Hermann Hesse's
THE GLASS BEAD GAME
A tentative sketch of the life of
Magister
Ludi Joseph Knecht
Translated from the German
by
Richard and Clara Winston
Digital electronic transcription by John O’Loughlin
Transcription Copyright © 2023 Centretruths Digital Media
______________________
CONTENTS
1
The
Call
2
Waldzell
3
Years
of Freedom
4
Two
Orders
5
The
6
Magister
Ludi
7
In
Office
8
The
Two Poles
9
A
Conversation
10
Preparations
11
The
Circular Letter
12
The
Legend
_______________________
THE GLASS BEAD GAME:
A GENERAL INTRODUCTION TO ITS HISTORY
FOR THE LAYMAN
... Non entia
enim licet quodammodo levibusque hominimus facilius atque incuriosius verbis reddere quam entia, veruntamen
pio diligentique rerum scriptori plane aliter res se habet:
nihil tantum repugnant ne verbis illustretur,
at nihil adeo necesse est ante hominum oculos proponere ut certas
quasdam res, quas esse neque
demonstrari neque probari potest, quae contra eo ipso, quod pii diligentesque
viri illas quasi ut entia tractant,
enti nascendique facultati paululum appropinquant.
ALBERTUS SECUNDUS
tract. de cristall.
spirit.
ed. Clangor et Collof.
lib. I, cap. 28
In Joseph Knecht's
holograph translation:
... For although in a certain sense and
for light-minded persons non-existent things can be more easily and
irresponsibly represented in words than existing things, for the serious and
conscientious historian it is just the reverse.
Nothing is harder, yet nothing is more necessary, than to speak of
certain things whose existence is neither demonstrable nor probable. The very fact that serious and conscientious
men treat them as existing things brings them a step closer to existence and to
the possibility of being born.
___________________
IT
IS OUR intention to preserve in these pages what scant biographical material we
have been able to collect concerning Joseph Knecht,
or Ludi Magister Josephus
III, as he is called in the Archives of the Glass Bead Game. We are not unaware that this endeavour runs,
or seems to run, somewhat counter to the prevailing laws and usages of our
intellectual life. For, after all,
obliteration of individuality, the maximum integration of the individual into
the hierarchy of the educators and scholars, has ever been one of our ruling
principles. And in the course of our
long tradition this principle has been observed with such thoroughness that
today it is exceedingly difficult, and in many cases completely impossible, to
obtain biographical and psychological information on various persons who have
served the hierarchy in exemplary fashion.
In very many cases it is no longer even possible to determine their
original names. The hierarchic
organization cherishes the ideal of anonymity, and comes very close to the
realization of that ideal. This fact
remains one of the abiding characteristics of intellectual life in our
Province.
If we have nevertheless persisted in our
endeavour to determine some of the facts about the life of Ludi
Magister Josephus III, and at least to sketch the
outlines of his character, we believe we have done so not out of any cult of
personality, nor out of disobedience to the customs, but on the contrary solely
in the service of truth and scholarship.
It is an old idea that the more pointedly and logically we formulate a
thesis, the more irresistibly it cries out for its antithesis. We uphold and venerate the idea that
underlies the anonymity of our authorities and our intellectual life. But a glance at the early history of that
life of the mind we now lead, namely a glance at the development of the Glass
Bead Game, shows us irrefutably that every phase of its development, every
extension, every change, every essential segment of its history, whether it be
seen as progressive or conservative, bears the plain imprint of the person who
introduced the change. He was not
necessarily its sole or actual author, but he was the instrument of
transformation and perfection.
Certainly, what nowadays we understand
by personality is something quite different from what the biographers and
historians of earlier times meant by it.
For them, and especially for the writers of those days who had a
distinct taste for biography, the essence of a personality seems to have been
deviance, abnormality, uniqueness, in fact all too often the pathological. We moderns, on the other hand, do not even
speak of major personalities until we encounter men who have gone beyond all
original and idiosyncratic qualities to achieve the greater possible
integration into the generality, the greatest possible service to the suprapersonal. If we
look closely into the matter we shall see that the ancients had already
perceived this ideal. The figure of the
Sage or Perfect One among the ancient Chinese, for example, or the ideal of
Socratic ethics, can scarcely be distinguished from our present ideal; and many
a great organization, such as the Roman Church in the eras of its greatest
power, has recognized similar principles.
Indeed, many of its greatest figures, such as St. Thomas Aquinas, appear
to us - like early Greek sculptures - more the classical representatives of
types than individuals.
Nevertheless, in the period before the
reformation of the intellectual life, a reformation which began in the
twentieth century and of which we are the heirs, that authentic ancient ideal
had patently come near to being entirely lost.
We are astonished when the biographies of those times rather garrulously
relate how many brothers and sisters the hero had, or what psychological scars
and blotches were left behind from his casting off the skins of childhood and
puberty, from the struggle for position and the search for love. We moderns are not interested in a hero's
pathology or family history, nor in his drives, his
digestion, and how he sleeps. Not even
his intellectual background - the influence upon his development of his
favourite studies, favourite reading, and so on - is particularly important to
us. For us, a man is a hero and deserves
special interest only if his nature and his education have rendered him able to
let his individuality be almost perfectly absorbed in its hierarchic function
without at the same time forfeiting the vigorous, fresh, admirable impetus which make for the savour and worth of the
individual. And if conflicts arise
between the individual and the hierarchy, we regard these very conflicts as a
touchstone for the stature of a personality.
We do not approve of the rebel who is driven by his desires and passions
to infringements upon law and order; we find all the more worthy of our
reverence the memory of those who tragically sacrificed themselves for the
greater whole.
These latter are the heroes, and in the
case of these truly exemplary men, interest in the individual, in the name,
face, and gesture, seems to us permissible and natural. For we do not regard even the perfect
hierarchy, the most harmonious organization, as a machine put together out of
lifeless units that count for nothing in themselves, but as a living body,
formed of parts and animated by organs which possess their own nature and
freedom. Every one of them shares in the
miracle of life. In this sense, then, we
have endeavoured to obtain information on the life of Joseph Knecht, Master of the Glass Bead Game, and especially to
collect everything written by himself. We have, moreover, obtained several
manuscripts we consider worth reading.
What we have to say about Knecht's personality and life is surely familiar in whole
or in part to a good many members of the Order, especially the Glass Bead Game
players, and for this reason among others our book is not addressed to this
circle alone, but is intended to appeal more widely to sympathetic readers.
For the narrower circle, our book would
need neither introduction nor commentary.
But since we also wish our hero's life and writings to be studied
outside the Order, we are confronted with the somewhat difficult task of
prefacing our book with a brief popular introduction, for that less-prepared
reader, into the meaning and history of the Glass Bead Game. We stress that this introduction is intended
only for popular consumption and makes no claim whatsoever to clarifying the
questions being discussed within the Order itself on the problems and history
of the Game. The time for an objective
account of that subject is still far in the future.
Let no-one,
therefore, expect from us a complete history and theory of the Glass Bead
Game. Even authors of higher rank and
competence than ourself
would not be capable of providing that at the present time. That task must remain reserved to later ages,
if the sources and the intellectual prerequisites for the task have not
previously been lost. Still less is our
essay intended as a textbook of the Glass Bead Game; indeed, no such thing will
ever be written. The only way to learn
the rules of this Game of games is to take the usual prescribed course, which
requires many years; and none of the initiates could ever possibly have any
interest in making these rules easier to learn.
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. All the
insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in
its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced
to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body
of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an
organ. And this organ has attained an
almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire
intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of
reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe. These manuals, pedals, and stops are now
fixed. Changes in their number and
order, and attempts at perfecting them, are actually no longer feasible except
in theory. Any enrichment of the
language of the Game by addition of new contents is subject to the strictest
conceivable control by the directorate of the Game. On the other hand, within this fixed
structure or, to abide by our image, within the complicated mechanism of this
giant organ, a whole universe of possibilities and combinations is available to
the individual player. For even two out
of a thousand stringently played games to resemble each other more than
superficially is hardly possible. Even
if it should so happen that two players by chance were to choose precisely the
same small assortment of themes for the content of their Game, these two Games
would present an entirely different appearance and run an entirely different
course, depending on the qualities of mind, character, mood, and virtuosity of
the players.
How far back the historian wishes to
place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a
matter of his personal choice. For like
every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least
the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed,
as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for
example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of
classical civilization. We find it
equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of
Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through
Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and
the runes of Novalis's hallucinatory visions. The same eternal idea, which for us has been
embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind towards
the ideal goal of a universitas litterarum, every Platonic academy, every league of an
intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more
liberal disciplines, every effort towards reconciliation between science and
art or science and religion. Men like Aberlard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar
with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric
systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical
expressiveness of the exact sciences. In
that age in which music and mathematics almost simultaneously attained
classical heights, approaches and cross-fertilizations between the two
disciplines occurred frequently. And two
centuries earlier we find in Nicholas of Cusa
sentences of the same tenor, such as this: "The mind adapts itself to
potentiality in order to measure everything in the mode of potentiality, and to
absolute necessity in order to measure everything in the mode of unity and
simplicity as God does, and to the necessity of nexus in order to measure
everything with respect to its peculiar nature; finally, it adapts itself to
determinate potentiality in order to measure everything with respect to its
existence. But furthermore the mind also
measures symbolically, by comparison, as when it employs numerals and geometric
figures and equates other things with them."
Incidentally, this is not the only one
of Nicholas's ideas that almost seems to suggest our Glass Bead Game, or
corresponds to and springs from a similar branch of the imagination as the play
of thought which occurs in the Game.
Many similar echoes can be found in his writings. His pleasure in mathematics also, and his
delight and skill in using constructions and axioms of Euclidean Geometry as
similes to clarify theological and philosophical concepts, likewise appear to
be very close to the mentality of the Game.
At times even his peculiar Latin (abounding in words of his own coinage,
whose meaning, however, was perfectly plain to any Latin scholar) calls to mind
the improvisatory agility of the Game's language.
As the epigraph of our treatise may
already have suggested, Albertus Secundus
deserves an equal place among the ancestors of the Glass Bead Game. And we suspect, although we cannot prove this
by citations, that the idea of the Game also dominated the minds of those
learned musicians of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries who based their musical compositions on mathematical
speculations. Here and there in the
ancient literatures we encounter legends of wise and mysterious games that were
conceived and played by scholars, monks, or the courtiers of cultured
princes. These might take the form of
chess games in which the pieces and squares had secret meanings in addition to
their usual functions. And of course
everyone has heard those fables and legends from the formative years of all
civilizations which ascribe to music powers far greater than those of any mere
art: the capacity to control men and nations.
These accounts make of music a kind of secret regent, or a lawbook for men and their governments. From the most ancient days of
Although we thus recognise the idea of
the Game as eternally present, and therefore existent in vague stirrings long
before it became a reality, its realization in the form we know it nevertheless
has its specific history. We shall now
attempt to give a brief account of the most important stages of that history.
The beginnings of the intellectual
movement whose fruits are, among many others, the establishment of the Order
and the Glass Bead Game itself, may be traced back to a period which Plinius Ziegenhalss, the
historian of literature, designated as the Age of the Feuilleton, by which name
it has been known ever since. Such tags
are pretty, but dangerous; they constantly tempt us to a biased view of the era
in question. And as a matter of fact the
Age of the Feuilleton was by no means uncultured; it was not even
intellectually impoverished. But if we
may believe Ziegenhalss, the age appears to have had
only the dimmest notion of what to do with culture. Or rather, it did not know how to assign
culture its proper place within the economy of life and the nation. To be frank, we really are very poorly
informed about that era, even though it is the soil out of which almost
everything that distinguishes our cultural life today has grown.
It was, according to Ziegenhalss,
an era emphatically "bourgeois" and given to an almost untrammelled
individualism. If in order to suggest
the atmosphere we cite some of its features from Ziegenhalss'
description, we may at least do so with the confidence that these features have
not been invented, badly drawn, or grossly exaggerated. For the great scholar has documented them
from a vast number of literary and other sources. We take our cue from this scholar, who so far
has been the sole serious investigator of the Feuilletonistic
Age. As we read, we should remember that
it is easy and foolish to sneer at the mistakes or barbarities of remote ages.
Since the end of the Middle Ages,
intellectual life in
Has the gain been worth the countless victims? Has our present structure of the life of the
mind been sufficiently developed, and is it likely to endure long enough, to
justify as worthwhile sacrifices, all the sufferings, convulsions, and
abnormalities: the trials of heretics, the burnings at stake, the many "geniuses" who ended in madness or
suicide? For us, it is not permissible
to ask these questions. History is as it
has happened. Whether it was good,
whether it would have been better not to have happened, whether we will or will
not acknowledge that it has had "meaning" - all this is
irrelevant. Thus those struggles for the
"freedom" of the human intellect likewise "happened", and
subsequently, in the course of the aforementioned Age of the Feuilleton, men
came to enjoy an incredible degree of intellectual freedom, more than they
could stand. For while they had
overthrown the tutelage of the Church completely, and that of the State
partially, they had not succeeded in formulating an authentic law they could
respect, a genuinely new authority and legitimacy. Ziegenhalss
recounts some truly astonishing examples of the intellect's debasement,
venality, and self-betrayal during that period.
We must confess that we cannot provide
an unequivocal definition of those products from which the age takes its name,
the feuilletons. They seemed to have
formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by
the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of
culture. They reported on, or rather
"chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. It would seem, moreover, that the cleverer
among the writers of them poked fun at their own work. Ziegenhalss, at any
rate, contends that many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only
be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. Quite possibly these manufactured articles do
indeed contain a quantity of irony and self-mockery which cannot be understood
until the key is found again. The
producers of these trivia were in some cases attached to the staffs of the
newspapers; in other cases they were free-lance scriveners. Frequently they enjoyed the high-sounding
title of "writer", but a great many of them seem to have belonged to
the scholar class. Quite a few were
celebrated university professors.
Among the favourite subjects of such
essays were anecdotes taken from the lives or correspondence of famous men and
women. They bore such titles as
"Friedrich Nietzsche and Women's Fashions of 1870", or "The Composer
Rossini's Favourite Dishes", or "The Role of the Lapdog in the Lives
of Great Courtesans", and so on.
Another popular type of article was the historical background piece on
what was currently being talked about among the well-to-do, such as "The Dream
of Creating Gold Through the Centuries", or
"Psycho-chemical Experiments in Influencing the Weather", and
hundreds of similar subjects. When we
look at the titles that Ziegenhalss cites, we feel
surprise that there should have been people who devoured such chitchat for
their daily reading; but what astonishes us far more is that authors of repute
and of decent education should have helped to "service" this gigantic
consumption of empty whimsies. Significantly,
"service" was the expression used; it was also the word denoting the
relationship of man to the machine at that time.
In some periods interviews with
well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Zigenhalss devotes
a separate chapter to these. Noted
chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or
popular actors, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and even
drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial
crises, and so on. All that mattered in
these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical
interest. The reader may consult Ziegenhalss for some truly startling examples; he gives
hundreds.
As we have said, no doubt a goodly dash
of irony was mixed in with all this busy productivity; it may even have been a
demonic irony, the irony of desperation - it is very hard indeed for us to put
ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand
them. But the great majority, who seem
to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque
things with credulous earnestness. If a
famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction,
if an old palace burned down, if the bearer of an aristocratic name was
involved in a scandal, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at
once learned the facts. What is more, on
that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose
of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword
of the moment. A torrent of zealous
scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality,
assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods
rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been
certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role
in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. A long disquisition by Ziegenhalss
on the curious subject of "Crossword Puzzles" describes the
phenomenon. Thousands upon thousands of
persons, the majority of whom did heavy work and led a hard life, spent their
leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet,
filling in the gaps according to certain rules.
But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this,
and let us abstain from ridiculing it.
For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural
feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phæacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political,
economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars
and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming,
meaningless childishness. These games
sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems
and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as
possible. They assiduously learned to
drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in
crossword puzzles - for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without
defences, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could
obtain no useful advice from Reason. These
people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take
the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread
of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no
belief in a tomorrow.
For there was also a good deal of
lecturing, and we must briefly discuss this somewhat more dignified variant of
the feature article. Both specialists
and intellectual privateers supplied the middle-class citizens of the age (who
were still deeply attached to the notion of culture, although it had long since
been robbed of its former meaning) with large numbers of lectures. Such talks were not only in the nature of
festival orations for special occasions; there was a frantic trade in them, and
they were given in almost incomprehensible quantities. In those days the citizen of a medium-sized
town or his wife could at least once a week (in big cities pretty much every
night) attend lectures offering theoretical instruction on some subject or
other: on works of art, poets, scholars, researchers, world tours. The members of the audience
at these lectures remained purely passive, and although some relationship
between audience and content, some previous knowledge, preparation, and
receptivity were tacitly assumed in most cases nothing of the sort was
present. There were entertaining,
impassioned, or witty lectures on Goethe, say, in which he would be depicted
descending from a post chaise wearing a blue frock-coat to seduce some Strassbourg or Wetzlar girl; or
on Arabic culture; in all of them a number of fashionable phrases were shaken
up like dice in a cup and everyone was delighted if he dimly recognized one or
two catchwords. People heard lectures on
writers whose works they had never read and never meant to, sometimes
accompanied by pictures projected on a screen.
At these lectures, as in the feature articles in the newspapers, they
struggled through a deluge of isolated cultural facts and fragments of
knowledge robbed of all meaning. To put
it briefly, they were already on the verge of that dreadful devaluation of the
Word which produced, at first in secret and in the narrowest circles, that
ascetically heroic countermovement which soon afterwards began to flow visibly
and powerfully, and ushered in the new self-discipline and dignity of the human
intellect.
It must be granted that many aspects of
the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant
uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the
end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly
confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military
crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue
and dignity and even of its own existence.
Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom,
was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements, including the
beginnings of a science of music of which we are the grateful heirs.
But although it is easy to fit any given
segment of the past neatly and intelligibly into the patterns of world history,
contemporaries are never able to see their own place in the patterns. Consequently, even as intellectual ambitions
and achievements declined rapidly during that period, intellectuals in
particular were stricken by terrible doubts and a sense of despair. They had just fully realized (a discovery
that had been in the air, here and there, from the time of Nietzsche on) that
the youth and the creative period of our culture was
over, that old age and twilight had set in.
Suddenly everyone felt this and many bluntly expressed this view; it was
used to explain many of the alarming signs of the time: the dreary
mechanization of life, the profound debasement of morality, the decline of
faith among nations, the inauthenticity
of art. The "music of decline"
had sounded, as in that wonderful Chinese fable; like a thrumming base on the
organ its reverberations faded slowly out over decades; its throbbing could be
heard in the corruption of the schools, periodicals, and universities, in
melancholia and insanity among those artists and critics who could still be
taken seriously; it raged as untrammelled and amateurish overproduction in all
the arts. Various attitudes could be
taken towards this enemy who had breached the walls and could no longer be
exorcised. Some of the best tacitly
acknowledged and stoically endured the bitter truth. Some attempted to deny its existence, and
thanks to the shoddy thinking of some of the literary prophets of cultural
doom, found a good many weak points in their thesis. Moreover, those who took exception to the
aforementioned prophets could be sure of a hearing and influence among the
bourgeoisie. For the allegation that the
culture he had only yesterday been proud to possess was no longer alive, that
the education and art he revered could no longer be regarded as genuine
education and genuine art, seemed to the bourgeois as brazen and intolerable as
the sudden inflations of currency and the revolutions which threatened his
accumulated capital.
Another possible immunization against
the general mood of doom was cynicism.
People went dancing and dismissed all anxiety about the future as
old-fashioned folly; people composed heady articles about the approaching end
of art, science, and language. In that
feuilleton world they had constructed of paper, people postulated the total
capitulation of Mind, the bankruptcy of ideas, and pretended to be looking on
with cynical calm or bacchantic rapture as not only art, culture, morality, and
honesty, but also
Yet during the decades of transition
this culture had not slumbered. Rather,
during the very period of its decay and seeming capitulation by the artists,
professors, and feature writers, it entered into a phase of intense alertness
and self-examination. The medium of
this change lay in the consciences of a few individuals. Even during the heyday of the feuilleton
there were everywhere individuals and small groups who had resolved to remain
faithful to true culture and to devote all their energies to preserving for the
future a core of good tradition, discipline, method, and intellectual
rigour. We are today ignorant of many
details, but in general the process of self-examination, reflection, and
conscious resistance to decline seems to have centred mostly in two groups. The cultural conscience of scholars found
refuge in the investigations and didactic methods of the history of music, for
this discipline was just reaching its height at that time, and even in the
midst of the feuilleton world two famous seminaries fostered an exemplary
methodology, characterized by care and thoroughness. Moreover, as if destiny wished to smile
comfortingly upon this tiny, brave cohort, at this saddest of times there took
place that glorious miracle which was in itself pure chance, but which gave the
effect of a divine corroboration: the rediscovery of eleven manuscripts by
Johann Sebastian Bach, which had been in the keeping of his son Friedemann.
A second focus of resistance to
degeneration was the League of Journeyers to the East. The brethren of that League cultivated a
spiritual rather than an intellectual discipline. They fostered piety and reverence, and to
them we owe our important elements in our present form of cultural life and of
the Glass Bead Game, in particular the contemplative elements. The Journeyers also contributed to new
insights into the nature of our culture and the possibilities of its
continuance, not so much by analytical and scholarly work as by their capacity,
based on ancient secret exercises, for mystic identification with remote ages
and cultural conditions. Among them, for
example, were itinerant instrumentalists and minstrels who were said to have
the ability to perform the music of earlier epochs with perfect ancient
purity. Thus they could play and sing a
piece of music from 1600 or 1650 exactly as if all the subsequent modes,
refinements, and virtuoso achievements were still unknown. This was an astonishing feat in a period in
which the mania for dynamics and gradazione
dominated all music-making, when the music itself was almost forgotten in
discussion of the conductor's execution and "conception". When an orchestra of the Journeyers first
publicly performed a suite from the time before Handel completely without crescendi and diminuendi,
with the naiveté and chasteness of another age and world, some among the
audience are said to have been totally uncomprehending, but others listened
with fresh attention and had the impression that they were hearing music for
the first time in their lives. In the
League's concert hall between Bremgarten and Morbio, one member built a Bach organ as perfectly as
Johann Sebastian Bach would have had it built had he had the means and
opportunity. Obeying a principle even
then current in the League, the organ builder concealed his name, calling
himself Silbermann after his eighteenth-century
predecessor.
In discussing these matters we have
approached the sources from which our modern concept of culture sprang. One of the chief of these was the most recent
of the scholarly disciplines, the history of music and the aesthetics of
music. Another was the great advance in
mathematics that soon followed. To these
was added a sprinkling of the wisdom of the Journeyers to the East and, closely
related to the new conception and interpretation of music, that courageous new
attitude, compounded of serenity and resignation, towards the ageing of
cultures. It would be pointless to say
much about these matters here, since they are familiar to everyone. The most important consequence of this new
attitude, or rather this new subordination to the cultural process, was that
men largely ceased to produce works of art.
Moreover, intellectuals gradually withdrew from the bustle of the
world. Finally, and no less important -
indeed, the climax of the whole development - there arose the Glass Bead Game.
The growing profundity of musical
science, which can already be observed soon after 1900 when feuilletonism
was still at its height, naturally exerted enormous influence upon the
beginnings of the Game. We, the heirs of
musicology, believe we know more about the music of the great creative
centuries, especially the seventeenth and eighteenth, and in a certain sense
even understand it better than all previous epochs, including that of classical
music itself. As descendants, of course,
our relation to classical music differs totally from that of our predecessors
in the creative ages. Our
intellectualized veneration for true music, all too frequently tainted by
melancholic resignation, is a far cry from the charming, simple-hearted delight
in music-making of those days. We tend
to envy those happier times whenever our pleasure in their music makes us
forget the conditions and tribulations amid which it was begotten. Almost the entire twentieth century
considered philosophy, or else literature, to be the great lasting achievement
of that cultural era which lies between the end of the Middle
Ages and modern times. We, however, have
for generations given the palm to mathematics and music. Ever since we have renounced - on the whole,
at any rate - trying to vie creatively with those generations, ever since we
have also forsworn the worship of harmony in music-making, and of that purely
sensuous cult of dynamics - a cult that dominated musical practices for a good
two centuries after the time of Beethoven and early Romanticism - ever since
then we have been able to understand, more purely and more correctly, the
general image of that culture whose heirs we are. Or so we believe in our uncreative, retrospective,
but reverent fashion! We no longer have
any of the exuberant fecundity of those days.
For us it is almost incomprehensible that musical style in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries could be preserved for so long a time in unalloyed
purity. How could it be, we ask, that
among the vast quantities of music written at that time we fail to find a trace
of anything bad? How could the
eighteenth century, the time of incipient degeneration, still send hurtling
into the skies a fireworks display of styles, fashions, and schools, blazing
briefly but with such self-assurance?
Nevertheless, we believe that we have uncovered the secret of what we
now call classical music, that we have understood the spirit, the virtue, and
the piety of those generations, and have taken all that as our model. Nowadays, for example, we do not think much
of the theology and the ecclesiastical culture of the eighteenth century, or
the philosophy of the Enlightenment; but we consider the cantatas, passions,
and preludes of Bach the ultimate quintessence of Christian culture.
Incidentally, there exists an ancient
and honourable exemplar for the attitude of our own culture towards music, a
model to which the players of the Glass Bead Game look back with great
veneration. We recall that in the
legendary
"The origins of music lie far back
in the past. Music arises from Measure
and is rooted in the great Oneness. The
great Oneness begets the two poles; the two poles beget the power of Darkness
and of Light.
"When the world is at peace, when
all things are tranquil and all men obey their superiors in all their courses,
then music can be perfected. When
desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and
righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore one can speak about music only with
a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.
"Music is founded on the harmony
between heaven and earth, on the concord of obscurity and brightness.
"Decaying states and men ripe for
doom do not, of course, lack music either, but their music is not serene. Therefore, the more tempestuous the music,
the more doleful are the people, the more imperilled the country, the more the
sovereign declines. In this way the
essence of music is lost.
"What all sacred sovereigns have
loved in music was its serenity. The
tyrants Giae and Jou Sin
made tempestuous music. They thought
loud sounds beautiful and massed effects interesting. They strove for new and rare tonal effects,
for notes which no ear had ever heard hitherto.
They sought to surpass each other, and overstepped all bounds.
"The cause of the degeneration of
the
"Therefore the music of a
well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and
fierce, and its government is perverted.
The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government
is imperilled."
The words of this Chinese writer point
fairly distinctly to the origins and to the real although almost forgotten
meaning of all music. For in prehistoric
times music, like the dance and every other artistic endeavour, was a branch of
magic, one of the old and legitimate instruments of wonder-working. Beginning with rhythm (clapping of hands,
tramping, beating of sticks and primitive drums), it was a powerful,
tried-and-true device for putting large numbers of people "in tune"
with one another, engendering the same mood, co-ordinating the pace of their
breathing and heartbeats, encouraging them to invoke and conjure up the eternal
powers, to dance, to compete, to make war, to worship. And music has retained this original, pure,
primordially-powerful character, its magic, far longer than the other arts. We need only recall the many testimonies of
historians and poets to the power of music, from the Greeks to Goethe in his Novelle.
In practice, marches and the dance have never lost their importance....
But let us return to our subject.
We shall now give a brief summary of the
beginnings of the Glass Bead Game. It
appears to have arisen simultaneously in
The Game was at first nothing more than
a witty method for developing memory and ingenuity among students and
musicians. And as we have said, it was
played both in
The inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, a rather
eccentric but clever, sociable, and humane musicologist, used glass beads
instead of letters, numerals, notes, or other graphic symbols. Perrot, who
incidentally has also bequeathed to us a treatise on the Apogee and Decline
of Counterpoint, found that the pupils at the Cologne Seminary had a rather
elaborate game they used to play. One
would call out, in the standardized abbreviations of their science, motifs or
initial bars of classical compositions, whereupon the other had to respond with
the continuation of the piece, or better still with a higher or lower voice, a
contrasting theme, and so forth. It was
an exercise in memory and improvisation quite similar to the sort of thing
probably in vogue among ardent pupils of counterpoint in the days of Schütz, Pachelbel, and Bach -
although it would then not have been done in theoretical formulas, but in
practice on the cembalo, lute, or flute, or with the voice.
Bastian Perrot
in all probability was a member of the Journeyers to the East. He was partial to handicrafts and had himself built several pianos and clavichords in the ancient
style. Legend has it that he was adept
at playing the violin in the old way, forgotten since 1800, with a
high-arched bow and hand-regulated tension of the bow hairs. Given these interests, it was perhaps only
natural that he should have constructed a frame, modelled on a child's abacus,
a frame with several dozen wires on which could be strung glass beads of
various sizes, shapes, and colours. The
wires corresponded to the lines of the musical staff, the beads to the
time-values of the notes, and so on. In
this way he could represent with beads musical quotations or invented themes,
could alter, transpose, and develop them, change them and set them in
counterpoint to one another. In
technical terms this was a mere plaything, but the pupils liked it; it was
imitated and became fashionable in
A bare two or three
decades later the Game seems to have lost some of its popularity among
students of music, but instead was taken over by mathematicians. For a long while, indeed, a characteristic
feature in the Game's history was that it was constantly preferred, used, and
further elaborated by whatever branch of learning happened to be experiencing a
period of high development or a renaissance.
The mathematicians brought the Game to a high degree of flexibility and
capacity for sublimation, so that it began to acquire something approaching a
consciousness of itself and its possibilities.
This process paralleled the general evolution of cultural consciousness,
which had survived the great crisis and had, as Plinius
Ziegenhalss puts it, "with modest pride accepted
the fate of belonging to a culture past its prime, as was the case with the
culture of late antiquity: Hellenistic culture in the Alexandrian age."
So much for Ziegenhalss.
We shall now attempt to sketch the further steps in the history of the
Glass Bead Game. Having passed from the
musical to the mathematical seminaries (a change which took place in France and
England somewhat sooner than in Germany), the Game was so far developed that it
was capable of expressing mathematical processes by special symbols and
abbreviations. The players, mutually
elaborating these processes, threw these abstract formulas at one another,
displaying the sequences and possibilities of their science. This mathematical and astronomical game of
formulas required great attentiveness, keenness, and concentration. Among mathematicians, even in those days, the
reputation of being a good Glass Bead Game player meant a great deal; it was
equivalent to being a very good mathematician.
At various times the Game was taken up
and imitated by nearly all the scientific and scholarly disciplines, that is, adapted
to the special fields. There is
documented evidence for its application to the fields of classical philology
and logic. The analytical study of
musical values had led to the reduction of musical events to physical and
mathematical formulas. Soon afterwards
philology borrowed this method and began to measure linguistic configurations
as physics measures processes in nature.
The visual arts soon followed suit, architecture having already led the
way in establishing the links between visual art and mathematics. Thereafter more and more new relations,
analogies, and correspondences were discovered among the abstract formulas
obtained in this way. Each discipline
which seized upon the Game created its own language of formulas, abbreviations,
and possible combinations. Everywhere,
the elite intellectual youth developed a passion for these Games, with their
dialogues and progressions of formulas.
The Game was not mere practice and mere recreation; it became a form of
concentrated self-awareness for intellectuals.
Mathematicians in particular played it with a virtuosity and formal
strictness at once athletic and ascetic.
It afforded them a pleasure which somewhat compensated for their
renunciation of worldly pleasures and ambitions. For by then such renunciation had already
become a regular thing for intellectuals.
The Glass Bead Game contributed largely to the complete defeat of feuilletonism and to that newly awakened delight in strict
mental exercises to which we owe the origin of a new, monastically austere
intellectual discipline.
The world had changed. The life of the mind in the age of the
Feuilleton might be compared to a degenerate plant which was squandering its
strength in excessive vegetative growth, and the subsequent corrections to pruning
the plant back to the roots. The young
people who now proposed to devote themselves to intellectual studies no longer
took the term to mean attending a university and taking a nibble of this or
that from the dainties offered by celebrated and loquacious professors who
without authority offered them the crumbs of what had once been higher
education. Now they had to study just as
stringently and methodically as the engineers and technicians of the past, if
not more so. They had a steep path to
climb, had to purify and strengthen their minds by dint of mathematics and
scholastic exercises in Aristotelian philosophy. Moreover, they had to learn to renounce all
those benefits which previous generations of scholars had considered worth
striving for: rapid and easy money-making, celebrity and public honours, the
homage of the newspapers, marriages with daughters of bankers and
industrialists, a pampered and luxurious style of life. The writers with heavy sales, Nobel Prizes,
and lovely country houses, the celebrated physicians with decorations and
liveried servants, the professors with wealthy wives and brilliant salons, the
chemists with posts on boards of directors, the philosophers with feuilleton
factories who delivered charming lectures in overcrowded halls, for which they
were rewarded with thunderous applause and floral tributes - all such public
figures disappeared and have not come back to this day. Even so, no doubt, there were still plenty of
talented young people for whom such personages were envied models. But the paths to honours, riches, fame, and
luxury now no longer led through lecture halls, academies, and doctoral
theses. The deeply debased intellectual
professions were bankrupt in the world's eyes.
But in compensation they had regained a fanatical and
penitential devotion to art and thought.
Those talented persons whose desires tended more towards glory or
comfortable living had to turn their backs on the intellectual life, which had
become so austere, and seek out occupations which still provided opportunities
for comfort and money-making.
It would lead us too far afield to attempt to describe in detail how the world of
Mind, after its purification, won a place for itself in the State. Experience soon showed that a few generations
of lax and unscrupulous intellectual discipline had also sufficed to inflict
serious harm on practical life.
Competence and responsibility had grown increasingly rare in all the
higher professions, including even those concerned with technology. To remedy this, supervision of the things of
the mind among the people and in government came to be consigned more and more
to the "intellectuals" in the best sense of the word. This was particularly the case with the
entire educational system; and indeed the situation is little changed to this
day. In almost all the countries of
To return now to the Glass Bead Game:
what it lacked in those days was the capacity for universality, for rising above all the disciplines. The astronomers, the classicists, the
scholastics, the music students all played their Games according to their
ingenious rules, but the Game had a special language and set of rules for every
discipline and subdiscipline. It required half a century before the first
step was taken towards spanning these gulfs.
The reason for this slowness was undoubtedly more moral than formal and
technical. The means for building the
spans could even then have been found, but along with the newly regenerated
intellectual life went a puritanical shrinking from "foolish digressions",
from intermingling of disciplines and categories. There was also a profound and justified fear
of relapse into the sin of superficiality and feuilletonism.
It was the achievement of one individual
which brought the Glass Bead Game almost in one leap to an awareness of its
potentialities, and thus to the verge of its capacity for universal
elaboration. And once again this advance
was connected with music. A Swiss
musicologist with a passion for mathematics gave a new twist to the Game, and
thereby opened the way for its supreme development. This great man's name in civil life can no
longer be ascertained; by his time the cult of personality in intellectual
fields had already been dispensed with.
He lives on in history as Lusor (or also, Joculator) Basiliensis. Although his invention, like all inventions,
was the product of his own personal merit and grace, it in no way sprang solely
from personal needs and ambitions, but was impelled by a more powerful
motive. There was a passionate craving
among all the intellectuals of his age for a means to express their new
concepts. They longed for philosophy,
for synthesis. The erstwhile happiness
of pure withdrawal each into his own discipline was now felt to be inadequate. Here and there a scholar broke through the
barriers of his speciality and tried to advance into the terrain of
universality. Some dreamed of a new
alphabet, a new language of symbols through which they could formulate and
exchange their new intellectual experiences.
Testimony to the strength of this
impulse may be found in the essay "Chinese Warning Cry", by a
Parisian scholar of those years. The
author, mocked by many his day as a sort of Don Quixote (incidentally, he was a
distinguished scholar in the field of Chinese philology), pointed out the
dangers facing culture, in spite of its present honourable condition, if it
neglected to develop an international language of symbols. Such a language, like the ancient Chinese
script, should be able to express the most complex matters graphically, without
excluding individual imagination and inventiveness, in such a way as to be
understandable to all the scholars of the world. It was at this point that Joculator
Basiliensis applied himself to the problem. He invented for the Glass Bead Game the
principles of a new language, a language of symbols and formulas, in which
mathematics and music played an equal part, so that it became possible to
combine astronomical and musical formulas, to reduce mathematics and music to a
common denominator, as it were. Although
what he did was by no means conclusive, this unknown man from
The Glass Bead Game, formerly the
specialized entertainment of mathematicians in one era, philologists or
musicians in another era, now more and more cast its spell upon all true
intellectuals. Many an old university,
many a lodge, and especially the age-old League of Journeyers to the East,
turned to it. Some of the Catholic
Orders likewise scented a new intellectual atmosphere and yielded to its
lure. At some Benedictine abbeys the
monks devoted themselves to the Game so intensely that even in those early days
the question was hotly debated - it was subsequently to crop up again now and then
- whether this Game ought to be tolerated, supported, or forbidden by Church
and Curia.
After Joculator
Basiliensis' grand accomplishment, the Game rapidly
evolved into what it is today: the quintessence of intellectuality and art, the
sublime cult, the unio mystica
of all separate members of the Universitas
Litterarum.
In our lives it has partially taken over the role of art, partially that
of speculative philosophy. Indeed, in
the days of Plinius Ziegenhalss,
for instance, it was often called by a different name, one common in the literature
of the Feuilletonistic Age. That name, which for many a prophetic spirit
in those days embodied a visionary ideal, was: Magic Theatre.
For all that the Glass Bead Game had
grown infinitely in technique and range since its beginnings, for all the intellectual
demands it made upon its players, and for all that it had become a sublime art
and science, in the days of Joculator Basiliensis it still was lacking in an essential
element. Up to that time every game had
been a serial arrangement, an ordering, grouping, and confronting of
concentrated concepts from many fields of thought and aesthetics, a rapid
recollection of eternal values and forms, a brief, virtuoso flight through the
realms of the mind. Only after some time
did there enter into the Game, from the intellectual stock of the educational
system and especially from the habits and customs of the Journeyers to the
East, the idea of contemplation.
This new element arose out of an
observed evil. Mnemonists,
people with freakish memories and no other virtues, were capable of playing
dazzling games, dismaying and confusing the other participants by their rapid
muster of countless ideas. In the course
of time such displays of virtuosity fell more and more under a strict ban, and
contemplation became a highly important component of the Game. Ultimately, for the audiences at each Game it
became the main thing. This was the
necessary turning towards the religious spirit.
What had formerly mattered was following the sequences of ideas and the
whole intellectual mosaic of a Game with rapid attentiveness, practised memory,
and full understanding. But there now arose the demand for a deeper and more spiritual
approach. After each symbol conjured up
by the director of a Game, each player was required to perform silent, formal
meditation on the content, origin, and meaning of this symbol, to call to mind
intensively and organically its full purport.
The members of the Order and of the Game associations brought the technique
and practice of contemplation with them from their elite schools, where the art
of contemplation and meditation was nurtured with the greatest care. In this way the hieroglyphs of the Game were
kept from degenerating into mere empty signs.
Hitherto, by the way, the Glass Bead
Game, in spite of its popularity among scholars, had remained a purely private
form of exercise. It could be played
alone, by pairs, or by many, although unusually brilliant, well-composed, and
successful Games were sometimes written down and circulated from city to city
and country to country for admiration or criticism. Now, however, the Game slowly began to be
enriched by a new function, for it became a public ceremonial. To this day everyone is free to play the Game
privately, and young people are especially fond of doing so. But nowadays virtually everyone associates
the Glass Bead Game with ceremonial public Games. They take place under the leadership of a few
superior Masters who are directly subordinate to the Ludi
Magister, or Master of the Game, of their country,
with invited guests listening raptly, and a wider audience all over the world
following with closest attention. Some
of these Games last for days and weeks, and while such a Game is being
celebrated all the players and guests - obeying precepts which even govern the
length of time they are allowed to sleep - live an ascetic and selfless life of
absolute absorption, comparable to the strictly regulated penitence required of
the participants in one of St. Ignatius Loyola's exercises.
There is scarcely any more we need
add. Under the shifting hegemony of now
this, now that science or art, the Game of games had developed into a kind of
universal language through which the players could express values and set these
in relation to one another. Throughout
its history the Game was closely allied with music, and usually proceeding
according to musical or mathematical rules.
One theme, two themes, or three themes were stated, elaborated, varied,
and underwent a development quite similar to that of the theme in a Bach fugue
or a concerto movement. A Game, for
example, might start from a given astronomical configuration, or from the
actual theme of a Bach fugue, or from a sentence out of Leibniz or the
Upanishads, and from this theme, depending on the intentions and talents of the
player, it could either further explore and elaborate the initial motif or else
enrich its expressiveness by allusions to kindred concepts. Beginners learned how to establish parallels,
by means of the Game's symbols, between a piece of classical music and the
formula for some law of nature. Experts
and Masters of the Game freely wove the initial theme into unlimited
combinations. For a long time one school
of players favoured the technique of sitting side by side, developing in
counterpoint, and finally harmoniously combining two hostile themes or ideas,
such as law and freedom, individual and community. In such a Game the goal was to develop both themes or theses with complete equality and
impartiality, to evolve out of thesis and antithesis the purest possible
synthesis. In general, aside from
certain brilliant exceptions, Games with discordant, negative, or sceptical
conclusions were unpopular and at times actually forbidden. This followed directly from the meaning the Game
had acquired at its height for the players.
It represented an elite, symbolic form of seeking for perfection, a
sublime alchemy, an approach to that Mind which beyond all images and
multiplicities is one within itself - in other words, to God. Pious thinkers of earlier times had
represented the life of creatures, say, as a mode of motion towards God, and
had considered that the variety of the phenomenal world reached perfection and
ultimate cognition only in the divine Unity.
Similarly, the symbols and formulas of the Glass Bead Game combined
structurally, musically, and philosophically within the framework of a
universal language, were nourished by all the sciences and arts, and strove in
play to achieve perfection, pure being, the fullness of reality. Thus "realizing" was a favourite
expression among the players. They
considered their Games a path from Becoming to Being,
from potentiality to reality. We would
like to remind the reader once again of the sentences quoted above from
Nicholas of Cusa.
Incidentally, the terminology of
Christian theology, or at any rate that part of it which seemed to have become
a part of the general cultural heritage, was naturally absorbed into the
symbolic language of the Game. Thus one
of the principles of the Creed, a passage from the Bible, a phrase from one of
the Church Fathers, or from the Latin text of the Mass could be expressed and
taken into the Game just as easily and aptly as an axiom of geometry or a
melody of Mozart. We would scarcely be
exaggerating if we ventured to say that for the small circle of genuine Glass
Bead Game players the Game was virtually equivalent to worship, although it
deliberately eschewed developing any theology of its own.
In struggling for their continued
existence in the midst of soulless world powers, both the Glass Bead Game
players and the Roman Church had become too dependent upon each other for
either to permit a decisive confrontation between them, although that danger
was always present, since the intellectual honesty and the authentic impulse to
reach incisive, unequivocal formulations drove the partisans of both towards a
parting of the ways. That parting,
however, never took place.
The Game had been played freely by
individuals and cliques, and for a long time amiably promoted by the ministries
of education, before it acquired the status of a public institution. It was first organized as such in
In general, a passing grade in the final
examination in one of the academies, especially one of the elite schools, is
considered sufficient qualification for a Glass Bead Game player; but in the
past and to this day superior competence in one of the principal fields of
scholarship or in music is tacitly assumed.
To rise some day to membership in one of the Games Commissions, or even
to Ludi Magister, is the
dream of almost every fifteen-year-old in the elite schools. But by the times these youths have become
doctoral candidates, only a tiny percentage still seriously cling to their
ambition to serve the Glass Bead Game and take an active part in its further
development. On the other hand, all
these lovers of the Game diligently study the lore of the Game and practise
meditation. At the "great"
Games they form that innermost ring of reverent and devoted participants which
gives the public matches their ceremonial character and keeps them from
devolving into mere aesthetic displays.
To these real players and devotees, the Ludi Magister is a prince or high priest, almost a deity.
But for every independent player, and
especially for the Magister, the Glass Bead Game is
primarily a form of music-making, somewhat in the sense of those words that
Joseph Knecht once spoke concerning the nature of
classical music:
"We consider classical music to be
the epitome and quintessence of our culture, because it is that culture's
clearest, most significant gesture and expression. In this music we possess the heritage of
classical antiquity and Christianity, a spirit of serenely cheerful and brave
piety, a superbly chivalric morality.
For in the final analysis every important cultural gesture comes down to
a morality, a model for human behaviour concentrated into a gesture. As we know, between 1500 and 1800 a wide
variety of music was made; styles and means of expression were extremely
variegated; but the spirit, or rather the morality, was everywhere the
same. The human attitude of which
classical music is the expression is always the same; it is always based on the
same kind of insight into life and strives for the same kind of victory over
blind chance. Classical music as gesture
signifies knowledge of the tragedy of the human condition, affirmation of human
destiny, courage, cheerful serenity. The
grace of a minuet by Handel or Couperin, the
sensuality sublimated into delicate gesture to be found in many Italian
composers or in Mozart, the tranquil, composed readiness for death in Bach -
always there may be heard in these works a defiance, a death-defying
intrepidity, a gallantry, and a note of superhuman laughter, of immortal gay
serenity. Let that same note also sound
in our Glass Bead Games, and in our whole lives, acts, and sufferings."
These words were noted down by one of Knecht's pupils.
With them we bring to an end our consideration of the Glass Bead Game.