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On the Study of Esotericism

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Will-Erich Peuckert and the Light of Nature

Wouter J. Hanegraaff
I have seen what few others have seen; I have seen Faust and
Luther and Weigel and Paracelsus and J. Boehme, the great movers
of the German spirit; I have sat with astrologers, and have listened to
alchemists for hours; I have been allowed to intuit magic as truth.

Will-Erich Peuckert
Introduction: Collecting the Mushrooms of History
This article is devoted to a scholar who has fascinated me since
my student years. To explain the reasons for this, and my assessment
of his importance to the study of Western esotericism, I will begin on
an autobiographical note. By doing so, I hope to make several points
about the relation between personal and academic motivations in this
field of research, and about the central topic of the present volume:
the relation between esotericism and nature.
In 1987, I was studying cultural history at the University of
Utrecht, the Netherlands, and did not yet have any clear idea about
the direction (if any) in which I was going or wanted to go. I was
enjoying the blissful luxury of shopping around as a student,
taking any courses that seemed interesting, and reading whatever
caught my fancy, hoping that I would eventually discover some
kind of connecting thread in the strange and idiosyncratic collection
of things that (for reasons that were far from clear to myself) I
happened to find attractive and exciting. Having recently earned
my conservatory diploma in classical guitar, I was very interested
not only in music, but in art and literature as well. My tastes in
that regard were, and still are, rather strongly oriented towards
nineteenth- and twentieth-century German culture. As the son of a
Protestant minister, I also had a latent interest in religion, but little
sympathy for ecclesiastical institutions or theological doctrine; and
hence I could hardly overlook the fact that so many artists, poets,
writers, composers and musicians looked at the world in ways that
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seemed somehow religious and yet had little in common with

the official confessions or doctrinal systems known to me from my
upbringing. What kind of religion was this? I had recently discovered
the existence of something called gnosis, and had begun to suspect
that this might be of some help in trying to understand the sources
of inspiration of poets such as Rainer Maria Rilke, writers such as
Thomas Mann, or composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton
von Webern.
Of course, it is not hard to see how these early questions and
interests would eventually lead me towards the study of Western
esotericism; but in view of this volumes central theme, Nature, I
have to mention one more autobiographical factor of a quite different
kind. Since age 11, I had developed a fascination for the study of
mushrooms, and as a kid I had spent most of my weekends on outdoor
excursions organized by the Dutch Mycological Association. Over
the years I had built up a collection of over 800 dried specimens
(with detailed descriptions, pencil drawings, and microscopic
observations) and had become quite a competent amateur mycologist.
In fact, I believe that my approach to theoretical questions such as
the definition and demarcation of Western esotericism still owes
something to my youthful exposure to mycological taxonomy.
In any case, there we have it: the dual theme of esotericism and
nature. It was with those interests and attractions in my personal
baggage that, in 1987, I came across a book in the library of the
University of Utrecht which carried the mysterious title Pansophie:
Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der weissen und schwarzen Magie
(Pansophy: An Attempt at a History of White and Black Magic).
It was written by a certain Will-Erich Peuckert, and I vividly
remember that while reading through it, I spontaneously identified it
as a Pilzbuch, a mushroom book. Of course that identification was
metaphorical, for Peuckert was writing about the history of ideas
in fifteenth- to seventeenth-century Germany. But to me, his book
breathed an unmistakable mycological atmosphere: the mushrooms
I used to collect during my trips through the forests, and the strange
ideas and personalities that Peuckert had collected during his forays
through the tangled woods of early modern history, simply smelled
the same. The effect of the book had a lot to do with Peuckerts
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inimitable prose (to which I will return), by which he introduced

his readers to a forgotten world that seemed to be suffused with the
same mysterious atmosphere of magic and fairy tales which, to me,
had always given mushrooms their special attraction. Whereas green
plants, trees and flowers flourish in broad daylight for all to see,
mushrooms were half-hidden creatures of twilight, ambiguous and
potentially poisonous plants-that-are-not-really-plants (what were
they, really?), associated by popular tradition with the forbidden
domains of magic and witchcraft. In short, mushrooms might be
defined metaphorically as the occult in biologyand conversely,
one could say that Peuckert now introduced me to what seemed like
the mushrooms of history. Just as mushrooms grow in the autumn
and are thus associated with decay and the decline of the life cycle,
Peuckert described the magic of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries
as the final flowering of a grand worldview in decline, inevitably
doomed to be dissolved by the rise of bourgeois culture. To cut a
long story short: Peuckerts Pansophie worked its magic on me, and
I was hooked for life. It is to him that I owe my decision to specialize
in the study of Western esotericism.
The Magical Professor
So who was Will-Erich Peuckert, and why should we still
pay attention to his work?1 First and foremost, Peuckert is known
as probably the most important twentieth-century pioneer of the
discipline known as Volkskunde, variously referred to in English
as folkloristics or European ethnology. He was born on May
1, 1895 in the Lower Silesian town of Tppendorf as the son of a
postman. In view of his later work, it is important to realize that he
came from a rural farmers family, and traditions of village magic
and ghost stories were a natural part of his childhood. As we will see,
his scholarly work was based upon the premise that early modern
German history must be interpreted in terms of a conflict between the
traditional, medieval, rural farmers culture (die Buerliche Kultur)
and the rise of the new Bourgeois culture of the towns and cities (die
Brgerliche Kultur). Undoubtedly Peuckert himself united those two
cultures within himself and saw his mission as one of preserving the
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traditions of the common people in an era dominated by the victory

of the city and the new merchant class.

Fig. 1. Will-Erich Peuckert. Festschrift fuer Will-Erich Peuckert, edited by

Helmut Doelker (Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1955), Goettingen Peukcert Archive.

Before World War II, Peuckert first worked as a schoolteacher,

then studied German History and Volkskunde at the University of
Breslau, where he also finished his dissertation and habilitation, and
went on to teach at the Pedagogical Academy in Breslau. During
these years he established his scholarly reputation by means of an
incredibly vast output of publications on German and particularly
Silesian folklore, next to a series of novels (of sadly mediocre
quality) and monographs on what we would now refer to as Western
esotericism.2 Normally he would have progressed towards an
academic professorship, but in the wake of a vicious defamation
campaign by a jealous colleague, the Nazis withdrew his venia
legendi (his right to teach) in 1935, and thereby forced him into a
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self-imposed intellectual exile that lasted until the end of the war.
Peuckert withdrew to his vacation home in Haasel, in the Silesian
Bober-Katzbach Mountains, where he transformed the cow-stable
into a library, and spent almost all his time reading and writing.
In this context, it is important to realize that the study of
German folklore was particularly vulnerable to exploitation by
the so-called vlkische ideologies from which National Socialism
had emerged, but Peuckert consistently refused to compromise or
collaborate with the Nazis in any way. For this courageous attitude
he was rewarded after 1945, when he emerged as practically the
only Volkskunde specialist wholly untainted by Nazi sympathies,
and was appointed professor at the University of Gttingen, holding
a chair for Volkskunde that for many years remained the only one in
Germany.
This late academic success notwithstanding, the final decades
of Peuckerts life were very difficult. In January 1945, he and his
wife had to flee because of the advancing Russian troops, leaving
behind his unique library of around 30,000 books, which was never
recovered. In the afterword to one of his most important studies, Die
Grosse Wende, we read this moving account:
This book is a child of pain and misery. . . . The final sentences .
. . were written in the January days of 1945. Next to the writing desk,
prepared for flight into the icy winter, stand the backpacks of two people
who have grown old in these days; and each title of each book that is
quoted means a farewell to that book.3

They did escape with their life, but in 1947, they were involved
in a heavy accident that killed his wife and left Peuckert threequarters blind in his left eye and completely blind in his right, in
addition to severe head injuries. Amazingly, Peuckert somehow
managed not only to keep teaching, but to write books as well.
Disaster kept pursuing him nevertheless, for in 1960 he lost his son,
and in 1963, he suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed
so that he could only type with one finger. Even that did not stop
his scholarly activity: one gets the impression that here was a man
whom one would have to literally kill to prevent him from writing.
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Peuckert kept doing so, until his death in 1969 as the result of a
second, massive stroke.
This short biographical sketch would not be complete without
mentioning that around the time of his retirement, Peuckert became
the object of a media hype that lasted for years, and for which he is
(ironically) still remembered more than for anything else.4 In a lecture
in Bremen in 1959, he had discussed the famous witches ointment,
explaining that it contained hallucinogenic substances that might
help explain many elements of the witches legends.5 As an aside, he
remarked that he had once prepared and tried the ointment himself,
and with success. This little sentence, mentioned in a 45-minute
talk, caused an uproar in the newspapers, which began to publish
sensational stories about the Professor who practiced witchcraft
and claimed to fly through the air under the influence of drugs. In
fact Peuckerts experiment with the witches ointment dated back
to the 1920s when he was still a young man. Peuckert and a friend
had remained in an entranced state for hours, during which they
were flying through the air, participated in big parties or festivals,
and experienced all kinds of erotic adventures. Although he never
seems to have used the ointment again, in response to continued
media requests the aged Peuckert did accept to participate in a TV
documentary, where one can see him in the cellar of his own house,
preparing Della Portas witches ointment in front of the camera.
In spite of his undisputed prominence and scholarly reputation
as a Volkskundler, Peuckert did not make school and left no pupils
who carried on his approach. He and his work were forgotten with
surprising quickness: as formulated by Rolf Christian Zimmermann
in 1973, already two years after his death, the name WillErich Peuckert hit . . . upon an apathetic reserve.6 In spite of a
commemorative volume of articles published at the occasion of his
100th birthday, in 1996, and a recent American Ph.D. dissertation
(the only publication on Peuckert available in English), he is now
little more than a name in the history of the discipline.
Peuckert and Western Esotericism
So what about Western esotericism? Peuckert did not use that
term, but a quick look at his bibliography demonstrates that much
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of his work was devoted to what we now study under that label. Not
only did he publish major monographs on Paracelsus,7 Sebastian
Franck,8 Jacob Boehme,9 Rosicrucianism,10 and astrology;11 but most
importantly, with his Pansophie of 193612 and two sequels (Gabalia13
and Das Rosenkreutz,14 explicitly presented as Pansophie parts II
and III) he presented a unique synthesis of the history of Western
esotericism in the early modern period, which traces the essential
lines of development on the basis of a clear theoretical concept, to
which I will return. In addition to these titles, mention must be made
of his two-volume Die Grosse Wende (The Great Reversal, 1948),15
which he rightly saw as central to his oeuvre, and which provides a
broader historical context for the story told in the Pansophie-trilogy.
Finally, there is a large volume titled Geheim-Kulte (Secret Cults),16
which studies the phenomenon of secret societies from a crosscultural perspective.
The secondary research on Peuckert is scanty, written almost
exclusively from the perspective of folklore studies, and reflects
almost no interest at all in these historical researches. Johanna
Micaela Jacobsens dissertation concentrates on Peuckerts
Volkskunde des Proletariat of 1931 and also includes a chapter on
the witches ointment hype, but does not even mention Peuckerts
Pansophie or any other of his large monographs in what we would
now call Western esotericism. We find the same pattern elsewhere:
only one single article in the memorial volume of 1996 is devoted
to Peuckerts studies of pansophy and paracelsism, but is notable
mostly for its utter ignorance about those fields and its attitude of
puzzled arrogance towards them.17 The only positive exception to
the pattern is a long and highly interesting introduction to Peuckert
published in 1973 by Rolf-Christian Zimmermann, the author of a
major study of eighteenth-century Hermeticism and its influence on
the young Goethe.18 Zimmermann himself, who also edited a major
collective volume in our field in 1979, together with Antoine Faivre,19
would experience a similar apathy, lack of interest and even hostility
among Goethe scholars during the 1970s, and it is only recently that
his pioneering importance is beginning to be recognized.20
As for Peuckert, a first small sign of rehabilitation can be
found in an article published in 1999 by Carlos Gilly, a leading
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contemporary expert in the domains previously studied by Peuckert.

Gillys remarks indicate precisely what one may expect in Peuckerts
work:
With all due understanding for the aversion, on the part of many
scholars, against Peuckerts enthusiastic narration style, the apparent
philological chaos and his frequent rhetorical flights, I still consider him
a master in his field. Thanks to his immense erudition, which included the
most unfamiliar areas of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century literature,
Peuckert had such a secure instinct for what was essential, that even with
incorrect quotations or insufficient argumentation he was still able to draw
conclusions that were quite correct.21

This assessment is fully to the point, and before taking a closer

look at the core perspective of Peuckerts Pansophical trilogy,
something should be said about the aspects to which Gilly alludes.
Peuckerts unique literary style is extremely unusual for
scholarly books. While it seems to have offended many German
academics (most of whom certainly could not themselves boast a
writing talent comparable to Peuckerts), it has proved irresistible
to many other readers, including myself. Pansophie in particular is
carried by an infectious enthusiasm which leaves the reader in no
doubt that Peuckert is utterly in love with his subject and personally
identifies with his protagonists (Paracelsus in particular) to such an
extent that one sometimes has trouble telling them apart. This is true
even in a literal sense, for unquestionably, Peuckerts greatest sin
as a scholar is his strange habit of giving long quotations without
using quotation marks: again and again one believes to be reading
Peuckert himself, only to realize that one has moved without any
warning into lengthy passages cited from sixteenth- or seventeenthcentury authors. The length of these quotations is often extravagant
as well, up to the extreme case of a passage from Trithemius that
runs on for eight pages and a halfin Latin!22 But in Peuckerts
defense, we should realize that much of his materials could only be
found in old editions and manuscripts, which were gathering dust
in the archives of the University of Breslau library,23 but would be
completely unknown and unavailable to his readers: he simply did
not have the luxury of a well-established corpus of modern critical
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editions, but was referring to an incredibly wide range of texts which

had been influential in their own time but had fallen into almost
completely oblivion since. As a result, Peuckert found himself in
the predicament typical of a pioneer: because almost everything in
his Pansophie was unknown and unfamiliar, he could not restrict
himself to creating a context or giving new interpretations, but had
to introduce the very materials themselves as well.
In that respect, one more point must be mentioned, which brings
me back to the parallellism between historiography and biology to
which I already alluded. With brilliant perceptiveness, Zimmermann
has characterized Peuckert as, essentially, eine sammelnde Natur.
He was indeed a collector at heart, who approached his materials
like a botanist: Peuckerts fundamental scientific gesture is that
of presenting a collection.24 Given my own youthful mycological
interests and my instinctive attraction to Peuckerts Pilzbuch, it
did not come as a surprise to learn that Peuckert was actually an
accomplished amateur biologist who knew the name of each and
every plant. As Zimmermann quite rightly points out, his consistent
emphasis on the ad fontes principlehis focus on primary sources
and relative lack of interest in participating or taking position in
academic debatesreflects the attitude of a botanist whose ultimate
goal is to introduce visitors to the fullness of his materials, neatly
ordered by genus and species, and who believes that such a collection
speaks for itself.25
While Zimmermanns characterization of Peuckerts quasibotanical attitude is certainly very perceptive, it seems to me that he
somewhat underestimated Peuckerts analytical side. At first sight,
the Pansophie trilogy might give the impression of a passionately
presented, but rather chaotic and merely descriptive collection of
materials; but in fact, the work is carried by a general concept and
perspective on the field as a whole, which is basic to Peuckerts
entire oeuvre. This makes him much more than a philological
botanist: with his Pansophie trilogy, he developed a comprehensive
perspective which is still inspiring and important today.
It is on this aspect that I will now further concentrate, and I
will do so with primary reference to Peuckerts crucial Pansophie
volume. In earlier publications I have argued that in our field of
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research we have seen several basic paradigms: what I call the Yates
paradigm, based upon Frances Yates concept of the Hermetic
Tradition of the Renaissance, was dominant from the 1960s
through the 1980s and still exerts its influence; another, religionist
paradigm with roots in Eranos (Jung, Eliade, Corbin etcetera) and
Traditionalism existed next to the Yates paradigm, expressed for
example in publications such as Gnosis magazine during the 1980s
and 90s,26 and saw esotericism as the Western inner tradition;
and what I call the Faivre paradigm based upon Antoine Faivres
influential definition of Western esotericism emerged since the early
1990s and is still highly influential in our field.27 If Peuckert had
been more successful, his work could have created an independent
paradigm for our field already prior to Frances Yates.28 Such a
Peuckert paradigm never emerged, due largely to the fact that
post-war Germany, dominated by intellectual perspectives such as
the Frankfurter Schule, was wholly unreceptive (or rather, extremely
suspicious and hostile) towards the irrational past. In addition,
Peuckerts work was simply too German and too strongly focused
on German history to be successful in translation, and thus his oeuvre
found no significant reception either in Germany or elsewhere, and
remains largely forgotten even today. At the same time, the fact that
he was able to write one of the most complete overviews of early
modern esotericism from an almost completely German perspective
tells us something about how important German culture indeed is
for our field. It is no coincidence that the pioneer of the study of
Western esotericism, Antoine Faivre, began as a Germanist as well.
The Pansophical Synthesis
In the Preface to his Pansophie (published at the beginning of
his intellectual exile under the Nazi regime), Peuckert made clear
what the book meant to him, and in doing so gave expression to his
personal credo:
. . . I began this book with secret feelings of joy. . . . I wrote it mostly
for my studentsas the history of our longing. As the history of a way of
thinking that was rightlike every way of thinking was once right. . . .
I have devoted a good part of my energy to the times that I have described
here, and I do not regret it. I have seen what few others have seen; I have

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seen Faust and Luther and Weigel and Paracelsus and J. Boehme, the great
movers of the German spirit; I have sat with astrologers, and have listened
to alchemists for hours; I have been allowed to intuit magic as truth. I was
allowed to grasp what I believed needed to be grasped; the way of research
lay wide open before me, I had no more limitations than Paracelsus had
in his magic. Only one star stood shining above my road, the star which
determined his life: Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest. I have been
allowed to live beautiful years.
I want to be grateful to all the years. For these years, and for this
road. It is the only one that fits us. Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest.29
Still in the same Preface, Peuckert proceeded to outline the
building ground (Baugrund)30 of his work. He writes that, at first
sight, the period covered by his book might seem to have been
investigated into the smallest detail, but actually remains largely
unknown: during the period of the Renaissance, there existed an
entire world of thought which was still very well known to authors
such as Ehregott Daniel Colberg and Gottfried Arnold at the end
of the seventeenth century, but was forgotten by the generations
that came after them.31 Henceforth, historians looked at the early
modern period either from the perspective of Reformation versus
Counter-Reformation, or from that of the Renaissance as a rebirth
of antiquity. Both perspectives, Peuckert observes, are essentially
catastrophe theories:32 they describe how the old breaks down and
vanishes at the arrival of the new. As a result of this narrow focus,
historians overlooked the many ways in which pre-modern thinking
continued right into the early modern world and took on new creative
shapes. Precisely that phenomenon is his topic of research.
From the perspective of Volkskunde, Peuckert continues,
the early modern period is dominated by the conflict between the
traditional, rural world of the farmer, and the newly emerging
bourgeois world, dominated by the city and the new merchant class.
The magical worldview that will be described in Pansophie is rooted
in the former; and Peuckert wants to show how, rather than vanishing
at the arrival of the Renaissance, it continues and keeps growing and
developing under the changed conditions of a new cultural climate:
[earlier scholars perceived] these years, and the searching of Franck

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or Agrippa as merely a final decline. The spasms of a dying world. The

middle ages were dying. But I will show about these middle ages that only
now, stirred by some impulse, it unfolded its most seductive blossom. I
show that from this decay, there emerged an unheard-of world that still
remains wholly unknown to us. And that the spirit lives only here. Not in
the quarreling and to-do of some churches. I show that from these areas
emerges the figure that seems to be the German one par excellence:
Johannes Faust.33

As one sees from this formulation and many others, Peuckert

thinks of history in wholly organic and teleological terms. Historical
periods and cultures are described like living organisms whose
possibilities and destinies are already implicit in their seeds, and
which possess an inner drive towards attaining their full potential.
For example, later on in the book, Peuckert will describe how Agrippa
is only half-consciously groping towards a worldview which only
manages to unfold its full flowering in Paracelsus. The perspective
that is unconsciously trying to be born from all their striving
finally results in the quintessentially German figure of Faust.
In tracing this development, Peuckert begins his story not
in Germany but in fifteenth-century Florence. He discusses basic
developments that are nowadays well known to anyone studying
Western esotericism: how ancient Greek manuscripts were brought
from Byzantium to Italy in order to save them from the Turkish
invaders, who conquered Constantinople in 1453; how the Councils
of Ferrara and Florence brought the Platonist Georgios Gemistos
Plethon to Italy; and how Cosimo de Medici was inspired by his
teachings to create a Platonic Academy:
. . . they had heard of Plato as of a land that is magical. The name
had fascinated the spirits of the young new age, and created the highest
expections. And now, here is somebody who knows him, who knows
everything, and whose agehe is almost ninety years oldglows upon
him like ripening wine.
After having sown his seed, he returned back to Misithra. But what
remained was his idea. What remained was a greater desire, to attain what
was there and yet withdrew from the hands that eagerly sought to grasp
it.34

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Moving on from here to Marsilio Ficino, Peuckert discusses his

relation to Lorenzo Il Magnifico, from whose writings he quotes
several passages that will prove essential to the rest of his book.
In his poem Altercazione, Lorenzo describes how he is wandering
restlessly through the peaceful, pastoral hills of Fiesole, tormented
by feelings of melancholy about the emptiness of life and the
elusiveness of peace and true felicity. He hopes that Nature, the
ancient mother of all creatures, will comfort him; and at meeting
an old shepherd, Alfeo, he envies him for being allowed to live his
life in the wide and pure world of nature that knows no falsity and
deceit. But the shepherd disagrees with this idyllic picture: his life
is hard and unhappy, and nature is not a friend but an enemy he has
to fight day by day. But just when Lorenzo exclaims that if this is
true, then they are both unhappy, and have no choice left but to bear
their fate with stoic courage, from the distance they suddenly hear
the sounds of a lyre. The player comes closer, and turns out to be
Marsilio Ficino, who proceeds to explain to him the road towards
true felicity. According to the platonic philosophy,
our soul possesses two broad and strong wings, which can
bring us better and more permanent possessions than gold, honour
or health. Our sharp intellect allows us to penetrate the secrets of
nature, and lets us pursue that way as long as we modestly recognize
our human weaknesses. But as for the ultimate secrets, which are
higher than angels and angelic spirits: no speculative reason can
attain them, but only deep mystical contemplation. There where our
thinking can come only slowly and with endless effort, our heart,
our mystical faith rises with a single wingbeat.35
This Platonic image of the two wings of the soul remains
the leading theme and connecting thread throughout Peuckerts
Pansophie, but once transposed to the German context, it will get
transformed into two lights, two books, and two ways of knowledge.
Hence in the chapter on Paracelsus, Peuckert quotes from his
Philosophia Sagax: God has given man two lights . . . by which he
can attain knowledge: the light of nature and the light of grace.36 By
means of the former we can read the book of nature, written by God
himself, whereas the latter allows us to understand the true meaning
of Gods other book, Holy Scripture. Basic to Peuckerts description
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of the German magical and pansophical tradition is this concept of

a duality of two complementary ways towards true knowledge. As
formulated by Paracelsus in his Philosophia Sagax:
Two wisdoms exist in this world, one that is eternal and one that is
mortal; the eternal one springs from the light of the Holy Spirit, the other
one from the Light of Nature. As there are two wisdoms, there must also
be two receivers of these wisdoms: the one from the Light of Nature is
received by the earthly man, the one from the divine Light is received
by the one with a calling [der Berufene]: the former is the technician, the
physician, the one who knows [der Wissende], the astronomer, the latter is
the apostle, the theologus. . . . Now the two lights and their knowledge are
not against but with one another. The one corresponds with and permeates
the other: man should live in both lights and neither of them hinders the
other, but they are married like husband and wife. How could there be
hostility between the mortal and the eternal light? For example, the mortal
physician heals the patient, and the apostle heals him too. The apostle is
superior to the natural physician because he is of the new birth. But this
does not mean that the Godhead allows us to reject the Light of Nature.
Still, by the fact that the apostle can bring the dead back to life and the
natural physician cannot, the natural physician sees that his art is only a
footbench against the eternal one.37

This notion of two complementary ways of knowledge is

the Ariadnes thread by which Peuckert seeks his way through
the labyrinth of magical texts in sixteenth- and early seventeenthcentury Germany. Admittedly this thread is sometimes stretched to
the breaking point, if not beyond it, and the author often seems to
lose his way. Reading through Pansophie is like watching a man
who is trying to hew his way with a machete through a dense jungle.
Again and again he is confronted with new, unexpected obstacles
that force him to improvise on the spot, and figure out some way
of dealing with them. Sometimes he is successful, sometimes he
gets lost. No one was more aware than Peuckert that his own path
through the jungle was only provisory:
We are groping our way through a dark forest. Whether the steps that
I am taking now are the right ones, no one can know. But I believe that
choosing some road, even if it proves to be the wrong one, is better than

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waiting until one day the solution may finally dew down from heaven. A
false road entices to better ones. But where no step is taken at all, no right
one will ever be taken either.38

Of course he was right. Since Peuckert was boldly going where

no one had gone before, it would be quite wrong to blame him for
sometimes choosing paths that we now recognize as dead ends,
committing various errors of detail, or occasionally making his
materials subservient to self-imposed structures.
One such weakness was grounded in his tendency, to which
I already referred, of deemphasizing contingency in favor of a
teleological perspective that approaches intellectual traditions as if
they are living organisms. To show the effects of such an approach,
it may be useful to take a closer look at the main lines of his
argumentation in the first part of Pansophie. Whereas the Florentine
Neoplatonists discussed in the first chapter developed previous
magical traditions into a purified natural magic, Peuckerts second
chapter describes how the superstitious magia profana of the middle
ages lived on in Germany, particularly in the work of Johannes
Trithemius:39 as a last son of the middle ages he reaches over into
a time that is pregnant with the new. He has seen it, and has not
understood.40
Cornelius Agrippa, on the other hand, who is central to chapters
three and four, is located by Peuckert in a Grenzland, a liminal space,
between what Frances Yates would later call that old dirty magic
of the Middle Ages and the new magic that is about to be born from
German soil. Peuckert concludes that the new purified magic born
in Ficinos and Picos Florence had been shining brilliantly, but only
for a short while and without carrying further fruits.41 Trithemius
magic was essentially medieval and reactionary, and therefore does
not grow further either.42 Johannes Reuchlin, however, in the wake
of Pico, interprets the two wings of knowledge as standing for
natural magic and kabbalah respectively, and this is taken up by
Agrippa in his three books on Occult Philosophy. Peuckert proceeds
two chapters long to work his way through the dense woods of
Agrippean and pseudo-Agrippean magic, but finally concludes
that Agrippa, too, was like a Moses who perceived the promised
land but could not enter it: The Abbot belongs in the middle ages.
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Agrippa stands on the crossroads of time. He reaches overbeyond

the boundary. He would like to venture beyond the boundarybut
dares to take only the first step.43 Nobody took up Agrippas system
to build it further, and therefore his path turned out to be a dead end
as well,44 at least according to Peuckert.
In trying to explain why this happened, Peuckert makes much
of the difference between the Italian and the German spirit. In
the end, he writes, northern intellectuals like Agrippa treated the
new Platonism very much like one treats a beautifully embroidered,
exotic fabric: they looked at it with admiration, and then carefully
laid it aside.45 Peuckerts choice for this analogy is significant,
for his further discussion shows that he saw this German attitude
towards Italian culture as grounded in the attitude of a healthy,
practical, earthy folk mentality towards the refined aristocratic spirit
of Florence:
Always again, people who have tasted all sensations and have grown
tired of all sensations, the late inheritors of their culture, turn towards the
arcadian. Not because the earth towards which they turn has come alive
in their blood, not because the earth reaches out to them, not because
they intuit that its bosom is the womb of life, but because to the many
sensations which they have already savored, they would like to add yet
another one, that of the primitive. Something like that happened in
Florence. . . . Arcadia [means] a life far away from the evil world. . . .
One does not speak about the unrest of that world. One devotes oneself
to meditation, to peace, to the landscape, not because the heart is drawn
by the monkish life, but because it seems esthetic to strip off, with listless
grace, what other people hold dear.46

Here we see Peuckert interpreting Florentine Platonism as a

kind of decadent fin-de-sicle estheticism, in sharp opposition to the
practical, earthy, life-affirming mentality of the German common
man. The magic from Florence may be beautiful and exquisite, but
it simply does not thrive in German soil. And it is at this crucial
point of his narrative, when all earlier attempts at a revival of magic
seem to have failed, that Peuckert introduces his great savior: there,
unexpected and seemingly inexplicable, it happens that the star that
long stood above the Arno begins to shine in Germany.47 That star,
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of course, is Paracelsus, wholike Faustdares to take on the

wings of an eagle: The Florentines got tired. Agrippa was too
smart and too empty. But hehe has taken flight.48
Having reached this point, Peuckert seems to have come out
of the tangled woods a bit, and now begins to follow the outlines
of Paracelsism as the quintessentially German manifestation
of magic. It would be useless to try and follow the discussion in
detail: what it comes down to, essentially, is that, not on the basis of
erudite humanistic learning but from his direct practical experience
with farmers and the common people, Paracelsus develops a new
understanding of magic grounded in the double light of Nature and
Grace, by means of which the physician learns to use the hidden
powers of creation that connect the human microcosm with the
macrocosm. This is what pansophy is all about. It is only much
further in the book that we encounter yet another crucial point in
Peuckerts narrative. Discussing the Paracelsian alchemist Grard
Dorn, he comes back once more to the image of the two wings,
lights or ways. Ficino, he writes, had chosen the wing of mystical
contemplation while neglecting the other wing; Paracelsus followed
both ways to their very end; but for Dorn, mystical contemplation is
a prerequisite for true knowledge of nature.49
In discussing this development, Peuckert suddenly shows a
moral stance that is absent elsewere in his work: Dorn, he writes,
failed to recognize the snake:50 his sin is that he instrumentalizes
mystical contemplation, thereby suggesting that God can be used
as a means to the end of alchemical knowledge. Peuckert returns to
this point repeatedly: by using mystical contemplation and prayer
instrumentally, as a means of gaining superior knowledge, Dorn fell
into sin, for
it makes no difference whether one gives oneself, ones ego, ones
soul, to the devil or to God, if one does soto know. . . . Not to want God
[himself], but merely to want to find him as an instrument for knowledge:
this is what Gerhard Dorn was the first to teach. In doing so, he created the
sin of Faust.51

Again, we see how the Faust figure functions (next to the image
of the two wings, or lights) as an implicit red thread in Peuckerts
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narrative. He is trying not only to describe the historical emergence

of the Faust archetype in German culture, but now also wishes to
pinpoint the essence of Fausts transgression. It is only here that
we see a shimmer of Peuckerts personal religious beliefs, which
he normally kept out of his books, except for a few passages in the
prefaces or afterwords. Particularly in the very emotional conclusion
to Die Grosse Wende, written next to those backpacks ready for flight
from the Russian troops, Peuckert expresses his personal belief in
God as the causal force behind history, the Unmoved One who moves
to meet humanity in response to its search for light and truth, and who
gives ultimate meaning to what might otherwise seem meaningless:
He needs us like we need him; but together with him we conquer
the night.52 A subtext in Peuckerts work is one of showing that,
far from being something unchristian, the magical and pansophical
tradition was wholly grounded in sincere Christian faithfar more
so, in fact, than the world of the quarreling theologians.
With this, the main pillars of Will-Erich Peuckerts construct of
the magical or pansophical tradition in early modernity are in place.
Guided by a few basic conceptsthe opposition between Buerliche
and Bourgeois culture, the duality of the two wings or lights, the
Faustian archetype, and the moral hierarchy of human knowledge
and mystical contemplationhe guides his reader through the
dense German woods of magical and pansophical texts (with
multiple digressions, including some false turns). From Paracelsus
and paracelsism the storyline leads by way of Valentin Weigel to
early Rosicrucianism and, finally, Jacob Bhme, who is presented
as der Pansoph pure and simple, and hence as the final culmination
of the German tradition started by Paracelsus. Peuckert finishes his
Pansophie by describing how the poet Daniel Czepko used Bhmes
theosophy to lead his readers back to the church. His commentary
shows that for himin line with Paracelsus motto alterius non sit,
qui suus esse potest (let no one that can belong to himself, belong
to another)the pansophical tradition is indeed extra-ecclesiastical
in principle:
What Cosimo had once feared was done by the Silezian poet [Czepko]
two hundred years after his lifetime: distrusting the power of the two wings
he returned back into the church.53

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I have concentrated on Peuckerts Pansophie, because it is

by far the most essential and the most inspired of his books on
Western esotericism. The second volume in the Pansophical trilogy,
Gabalia, was published two years before his death, and is somewhat
dryer in tone. It adds many further and important materials, but is
grounded in the same basic narrative and takes it further into the
eighteenth century. The third volume, Das Rosenkreutz, published
posthumously in 1973, remained fragmentary in nature.
Concluding Remarks: Historical Relativity, the Two Lights,
and a Tale of Cucumbers and Mushrooms
In conclusion, I would like to make three points of more
general relevance. The first concerns Peuckerts concept of historical
relativity. We saw that, according to the Preface to Pansophie (1935),
he started that book with secret feelings of joy and wrote it (mainly
for his students) as the history of our longing (die Geschichte
unseres Verlangens). As the history of a way of thinking that was
rightlike each way of thinking was once right.54 This was no
random remark, for he came back to it at the end of his Gabalia
more than 30 years later:
I learned to understand that each event could have different aspects,
and [hence] that there exist several world-explanations that appear valid;
that also a rationalistic and intellectualist Worldview might be just one
among several. I learned to understand that magic, too, was the expression
of a way of understanding the world, and [I] have come to the insight that
magic is quite as true and correct as prayer or a logarhythmic example.
. . . and thus the present book Gabalia [too] takes its departure from
recognizing the relativity of worldviews and their interpretations.55

This was a daring statement for an academic writing in

Germany in the 1960s, when it was generally still taken for granted
that if scholars wrote about magic at all, they could only treat it
as an obviously mistaken and somewhat ridiculous remnant of past
superstitions. To claim that magic was an integral worldview with
its own internal logic and consistency, which could be compared
with rational or scientific worldviews on an equal basis, was almost
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unheard of. From our present-day perspective, I would suggest

that Peuckerts historical relativism implies a methodological
agnosticism which remains much more correct methodologically
than the dogmatic reductionism that was dominant in his time.
My second point leads back to Peuckerts basic notion of
the two lights. In a recent publication, I have suggested that
two elements should be seen as centrally important in Western
esotericism as a field of study: the notion of superior knowledge or
gnosis, and a panentheist of cosmotheist cosmology.56 Peuckerts
notion of the two wings or lights seems quite consistent with such
an approach: the first light has to do with superior and suprarational
direct knowledge of the divine, whereas the second light (the
light of nature) concerns the perception of nature as a network of
correspondences permeated by an ultimately divine presence or life
force. I would suggest that the project of tracing the basic notion
of a double source of knowledgenatural and divinethrough the
history of our field remains as valid today as it was in Peuckerts
time. We would approach many things differently now, and can
benefit from better access to the sources (even though many remain
as unknown as they were a century ago), but Peuckerts essential
intuitions were brilliant and, in some regards, well ahead of their
time.
A third and final point brings me back to my own youthful
fascination with mushrooms. In the period between my tenth and
my twentieth year when I was active as an amateur mycologist, I
had a problem during the winters: almost no mushrooms grow
during that season, and yet I sometimes felt like spending time on
my hobby. Fortunately I was living in an area with quite a large
number of greenhouses, used for the cultivation of cucumbers. The
warm and humid tropical climate there was perfect for fungi, and
therefore I would sometimes take my bike and collection kit, and
go to one of the greenhouses in the hope of finding mushrooms.
The farmers usually gave me permission, but they always told me
the same thing: OK kid, you sure can take a look inside if you
want, but I can tell you right now that its no use: Ive been working
here for twenty years, and believe me, Ive never seen one single
mushroom. Nevertheless I would enter the greenhouse, and it
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would always be the same: the place would be literally swarming

with mushrooms. Afterwards I would show the farmers what I had
found, to their enormous surprise: for many years they had spent
countless hours sitting on their knees picking cucumbers, and yet
they had simply never noticed the presence of those mushrooms
growing in abundance right in front of their faces.
I have always considered this a perfect metaphor for the history
of the study of Western esotericism. Countless sources show, beyond
a shadow of doubt, that Western culture has been extremely fertile
soil not only to what might be called the well-known cucumbers
produced by mainstream Christianity, theology and philosophy, but
also to a great variety of less reputable and less familiar mushrooms,
that is to say, the kinds of phenomena that in common parlance are
often referred to as the occult. Until recently, academic historians
largely restricted themselves to picking the cucumbers: they gave
much attention to the various kinds of officially sanctioned religion,
theology and philosophy, but in doing so they largely neglectedor
simply overlookedthe presence of all those other strange growths
that are mushrooming in the garden of history. The study of Western
esotericism should seek to correct that bias and provide a more
complete and accurate picture of the vegetation that is actually
present. It is simply not correct to think of a greenhouse as a place
where only cucumbers grow, for it actually contains a complete and
very complex biosystem. Likewise it is not correct to think of the
history of religion in Western culture as consisting essentially of the
mainstream churches and theologies.57 The question of what is to
be considered important in the greenhouse biosystem and what is
not should not be decided by the interests of the farmer alone, any
more than the interests of theologians and church historians should
monopolize the study of the history of religion in the West. WillErich Peuckert was one of the very few scholars whose intellectual
attitude was independent enough to allow him to see the mushrooms
of history, to which his colleagues remained blind, and grasp their
importance. After his pioneering explorations, the greenhouse of
history has never looked quite the same.

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Notes
1. For the biographical facts on Peuckert, see Brigitte Bnisch-Brednich,
Will-Erich Peuckert (18951969): Versuch einer Biographie, in
Brigitte Bnisch-Brednich and Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, eds., Volkskunde
ist Nachricht von jedem Teil des Volkes: Will-Erich Peuckert zum 100.
Geburtstag (Gttingen: Schmerse Verlag, 1996), 1532; Johanna Micaela
Jacobsen, Boundary Breaking and Compliance: Will-Erich Peuckert and
20th Century German Volkskunde (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania,
2007), chapter 1; Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Ich gebe die Fackel
weiter!: Zum Werk Will-Erich Peuckerts, in: Peuckert, Das Rosenkreutz,
2nd rev. edition (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1973), VII-LI.
2. See Brigitte Bnisch-Brednich & Rolf Wilhelm Brednich, Will-ErichPeuckert-Bibliographie. Mit einem Anhang: Breslauer und Gttinger
Lehrveranstaltungen, Verzeichnis der betreuten Gttinger Dissertationen,
Festschriften, Nachrufe und Wrdigungen, in Bnisch-Brednich &
Brednich, Volkskunde, 165196; and John Tuneld, Will-Erich Peuckert:
Bibliografi, in Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademiens Minnesbok 19571972
(Uppsala, 1972), 205247.
3. Das Buch, das ich heute vorlege, ist ein Kind des Schmerzes und der
Not. . . . die letzten Zeilen des Nachweises . . . wurden in den Januartagen
1945 niedergeschrieben; neben dem Schreibtisch stehen die fr die Flucht
in den eisigen Winter gepackten Ruckscke zweier in diesen Tagen alt
gewordener Leute, und jeder Titel jedes Buches, der zitiert wird, ist ein
Abschiednehmen von dem Buche. (Peuckert, Die Grosse Wende: Das
Apokalyptische Saeculum und Luther, vol. 2 [Hamburg, 1948; repr.
Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1966], 647).
4. For the most complete discussion of this media hype, see Jacobsen,
Boundary Breaking and Compliance, chapter 4.
5. For Peuckerts views on this topic, see Peuckert, Hexensalben,
Medizinischer Monatsspiegel: Ein Zeitschrift fr den Arzt 8 (1960),
169174; and id., Ergnzendes Kapitel ber das Deutsche Hexenwesen,
in Julio Caro Baroja, Die Hexen und ihre Welt (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett,
1967), 285320. Unfortunately the chapter is not included in the English
translation of Barojas book.
6. Zimmermann, Ich gebe die Fackel weiter!, VII.
7. Peuckert, Theophrastus Paracelsus (Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer,
1941; repr. 1943, 1944).

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8. Peuckert, Sebastian Franck: Ein Deutscher Sucher (Mnchen: R. Piper

& Co, 1943).
9. Peuckert, Das Leben Jacob Bhmes (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1924).
10. Peuckert, Die Rosenkreutzer: Zur Geschichte der Reformation (Jena:
Eugen Diederichs, 1928).
11. Peuckert, Astrologie: Geschichte der Geheimwissenschaften Band I
(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960).
12. Peuckert, Pansophie: Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der weissen und
schwarzen Magie (orig. 1936; 2nd rev. and expanded edition Berlin: Erich
Schmidt,1956).
13. Peuckert, Gabalia: Ein Versuch zur Geschichte der magia naturalis im
16. bis 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1967).
14. Peuckert, Das Rosenkreutz (2nd rev. edition Berlin: Erich Schmidt,
1973).
15. Peuckert, Die Grosse Wende: Das Apokalyptische Saeculum und
Luther, 2 vols. (Hamburg 1948; repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1966).
16. Peuckert, Geheim-Kulte (Heidelberg: C. Pfeffer, 1951; new eds.
Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1988; Hamburg: Nikol, 2005).
17. Johanna Moritz, Schwarze und Weisse Magie: Die Erforschung der
paracelsischen und der pansophischen Schriften des 15. bis 17. Jahrhunderts
als Beitrag W.-E. Peuckerts zu einer volkskundlichen Geistesgeschichte,
in Bnisch-Brednich & Brednich, Volkskunde, 8392.
18. Rolf Christian Zimmermann, Das Weltbild des jungen Goethe: Studien
zur hermetischen Tradition des Deutschen 18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols.
(Mnchen: Wilhelm Fink, 1969).
19. Antoine Faivre & Rolf Christian Zimmermann, eds., Epochen der
Naturmystik: Hermetische Tradition im wissenschaftlichen Fortschritt
(Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1979).
20. See notably Monika Neugebauer-Wlk, Esoterik im 18. Jahrhundert
Aufklrung und Esoterik: Eine Einleitung, in Neugebauer-Wlk, ed.,
Aufklrung und Esoterik (Hamburg: Felix Meiners, 1999), 137, esp.
2023.
21. Carlos Gilly, Comenius und die Rosenkreuzer, in Neugebauer-Wlk,
Aufklrung und Esoterik, 95 nt 21.
22. Peuckert, Pansophie, 4755 (interrupted only by a few lines in German
on pp. 5152).
23. Peuckert, Gabalia, 528.
24. Zimmermann, Ich gebe die Fackel weiter, XVIII.
25. Zimmermann, Ich gebe die Fackel weiter, XIX.
26. See Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Kabbalah in Gnosis Magazine (1985

297

199), forthcoming in Boaz Huss (ed.), Kabbalah and Contemporary

Spiritual Revival.
27. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Beyond the Yates Paradigm: The Study of
Western Esotericism between Counterculture and New Complexity,
Aries 1:1 (2001), 537; idem, The Study of Western Esotericism: New
Approaches to Christian and Secular Culture, in Peter Antes, Armin W.
Geertz & Randi R. Warne, eds., New Approaches to the Study of Religion I:
Regional, Critical, and Historical Approaches (Berlin/New York: Walter
de Gruyter, 2004), 489519.
28. See the analogous observations by Zimmermann, Ich gebe die Fackel
weiter, XLVIII.
29. Peuckert, Pansophie, XII-XIII.
30. Peuckert, Pansophie, X.
31. Peuckert, Pansophie, VIII.
32. Peuckert, Pansophie, IX.
33. Peuckert, Pansophie, XI.
34. Peuckert, Pansophie, 11.
35. Peuckert, Pansophie, 13.
36. Peuckert, Pansophie, 185.
37. Peuckert, Pansophie, 192193.
38. Peuckert, Pansophie, 254.
39. Peuckert, Pansophie, 46, 58.
40. Peuckert, Pansophie, 93.
41. Peuckert, Pansophie, 96.
42. Peuckert, Pansophie, 93: Trithemius aber wuchs nicht fort.
43. Peuckert, Pansophie, 121.
44. Peuckert, Pansophie, 180.
45. Peuckert, Pansophie, 181.
46. Peuckert, Pansophie 182183.
47. Peuckert, Pansophie, 185.
48. Peuckert, Pansophie, 245.
49. Peuckert, Pansophie, 277.
50. Peuckert, Pansophie, 278.
51. Peuckert, Pansophie, 345346.
52. Peuckert, Die Grosse Wende II, 649.
53. Peuckert, Pansophie, 408.
54. Peuckert, Pansophie, XII.
55. Peuckert, Gabalia, 528529.
56. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, The Trouble with Images: Anti-Image Polemics
and Western Esotericism, in Olav Hammer and Kocku von Stuckrad, eds.,
Polemical Encounters: Esoteric Discourse and Its Others (Leiden/Boston:

298

Brill, 2007), 107136, esp. 131ff.

57. Wouter J. Hanegraaff, The Dreams of Theology and the Realities of
Christianity, in J. Haers & P. De Mey, eds., Theology and Conversation:
Towards a Relational Theology, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum
Lovaniensium 172 (Louvain: Peeters, 2003), 709733.

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