. 63–74. The Present Position of the Slavic Josephus Question. London: J. M. Watkins. “Un manuscrit du Josèphe hébreu conservé à la Bibliothèque nationale (fonds hébreu, n°280)” (“A Manuscript of the Hebrew Josephus in the National Library (Hebrew Collection, No. 280)”). Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 72, No.1, p. 34. “Die ‘Seevölker’-namen in den altorientalischen Quellen (mit einer Karte)” (“The Name ‘Sea Peoples’ in the Ancient Oriental Sources (with a Map)”). Caucasica: Zeitschrift fur die Erforschung der Sprachen und Kulturen des Kaukasus Fasc. 5, pp. 73–130.

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135

Events

Aby Warburg dies. Receives first letter from Robert Whitehead on New Year’s Eve.

Year

1929 Age 47

(continued)

ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ: Messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechtenn ach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen (Jesus, the King Who Did Not Reign: The Messianic Independence Movement from the Appearance of John the Baptist to the Downfall of Jacob the Righteous after the Newly Discovered “Conquest of Jerusalem” by Flavius Josephus and the Christian Sources). Volume I. Heidelberg: C. Winter. “Das Quainszeichen und die Qeniter” (“The Mark of Cain and the Kenites”). Le Monde Oriental Vol. 23, No. 51, p. 67ff. “Nachleben dionysischer Mysterienriten” (“Afterlife of the Dionysian Mystery Rites”). Archiv für Religionswissenschaft Vol. 27, pp. 171–183. “Texte roumain de la version slave de Jean Malalas permettant d’identifier le groupe de Panéas (Césarée de Philippe)” (“The Romanian Text of the Slavic Version of John Malalas, Allowing for the Identification of the Group of Paneas (Caesarea of Philip).” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 73, No. 3, p. 160.

Publications

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1930 Age 48

(continued)

ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ. Volume II. Heidelberg: C. Winter. “La ponctuation du prologue antimarcionite a l’evangile selon Jean” (“The Punctuation of the Anti-Marcionite Prologue to the Gospel of John”). Revue de philologie de litterature et d’histoire anciennes, 3. ser., a. I, l. 4. (56. de la collection), 4. livraison (October), pp. 350–371. “The Paraclete Problem.” The Quest Vol. 21, pp. 113–128. “The Paraclete Claimant Simon Magus.” The Quest Vol. 21, pp. 225–243. “The Evangel of Kerinthos: The Book of Lazarus the Beloved Disciple.” The Quest Vol. 21, pp. 340–357. “Flavius Josephus on Jesus Called the Christ.” The Jewish Quarterly Review Vol. 21, No. 1/2, pp. 1–60. “Die slavische Uebersetzung der Halosis des Hierousalem des Flavius Josephus” (“The Slavic Translation of the ‘Halosis’ of ‘Hierusalem’ of Flavius Josephus”). Byzantinoslavica Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 305–381. “Pistis Sophia und Barbelo.” Angelos: Archiv für neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte und Kulturkunde Vol. 3, No. 3/4, pp. 93–110. “Le prologue antimarcionite du IVe évangile” (“The AntiMarcionite Prologue to the Fourth Gospel”). Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 74, No. 2, pp. 98–99.

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137

1934 Age 52

1933 Age 51

1932 Age 50

The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources. London: Methuen & Co. This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. “Portraits authentiques de philosophes cyniques” (“Authentic Portraits of the Cynic Philosophers”). Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 75, No. 2, pp. 99–102. Untitled Letter. The Times. September 30, p. 8. Gives testimony to British Parliamentary Finance Committee Review Stable Money: The Remedy for the Economic World Crisis: A about his monetary reform scheme. Programme of Financial Reconstruction for the International Conference. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. La monnaie: cause et remède de la crise économique mondiale (Money: The Cause and Remedy of the World Economic Crisis). Paris: Valois. “The Shirt of Mohammed.” The Times. February 3, p. 8. “Stable Money: A Sterling Area.” The Times. April 13, p. 8. Publication of J. W. Jack’s The Historic Christ: An Examination of Dr. With Alec Wilson. The Money Machine. A Simple Introduction to Robert Eisler’s Theory According to the Slavonic Version of Josephus and the Eisler Plan. London: The Search Publishing Co., Ltd. Other Sources. London: James Clarke & Company, Ltd. Gives testimony to U.S. Congress’s Committee on Banking and “Internal Price Stability Versus Exchange Stability: A Note on Currency about his monetary reform scheme on January 20. Professor J. H. Jones’s Paper.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Stays with his wife’s family, the Storks, where he inspires his niece Society Vol. 97, No. 3, pp. 478–483. Rosalie to immortalize him as the pedantic “Uncle Ludwig” in an “Freethinkers.” In Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: unpublished autobiographical novel. The Macmillan Company, Vol. 6, p. 470. “Birds Versus Snakes.” The Times. June 11, p. 8.

1931 Age 49

Publications

Events

Year

(continued)

138  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

Jung rejects article on Whitehead for Imago

1937 Age 55 1938 Age 56

Is awarded the Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion at Oxford. In May, he is picked up in the second round of arrests following the Anschluss and becomes prisoner number 16547 in Dachau. Transferred to Buchenwald on September 23 or 24. Quoted by Freud in “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.”

Gets involved in financial speculation in London.

1936 Age 54

1935 Age 53

(continued)

The Enigma of the Fourth Gospel. London: Methuen & Company, Limited. “Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht” (“A 20th Century Vision of Jesus Psychologically Examined”) Zeitschrift für Religionspsychologie Vol. 11, pp. 14–41.

“Zur Kritik der psychologistischen Konjunktur-Theorie” (“On the Criticism of the Psychologistic Business Cycle Theory”). Wiener Börsen-Kurier. “Jesus among the Animals by Moretto da Brescia.” Art in America Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 137–140. “Un nouveau papyrus évangélique” (“A New Gospel Papyrus”). Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Vol. 79, No. 2, pp. 197–202. “Cimon and Iphegenia.” The Times. March 1, p. 10. “The New Gospel Fragments: Sowing on the Water.” The Times. June 19, p. 10. “Das Rätsel des Johannes-Evangeliums” (“The Ridddle of the Gospel of John”). In Eranos-Jahrbuch 1935: Westöstliche Seelenführung. Edited by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, pp. 323–511. Zurich: Rhein-Verlag. “The Sadoquite Book of the New Covenant: Its Date and Origin.” In Occident and Orient: Being Studies in Semitic Philology and Literature, Jewish History and Philosophy and Folklore in the Widest Wense. In Honour of Haham Dr. M Gaster’s 80th Birthday. Edited by B. Schindler and A. Marmorstein, pp. 110–143. London: Taylor’s Foreign Press. “The Fourth Gospel: John of Ephesus.” The Times. February 12, p. 10.

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139

1944 Age 62

1940 Age 58 1941 Age 59 1942 Age 60 1943 Age 61

Released from Buchenwald in July. “Boghazköj-Studien zu Homer und Hesiod” (“Boghazköj Studies Makes it to Oxford to find that E. O. James has taken his place as the on Homer and Hesiod”). L’Antiquité Classique Année Vol. 8, No. Wilde Reader and is refusing to give up the post. 1, pp. 41–69. Interned on Isle of Man from June 25 to September 5, when released due to acute angina pectoris “Egyptian Astronomy: Letters from Dr. Eisler and Dr. Chattley.” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology Vol. 27, pp.149–152. Otto Eisler is murdered in Maly Trostenets death camp, Belarus. “Vanity of Vanities: The Book “Ecclesiastes’ Restored to the Original Form.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 40, pp. 228–237. “Early References to Fossil Fishes.” ISIS Vol. 34, p. 63. “The Future of Gold.” The Times. May 11, p. 5. “Trade and Exchange.” The Times. August 4, p. 5. “International Lending.” The Times. November 10, p. 5. “Oxford Personality of 16th Century: Subject of Dürer Portrait Discovered to Be Nicolaus Kratzer.” Oxford Times, no. 4565, Thursday, August 5. In September, he writes long angry letter to Esther Simpson, “Albrecht Dürer’s Engraving Known as ‘The Doctor’s Dream.’” secretary of the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs Vol. 84, No. 493, pp. 100–103. “The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, The Library of Living Philosophers vol. v. Edited by Paul Arthur Schlipp—Published by North-western University, Evanston and Chicago 1944— Cambridge University Press.—Pp. xvi + 816, Large 8vo.—31s.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 43, pp. 281–284. “Austrian Ideologies: The Historical Roots and Significance in the Re-Ordering of Europe.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 42, pp. 240–247.

1939 Age 57

Publications

Events

Year

(continued)

140  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

1948 Age 66

1947 Age 65

1946 Age 64

1945 Age 63

Accuses BBC of religious discrimination for declining to air a recording of his reconstruction of Ecclesiastes for Ash Wednesday.

(continued)

“Goethe the Statesman.” The Times. April 7, p. 5. “Hitler.” The Times. May 7, p. 5. “Hitler and Lueger.” May 17, p. 5. “Peace-Loving Nations and War-Making States.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 126–133. The Royal Art of Astrology. London: H. Joseph. “Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Account of the Fall.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 45, pp. 159–165. “Essays on Human Evolution. By Sir Arthur Keith.—London, Watts & Co.—x + 226 pp.—Small 8vo.—15s.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 44, pp. 377–380. “The Frontispiece to Sigismondo Fanti’s ‘Triompho di Fortuna.’” Journal of the Warburg-Courtauld Institute, No. 10, pp. 155–159. “Religion for the Age of Reason.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 46, pp. 334–340. Winning the Peace, a Comprehensive Policy Outlined by Robert Eisler and Eric George Hart. London: F. Muller. “Danse Macabre.” Traditio Vol. 6, pp. 187–225. “Plato: His Personality and His Politics.” The Philosopher Vol. 25, No. 8, pp. 2–12. “Der Vater des katholischen Modernismus, Alfred Loisy (1857– 1940). By Friedrich Heiler. Munich: I. and S. Federmann, 1947. Pp. 252, la. octavo, D.M. 12s.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 47/48, pp. 303–305. “Scientific Inference According to B. Russell, K. R. Popper and Felix Haufbert.” The Hibbert Journal Vol. 47, pp. 375–381. “Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.” The Burlington Magazine Vol. 90, No. 545, pp. 239–240.

  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications 

141

Dies on December 18th

1951

1950

Events

Year

1949 Age 67

(continued) Publications “Appearance and Reality: A Critique of Lord Russell’s Neutral Monism.” The Philosopher, New Series, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 78–87. “The Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation.” Ethics Vol. 59, No. 2, Part 1, pp. 77–94. “Hebrew Scrolls: Further Evidence for their Pre-Christian Date.” Modern Churchman Vol. 39, pp. 284–287. “Metallurgical Anthropology in Hesiod and Plato and the Date of a ‘Phoenician Lie.’” ISIS Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 108–112. “The Polar Sighting-Tube.” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences Vol. 6, pp. 312–332. “Age of Hebrew Scrolls.” The Times. September 8, p. 5. “The Parmenidean Dogma.” Philosophy Vol. 25 No. 2, pp. 94–95. “The Passion of the Flax.” Folklore Vol. 61, No. 3, pp. 114–133. Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism, and Lycanthropy. London: Routledge. Plato. London (attested as published in Robert Eisler, Martino Doni, and Enrico Antonio Giannetto, Uomo lupo: saggio sul sadismo, il masochismo e la licantropia (Milan: Medusa, 2011) with 21 pages of galley proofs located in the Archive of the Warburg Institute)

142  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

Draft typescripts in the archive of the Warburg Institute

(continued)

“Der Aegyptische Joseph” (“The Egyptian Joseph”). N.D. “The Alphabet in Mysticism and Magic.” N.D. “The Bernardino Luini Frescoes in the Washington National Gallery of Art.” N.D. “Das Buch der Weltgestaltung” (“The Book of Shaping the World”). N.D. “Caphtor, Kaptara, Kftj.w. (sic.).” 1940. “Die Dodekaoros in der kosmologischen Überlieferung der Juden” (“The Dodekaoros in the Cosmological Tradition of the Jews”). N.D. “A Dream Poem.” c. 1930s. “Dürer’s ‘Melancholy’ & the Horoscope of the Emperor.” c. 1940s. “Dürer’s Portrait with the Male Eryngium Album.” c. 1940s. “Dürer’s Star Maps.” c. 1940s. “Die Fechnersche Theorie und das kunsttheoretische Erfahrungsmaterial” (“Fechnerian Theory and the Art-theoretical Experience of Material”). N.D. “A German 17th Century Horse Doctor’s Book of Prescriptions.” N.D. “The God of the Pre Socratic (sic.) Philosophers: To the Editor of The Philosopher.” N.D. “Iconographic Notes on Some Albertina Drawings.” N.D. “The Kiss in the Moon.” N.D. “The Name of the Hyksos City Awaris and the Other Semitic Loan Words for ‘Town.’” c. 1930s. “The Name and Origin of the Nasili Language Written by the Scribes of Hattusa.” N.D. “Noricus Ensis-Noricus Vestis.”c. 1930s “Notizen zur Geschichte der decorativen Landschaftsmalerei” (“Notes on the History of Decorative Landscape Painting”). c. 1910s. (manuscript) “Orphic Reminiscenes (sic.) in Robert Fludd’s Cosmology.” N.D. “Poetry in Dreams.” 1948. Die Phänomenalwerte: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aesthetik (Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetic). 1898. (manuscript) “The Problem of Historism.” N.D.

Unpublished, incomplete, and unedited works

  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications 

143

Others

(continued)

“Rembrandt’s Alleged ‘Rabbi’ in the Chatsworth Collection.” N.D. “Rembrandt’s Etching ‘The Synagogue’ and the Excommunication of Uriel d’Acosta.” N.D. “La tunique de Mahomet.” (“The Tunic of Mohammed”). 1932. (unpublished paper given at the Association Francaise des Amis de l’Orient) “Two Renaissance Illustrations of Heraclitus’ Fragment 52.” N.D. “Das Volk ohne Stadt” (“The People Without a State”). N.D. “Volksbildung und Volkswirtschaft. Ein Wort zur Klärung” (“National Education and Economics: A Word of Clarification”). N.D. “Whence Came the Philistines.” 1940. “Zeus Olympios im Heiligtum von Jerusalem” (“Zeus Olympios in the Temple of Jerusalem”). 1938. “Zur Sphaera Hebraica” (“On the Hebrew Sphaera”). N.D. Comparative Studies of Ancient Cosmology: On the Constellations of the Babylonian and Egyptian Spheres and Their Modifications by the Greeks of the Achaean Period. c. 1940s (unedited partial typescript in the archives of the Griffith Institute, Oxford) The Sociology of War and Peace. c. 1940s. (location unknown) Supplement to Messiah Jesus c. 1930s. (attested in Eisler, Doni, and Giannetto 2011, location unknown)

144  Appendix: Timeline of Robert Eisler’s Life and Publications

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, 9 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film), 120 A Abhinavagupta, see Polymathy Abulafia, Abraham (Jewish mystic), 122 Academic Assistance Council, see Society for the Protection of Science and Learning Aesthetics, philosophy of, 26, 118 Afikoman, 43–53 See also Last Supper, The Against Apion (Josephus), 59 Allen, W.E.D. (friend of Eisler), 100 American Transcontinental Railroad, 10 Amery, Leo (British Secretary of State for India), 76

Analysis Terminable and Interminable (Freud), 62 Andersen, Hans Christian, 112 Angell, Sir Norman (reviewer), 86 Anschluss, 97, 98 Anthropology, vii, 3, 25 Antigone (Sophocles), 91, 92 Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus), 59, 60 Anti-Semitism, 50, 66, 97 See also Eisler, Robert, and Anti-Semitism Aramaic, text by Josephus, see Jewish War, The (Josephus) Archaeology, 21, 118 Archetypes, 121 See also Collective unconscious; Jung, Carl Aristotelian philosophy, 12, 18n3 See also Aristotle Aristotle, 18n3, 123 Armstrong, Ruth (distant relative), 10

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Collins, Robert Eisler and the Magic of the Combinatory Mind, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-61229-0

145

146 

INDEX

Ars Magna, see Llull, Ramon (philosopher) Art, 4, 22–25, 27, 28, 32, 35, 36, 50, 62, 113, 123, 124 See also Art history Art history, x, xi, 4, 21–28, 117, 118, 123 Art theft, Robert Eisler arrested for, 28, 98 Ascona (Switzerland), 84 Austrian economics, 11 Austrian Historical Institute, 75 Avenarius, Richard (empirical philosopher), 16 B Banco, money, see Eisler, Robert, dual currency model of Baptism, 47 Baring-Gold, Sabine (The Book of Were-Wolves), 2 Barkley, Alban (U.S. Senator), 76 Becoming a Werewolf: A Contribution to the Anthropological, Sociological and Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Lycanthropy (Eisler, unpublished), 3 Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, see Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (Mach) Beloved Disciple, 83, 92 See also John, son of Zebedee; Lazarus Benjamin, Walter, 22, 31–39, 56 Berendts, Alexander (German-­ Estonian philologist), 58, 60, 61, 65 Bergson, Henri, 56 Bhagavad Gı̄tā, 34 Bianchi, Ugo (historian of religions), 121

Bibelforscher (“Bible Students”), see Jehovah’s Witnesses Biblical scholarship, 25, 81 Bibliothek Warburg, 28, 50, 53 Bing, Gertrud (Hamburg Circle), 50 Bisexuality, 89 Black bunker, see Dachau Blécourt, Willem de (werewolf expert), 3 Bohemia, 9 Böhm-Bawerk, Eugen von (economist), 10 Book of Lazarus, The (Eisler, planned), 86, 109 Boulanger, André (reviewer), 5 Brentano, Franz, 12, 13, 22, 117 British Archaeological Association, 113 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 108 British Empire, 75, 77 British Parliamentary Finance Committee, 74, 76 Bruyne, Dominic de (Biblicist), 82, 83 Buber, Martin, 37, 65, 118 Buchenwald, 97–103, 105, 107, 112, 121 Buiter, Willem (economist), 74 Burgot, Pierre (suspected werewolf), 2 Burkitt, F.C. (reviewer), 5 C Calvinism, 120, 124n2 Canossa, Henry IV’s pilgrimage to, 17 See also Pope Gregory VII Capture of Jerusalem, The, see Jewish War, The (Josephus) Cassirer, Ernst, 32–34, 50, 51 Chamberlain, Neville (U.K. Prime Minister), 112 Chicago, viii, 9, 28, 120 Chronos, 34

 INDEX 

Cleghorn Thomson, David (Society for the Protection of Science and Learning), 99 Clement of Alexandria, 81 Collective unconscious, 3, 121 Comparative mythology, 58 See also Myth Comparetti, Domenico (Orphism scholar), 44, 45 Contributions to the Analysis of Sensations (Mach), 13 Creuzer, Friedrich (mythologist), 34 Crick, Francis, see DNA Croce, Benedetto (philosopher), 26 Crypto-jews, 61 Cryptomnesia, 92 Cumont, Franz (historian of religions), 53 Curie, Marie (scientist), 56 Curtius, Ernst Robert (Eranos attendee), 85, 94n1 Czech University, 101 D Da Vinci, Leonardo, see Polymathy Dachau, 4, 97–103, 112 Dallas Leather Library, 3 Danse Macabre, 111 Darwin, Charles, 45 See also Darwinian Synthesis; Evolution Darwinian Synthesis, 121 Das Geld: Seine geschichtliche Entstehung und gesellschaftliche Bedeutung, see Money: Its Historical Origin and Social Significance (Eisler) Das letzte Abendmahl, see Last Supper, The Das Rätsel des Johannesevangeliums, see Riddle of the Gospel of John, The (Eisler)

147

Das sogenannte Böse. Zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression, see On Aggression (Lorenz) Daube, David (Hebrew Bible scholar), 49 Dechend, Hertha von, see Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (Santillana) Demetrius Poliorcetes (Macedonian King), 33 Der Jude, see Jew, The (Buber) Der Wille zum Schmerz, Ein psychologisches Paradoxon, see “Will to Pain, a Psychological Paradox, The” Desire, see Verlangen (“desire”) Devil, the, 83, 87, 120, 124n2 Die Phänomenalwerte: Versuch einer wissenschaftlichen Aesthetik, see Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetics (Eisler) Die Probleme der Geschichtsphelodophie: eine Erkenntnistheoretische Studie, see Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Study, The (Simmel) Dionysian rituals, 101 flagellation in, 101 Disvalue and value, 15 DNA, 121 Dobschutz, Ernst von (theologian), 47 Domitian (Roman Emperor), 47, 61 Dream Poem, A (Eisler, unpublished), 90 Dream Symbols and the Individuation Process (Jung), 85 Dreams, interpretation of, see Eisler, Robert, dream of Dropsie College, 63 Duncan, Helen (British psychic), 109 Dupuis, William (mythologist), 34

148 

INDEX

E Ecclesiastes, 85, 105–114 Economics, x, 11, 18n2, 21, 71–73, 77, 79n1, 118, 123 Edmonds, Radcliffe (Orphism scholar), 44, 45 Ehrenfels, Christian von (philosopher), 12, 117 Eine Jesusvision des. 20 Jahrhunderts psychologisch untersucht, see Twentieth Century Vision of Jesus Psychologically Examined, A (Eisler) Einstein, Albert, 57 See also General Theory of Relativity; Special Theory of Relativity Eisler, Friedrich Fritz (father), 9 Eisler, Lili née Von Pausinger (wife), 27, 28, 100, 107 Eisler, Melanie née Reitzes (mother), 9, 10, 26 Eisler, Otto (brother), 100 Eisler, Robert, vii, viii, x–xii, 1, 3, 4, 6n1, 9, 22, 28, 37, 49, 62, 65, 66, 73, 75, 99, 100, 102, 113, 114 and Aby Warburg, 22, 27, 39, 50, 118 and agnosticism, 28, 111 and Anti-Semitism, 50, 66, 97 arrest by Nazis in Vienna, 9, 10, 18n1, 22, 26, 27, 50, 78, 101 arrest for art theft in Italy, 24, 28 and combinatory mind, 121, 124 conversion to Catholicism, 28 dream of, 90, 92, 93 dual currency model of, 72–74, 79 (see also Eisler, Robert, testimony before U.S. Senate; The Money Machine: A Simple Introduction to the Eisler Plan;

This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis (Eisler); Stable money) and Fritz Saxl, 50, 52 and Gershom Scholem, vii, 22, 36, 37, 56, 65, 84, 94n2, 118 health problems of, 109, 114 and Martin Buber, 37, 65, 118 and naturalization, 112 in Paris, 5, 37, 56, 63, 67 as polymath, xii, 119, 123 and psychoanalysis, 3, 4, 79, 86, 90, 122, 123 (see also Eisler, Robert, dream of; Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl; Psychoanalysis; Whitehead, Robert) and Solomon Zeitlin, ix, 49, 63 testimony before U.S. Senate, 79 two modes of thinking, 118 Eliade, Mircea, 27, 28, 36, 66, 84 Eliasberg, W.G. (reviewer), 119 Empiric Basis of Moral Obligation, The, 98, 111 Enigma of the Fourth Gospel, The, 25, 82, 84, 86, 90, 98, 100, 109, 118 Ephesus, 21, 83, 84 Epigenetics, 121 Epistemology, 13, 103 Eranos, 81–94, 118 See also Curtius, Ernst Robert (Eranos attendee); Fröbe-­ Kapteyn, Olga (Eranos); Jung, Carl Ethics, 111, 123 Evans, Sir Arthur (archaeologist), 22 Evolution, 121 See also Darwin, Charles; Epigenetics; Genetics; Neo-Lamarckism

 INDEX 

F Fact, historical, 15–17, 35 Farrer, Austin (theologian), 108 Feeling, see Gefühl (“feeling”) Fiat currency, see Eisler, Robert, dual currency model of First Austrian School of Value Theory, 10 Flagellation, see Dionysian rituals, flagellation in Flavius Josephus, see Josephus Fletcher, Duncan (U.S. Senator), 74 Fliess, Wilhelm (otolaryngologist), 89 Folk-Lore Society, The, 111 Forster, Peter (Buchenwald), 99 Fourth Gospel, 81–94, 108, 118 authorship of, 85 Frankfurt am Main, 10, 114 Frazer, Sir James George, 33, 44, 45, 53 Freigold (“free money”), 73 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 25, 62, 89, 90, 117, 122 Fröbe-Kapteyn, Olga (Eranos), 85 Frondzi, Risieri, 13 Furtwängler, Adolf (archaeologist), 62 G Gefühl (“feeling”), 12, 13, 39, 56, 98, 108, 114n1 Gemütstätigkeiten (“matters of love and hate”), 12 General Theory of Employment, Money and Interest, The (Keynes), 73 General Theory of Relativity, 110 Genesis, 27, 84 Genetics and chromosomes, 120 and informational view of heredity, 121 Geography, 15, 16, 113

149

Geology, 15, 16 Gesner, Johann Matthias (classicist), 44 Gessel, Sivio (economist), 73 Ginzburg, Carlo, 24, 50 Glass, Carter (U.S. Senator), 76 Glass Bead Game, The (Hesse), 123 Goguel, Maurice (theologian), 5 Gold Reserve Act of 1934, 74, 75, 77 Goldsmid, Cyril (Eisler’s friend), 114 Gold standard, 75, 76, 78 Gorizia, sanitarium at, 27 Gospel of the Paraclete, The (Eisler, planned), 86 Gospels, summaries of, 25, 46, 59, 65, 81, 82, 101 See also Bruyne, Dominic de (Biblicist) Grassl, Wolfgang, 12 Great Depression, The, 18n2, 71, 73 Greisman, H.C. (sociologist), 119, 120 Grundmann, Walter (Nazi theologian), 102, 103 Grundsätze der Volkswirtschaftslehre, see Principles of Economics (Menger) Gubser, Michael (art historian), 23 Gumbel, Emil (mathematician), 50 H Haigh, John George (murderer), 2 Hamburg Circle, 43–53 Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (Santillana), 35 Harnack, Adolf von (Gnosticism scholar), 83 Harrisson, Tom (Mass-­ Observation), 114n1

150 

INDEX

Harvard Theological Review, The, 5 Harvey, Martin (Eisler’s friend), 100 Heath, Neville (murderer), 2 Hebrew Bible, viii Hegesippus, 59, 60 See also Jewish War, The (Josephus) Heidelberg University, 49 Henderson, Sir David K., 6n1 Henry II (Holy Roman Emperor), coronation robe of, 33, 34 Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 17 See also Pope Gregory VII Henry VIII (English king), 113, 118 Heresy, see Crypto-jews; Marcion Hesiod, 34 Hesse, Hermann, 123 Hexen Sonderauftrag (“Special Witch Unit”), 102 Hibbert Journal, The, 6n2, 103 Hibbert Trust, The, 108 Himmler, Heinrich, 102 See also Hexen Sonderauftrag (“Special Witch Unit”) Hiraṇyagarbha (“Golden Egg”), 34 Historic Christ: An Examination of Dr. Robert Eisler’s Theory According to the Slavonic Version of Josephus and Other Sources, The (Jacks), 65 Historical Jesus, see Jesus History of Decorative Landscape Painting, The (Eisler), 22 Hitler, Adolf, name, 102 Hitler, Adolph, 98, 101–103, 109 as Anti-Christ, 101 name, 102 Hoffmann, Ernst (Heidelberg historian of philosophy), 49 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von (poet), 27 Hommel, Fritz (Assyriologist), 38 Horace, 82 Horne, Robert (British Chancellor of the Exchequer), 76

Howard, Wilbert (Eisler’s friend), 100 Hunt, William Holman (painter), 90 Husserl, Edmund, 12 Huxley, Thomas Henry, see Eisler, Robert, and agnosticism I Ibn Sina, see Polymathy Ideas of the Orphic-Dionysian Mysteries in Early Christianity, The (Eisler), 5 Imago (psychoanalytic journal), 90 Indus script, 122 Inflation, of currency, 18n2, 71, 75 Inquisition, The, 99 Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle, see League of Nations, International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben, see Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life Institute for the Study and Elimination of Jewish Influence on German Church Life, 103 Interfaith marriage, in Austria-­ Hungary, 28 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, see League of Nations, International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation Interpellations in Fourth Gospel, 84 in work of Josephus, 84 Island of Bones (Parrish), 3

 INDEX 

Isle of Man, internment camp for refugees, 107 Ius ubicumque docendi, 113 I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957 film), 3 J Jacks, J.W. (theologian), 65, 66 Jacob, Heinrich E. (historian), 99 James, Edwin Oliver (theologian), 105 James, the Apostle, 90 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 98, 103n1 Jennings, Humphrey (Mass-­ Observation), 114n1 Jesus and Josephus, 60, 65–67, 88–90 (see also Testimonium Flavianum) as political messiah, 47, 57, 66 physical description of, 59, 60, 66, 67, 87, 88, 90 visions of, 60, 67, 87, 89, 90 ΙΗΣΟϒΣ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣ Οϒ ΒΑΣΙΛΕϒΣΑΣ [Jesus Basileus ou Basileusas]: Messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechtenn ach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen, see Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources, The Jesus der Nazoräer, der König der Juden, see Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Murawski) Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews (Murawski), 103

151

Jewish Quarterly Review, The (JQR), viii–x, 63 Jewish War, The (Josephus), 59–61, 63, 65 Jewish War, The, Slavonic translation of, see Josephus, Slavonic translation of Jews, 10, 37, 50, 57–59, 61, 64, 66, 98–102, 111, 114, 118, 122 Jews, in Vienna, 9–19 See also Anti-Semitism Jew, The (Buber), 37 John Bull’s Other Island (Shaw), 92, 94 John the Evangel, see Fourth Gospel John, Gospel of, see Fourth Gospel John, of Ephesus, 83, 84 John, son of Zebedee, 82, 86 John, the Apostle, see John, son of Zebedee John, the Baptist, 47, 58, 60, 65 See also Vegetarianism, of John the Baptist John, the Elder, 86 Joint Committee on Matters of Religious Liberty, 109 Josephus, 55–68, 88–90, 122 Slavonic translation of, ix, 55–68 See also Testimonium Flavianum Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, The, 119 Jowett Society, 111 Joyce, William (traitor in World War Two), 112 Judaism, viii, 37, 45, 49, 61 See also Jews; Kabbalah Judenbibliothek, 102 Judgements, see Urteile (“judgements”) Jung, Carl, 2, 25, 27, 28, 85, 90, 121

152 

INDEX

K Kabbalah, 38, 122 Kala (Hindu god), 34 Kautsky, Karl (Marxist scholar), 56 Kerényi, Karl (mythologist), 85 Keynes, John Maynard, 73 Khazars, 61, 64 Kimball, Miles (economist), 73 Kinematic Cosmology, 110 King James Bible, 15 Kircher, Athanasius, 123 Knossos, 21 Konfessionslos, legal category, 28 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von (sexologist), 10 Kratzer, Nicholas (astronomer to Henry VIII), 113, 118 Kraus, Hans P. (bookseller), 99 Kristallnacht, 99 Kṛṣṇa (Hindu god), 34 Kubrick, Stanley, see 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968 film) Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, see Bibliothek Warburg Kunstwollen (“artistic volition”), 23, 34 L Lake Attersee, 90 Last Supper, The, 46, 48, 49 Lazarus, 82–84, 92 League of Nations, 5, 55–68, 98 International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation, 55–56 Leithner, Baron Otto (Eisler’s friend), 100 Leopoldstadt, 10, 114 Lévi, Israël (Grand Rabbi of France), 57 Libraries, 25, 27, 51, 65, 82, 85, 91, 102, 107

Hellenistic, 25 Lietzmann, Hans (theologian), 48, 49 Light of the World, The (William Holman Hunt painting), 90 Linear A, 122 Linguistics, comparative, see Philology Livy, 60 Llull, Ramon (philosopher), 122 Loisy, Alfred (Christian humanist), 56 Lorenz, Konrad, 120 Louis XVI (French king), 114 Lycanthropy, 2, 3 M Mach, Ernst, 13, 117 Madge, Charles (Mass-­ Observation), 114n1 Majer, Augusto (Eisler’s friend), 26, 27 Malaria, and personality change, 26–28, 108 Maly Trostenets (death camp), 100 Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Account of the Fall (Eisler), 6n2 Man into Wolf: An Anthropological Interpretation of Sadism, Masochism and Lycanthropy (Eisler), vii, 1 Mantegna’s Early Works and Roman Antiquity (Eisler), 21 Mantegnas frühe Werke und der römische Antike, see Mantegna’s Early Works and Roman Antiquity (Eisler) Marcion, 82–84, 118 Marmorstein, Arthur (Jewish historian), 48, 49 Marshall, Captain Robert (Isle of Man), 107 Masochism, 2, 10, 35 Mass murder, 2

 INDEX 

Mass-Observation project, on astrology, 109 Matsya Purāṇa, 34 Matters of love and hate, see Gemütstätigkeiten (“matters of love and hate”) McGilvary, Evander Bradley (reviewer), 14 Mead, George Robert Stow (The Quest), 36, 40n1, 46, 58, 87 Meinong, Alexius von (philosopher), 12, 117 Menger, Carl (economist), 11, 24 Meqabrim (Hebrew society of gravediggers), 111 Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus’ Recently Rediscovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and Other Jewish and Christian Sources, The (Eisler), 4, 63 Methuen (publisher), 86, 120 Miletus, 21 Milne, Edward Arthur, see Kinematic Cosmology Mindowgas (Lithuanian king), 61 Mithraism, 53 Money, 38, 51, 52, 71–75, 77, 78, 93, 108, 118 Money: Its Historical Origin and Social Significance (Eisler), 52, 72 Money Machine: A Simple Introduction to the Eisler Plan, The, 72 Montee, Kristy (novelist), 3 Monteverdi, Claudio Giovanni Antonio (composer), 44 Morelli, Giovanni (art historian), 21–28, 34 Müller, F. Max (philologist), 33 Müller, Karl Otfried (mythologist), 34 Munich, 38, 82 Murawski, Friedrich (S.S. officer), 102, 103

153

Murray, Gilbert, 5, 53, 55, 98, 113 Mysticism, Jewish, see Kabbalah Myth, viii, 3, 18, 27, 32, 33, 45, 84 Mythologemes, 18 N Nazis, 22, 50, 78, 99 Nebuchadnezzar II, see Nebuchadnezzar Neo-Lamarckism, 121 Neoplatonists, 44 New Testament, 65, 79, 82, 100, 122 See also Fourth Gospel; Jesus New Titles for Old Paintings (Eisler, planned), 24 New York Times, The, 67, 88 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 45, 85 Nixon, Richard (U.S. President), 78 O Objects (philosophy), 13 Olin, Margaret (art historian), 23 On Aggression (Lorenz), 120 On the Epistemology of Aesthetic Criticism (Eisler), 13 Ontology, 12, 14 Orpheus, 44–46, 52 See also Orphism Orpheus the Fisher: Comparative Studies in Orphic and Early Christian Symbolism (Eisler), 43 Orphic tablets, 44 See also Orphism Orphic-Dionysian Mystery Thought in Early Christianity (Eisler), 52 Orphisch-Dionysische Mysteriengedanken in der christlichen Antike, see Orphic-­ Dionysian Mystery Thought in Early Christianity (Eisler) Orphism, 43–53

154 

INDEX

P Pain, 13, 108 See also Masochism; Sadism Palestine, see Zionism Panofsky, Erwin (Hamburg Circle), 50 Paris Eisler’s residence in, 56 Eisler’s meeting with and Scholem Benjamin in, 39 Parrish, P.J., see Montee, Kristy (novelist) Passion of the Flax, The (Eisler), 111, 114 Passover, 48, 49 See also Afikoman; Last Supper, The Phanes (Orphic god), 53 Phenomenal Values: Attempt at a Scientific Aesthetics (Eisler), 10, 11 Pherykedes of Syros (Pre-Socratic philosopher), 34 Philoctetes (Sophocles), 93 Philology, x, 4, 43, 49, 57, 118, 123 Philosophic Basis of Modern Physics, The (Eisler), 109 Philosophy in ancient Greece, 32, 111 in Vienna, 21, 117, 123 Physics, 15, 16, 110, 119, 120 Plato, 52 Polyamory, 3 Polymathy, 123 See also Kircher, Athanasius Pope Gregory VII, 17 See also Henry IV (Holy Roman Emperor Popper, Karl, 52 Presentations, see Vorstellungen (“presentations”) Price, Morgan Phillips (British Member of Parliament), 67 Principles of Economics (Menger), 11

Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Study, The (Simmel), 16 Psychoanalysis, 4, 79, 81–94, 122, 123 See also Freud, Sigmund; Jung, Carl Q Quest Society, The, 36 Quest, The (journal), 36, 44, 48, 58, 86 R Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli (philosopher), 56 Reflation, of currency, 75, 78 Regen, Rosalie (niece), 79n1 Reinach, Salomon (archaeologist), 45, 56, 66 Reitzes, Melanie, see Eisler, Melanie née Reitzes (mother) Religions, history of, x, xii, 4, 31–39, 43, 45, 46, 85 Republic (Plato), 52 Res publica eruditorum, 113 Rhys Davids, Caroline (Buddhologist), 85 Riddle of the Gospel of John, The (Eisler), 85 Riegl, Aloïs, 21–28, 32, 34, 39 See also Kunstwollen (“artistic volition”) Rogoff, Kenneth (economist), 74 Romans, occupation of Jerusalem by, see Jewish War, The (Josephus); Josephus; Titus (Roman Emperor); Vespasian, Flavius (Roman Emperor) Rongorongo, 122

 INDEX 

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano (U.S. President), 73, 74 Rothschild family, 10 Royal Art of Astrology, The (Eisler), 109, 110 Royal Society of Medicine, 2, 6n1, 86 Rudolph, Crown Prince, 28 Ruff, A.M. (Eisler’s friend), 100 Russell, Bertrand, 57 S S.A., 102 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 2, 10 Sade, Marquis de, 2 Sadism, 2, 3, 35, 99 Santillana, Giorgio de, see Hamlet’s Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and Its Transmission Through Myth (Santillana) Satı̄ (widow-burning), 53n2 Saxl, Fritz (Hamburg Circle), 50–53 Scheler, Max (philosopher), 12 Schicklgruber, see Hitler, Adolf, name Schlosser, Julius von, 22 Scholem, Gershom, vii, 22, 29n1, 31–39, 49, 56, 84, 94n2, 114, 121, 122 Schutzhaft (“protective custody”), 98 Schutzstaffel, see S.S. Second Austrian School of Value Theory, 10, 11 Sefer Yosippon, 60 See also Jewish War, The (Josephus) Serial killers/killing, 3 Sharp, Malcolm (reviewer), 24, 120 Shaw, George Bernard (playwright), 57, 92 Simmel, Georg (philosopher), 16, 18 Simpson, Esther, 100, 108

155

Slavonic Josephus, see Josephus, Slavonic translation of Society for the Protection of Science and Learning, 99, 108, 112 See also Cleghorn Thomson, David (Society for the Protection of Science and Learning; Simpson, Esther Socratic Club, 108 Sophocles, 91–93 Sorbonne, The, 56, 57 Ernest Renan Society, 57 Sousa, Léon de (Eisler’s friend), 91 Special Theory of Relativity, 110 S.S., 101 Stable money, 72, 74, 75 See also Eisler, Robert, dual currency model of States of affairs (philosophy), 12, 14 Stork, Charles Wharton (brother-in-­ law), 27, 79n1 Stork, Elisabeth von Pausinger (sister-in-law), 79n1 Studien zur Werttheorie, see Studies in Value Theory (Eisler) Studies in Value Theory (Eisler), 10, 13, 14, 17, 18, 22, 32, 118, 122 Sturmabteilung, see S.A. Suicide, 17, 27, 28, 29n2, 58, 103 Eisler’s attempted, 29n2, 103 Summers, Montague (werewolf author), 2 T Talmudist, 49, 63 Testimonium Flavianum, 59, 62, 65 Theaetetus (Plato), 52 Theosophy, see Mead, George Robert Stow (The Quest); Quest Society, The; Quest, The (journal)

156 

INDEX

This Money Maze: A Way Out of the Economic World Crisis (Eisler), 4, 71, 73 Thomson, David Cleghorn, see Cleghorn Thomson, David (Society for the Protection of Science and Learning Thorwaldsen, Bertel (art historian), 62 Times, The, 85, 107 Titus (Roman Emperor), 59 Twentieth Century Vision of Jesus Psychologically Examined, A (Eisler), 90, 94n2 U Udine (Italy), 21–28, 37, 52 United States Senate, Committee on Banking and Currency, see Eisler, Robert, testimony before U.S. Senate University of Muri, 39 University of Vienna, 10, 21, 22, 100 Unruh, Howard (murderer), 2 Unterach, see Lake Attersee Urteile (“judgements”), 12 Usener, Hermann (mythologist), 25, 32–34 V Value, 9–18, 23, 24, 64, 73, 74, 77, 78, 92, 93, 111, 123 See also Disvalue and value; First Austrian School of Value Theory; Second Austrian School of Value Theory Vanity of Vanities The Book ‘Ecclesiastes’ Restored to Its Original Form (Eisler), 105–114 Vegetarianism, of John the Baptist, 58

Verdun, Michel (suspected werewolf), 2 Verlangen (“desire”), 12, 68, 72, 83, 89 Vespasian, Flavius (Roman Emperor), 58, 59 Vienna Circle, The, 13 Virgil, 60 Virginis et Passionis, 26 Vorstellungen (“presentations”), 12, 58, 122 Vronsky, Peter, 3 W Wandlung zum Werwolf. Ein Beitrag zur anthropologischen, soziologischen und psychoanalytischen Deutung des Lycanthropie, see Becoming a Werewolf: A Contribution to the Anthropological, Sociological and Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Lycanthropy (Eisler, unpublished) Warburg, Aby, 22, 23, 27, 36, 39, 50, 118 Warburg, Mary, 27, 94n2 Watkins, John M., 43, 46 Watson, James, see DNA Weimar Republic, 38 Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt: Religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Urgeschichte des antiken Weltbildes, see World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-­ Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldviews (Eisler) White, David Gordon, 93 Whitehead, Robert, ix, 86–90 Wickhoff, Franz (art historian), 22, 32, 117

 INDEX 

Wieser, Friedrich von (economist), 11 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von (classicist), 51 Wilde Readership in Comparative and Natural Religion, 98 “Will to Pain, a Psychological Paradox, The,” 18 Wordsworth, W.A., 78, 79, 85, 86, 99 World Cloak and Sky Canopy: Religious-Historical Investigations on the Prehistory of the Ancient Worldviews (Eisler), 4, 31 World War One, 29n2, 36, 58 World War II, 85 See also Anschluss; Buchenwald; Dachau; Nazis

157

Y Yetzer hara (“evil impulse”), 87 Yoga, 90 Z Zappa, Frank, 3 Zeitlin, Solomon (Judaism scholar), ix, 49, 63–65, 67 Zero Lower Bound, see Eisler, Robert, dual currency model of Zimmer, Heinrich (Indologist), 85 Zionism, 10, 114 Zlotnik, Rabbi J. L. (Zionist Organization of Canada), 67 Zoroastrianism, see Zurvan Zurvan, 34, 51