Ma painted dream bird was on the way looking for my friend. An answer came to me in the strangest way.

In my school class, at my seat, I once found a piece of paper stuck in my book after the break between two lessons. It was folded in exactly the same way as it was usual for us when classmates secretly passed tickets to each other during a lesson. Me I was just wondering who would send me such a note, because I have never had such contact with any of my classmates. I thought it was an invitation to some school fun that I wouldn’t take part in, and I put the piece of paper unread in the front of my book. It was only during the lesson that it accidentally fell into my hand again.

I played with the paper, mindlessly unfolding it and finding some words written on it. I glanced at it, stopped at a word, was frightened, and read, my heart contracting with fate as if in great cold:

“The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The god’s name is Abraxas.”

After reading these lines several times, I sank into deep contemplation. There was no doubt, it was Demian’s answer. No one could know about the bird but me and him. He had gotten my picture. He understood and helped me interpret. But how was everything connected? And – this was what bothered me most of all – what did Abraxas mean? I had never heard or read the word. “The god’s name is Abraxas!”

The hour passed without me hearing anything about the lesson. The next one began, the last one of the morning. It was given by a very young assistant teacher who had just come out of university and we liked it because he was so young and didn’t assume any false dignity towards us.

We read Herodotus under Doctor Follen’s leadership. This reading was one of the few school subjects that interested me. But this time I wasn’t there. I opened my book mechanically, but didn’t follow the translation and remained lost in my thoughts. By the way, I had already experienced several times how correct what Demian had told me in spiritual instruction was. Whatever you wanted hard enough, you succeeded. If I was very busy with my own thoughts during the lesson, I could be calm that the teacher would leave me alone. Yes, when you were distracted or sleepy, he suddenly stood there: I had already encountered that. But if you really thought, really sunk, then you were protected. And I had also tried the fixed look thing and found it to be effective. Back in Demian’s day it was me I didn’t succeed, now I often felt that a lot could be achieved with looks and thoughts.

I was sitting like that now, far from Herodotus and the school. But then suddenly the teacher’s voice struck me like lightning and I woke up in shock. I heard his voice, he was standing close to me, I thought he had called my name. But he didn’t look at me. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then I heard his voice again. She said the word out loud: “Abraxas.”

In a statement the beginning of which escaped me, Doctor Follen continued: “We must not imagine the views of those sects and mystical societies of antiquity as naively as they appear from the standpoint of a rationalist view. Antiquity did not know any science in our sense. There was, however, a very highly developed preoccupation with philosophical-mystical truths. In part this resulted in magic and games, which often led to fraud and crime. But magic also had a noble origin and deep thoughts. Such is the teaching of Abraxas, which I used as an example earlier. This name is mentioned in connection with Greek magic formulas and often considers it to be the name of some magical devil, such as wild peoples still have today. But it seems that Abraxas means much more. We can think of the name as that of a deity who had the symbolic task of uniting the divine and the devil.”

The little learned man continued to speak delicately and eagerly, no one was very attentive, and since the name was no longer mentioned, my attention soon sank back into myself.

“The divine and the devil unite,” it echoed in my mind. I was able to pick up here. This was familiar to me from conversations with Demian during the very last period of our friendship. Demian had said at the time that we did have a God that we worshiped, but that he only represented an arbitrarily separated half of the world (it was the official, permitted, “light” world). But you have to be able to worship the whole world, so you either have to have a God who is also the devil, or you have to set up a ministry of the devil in addition to the church service. — And now Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil.

For a while I searched with great zeal continue on the trail without making any progress. I also searched an entire library for the Abraxas without success. But my nature was never strongly attuned to this kind of direct and conscious searching, whereby one usually only finds truths that remain stones in one’s hand.

The figure of Beatrice, with whom I had been so deeply occupied for a certain time, now gradually sank beneath me, or rather she slowly moved away from me, came closer and closer to the horizon and became more shadowy, distant, paler. It was no longer enough for the soul.

A new education now began to emerge in the existence that was strangely wrapped up in myself and which I led like a dream walker. The longing for life blossomed in me, rather the longing for love, and the sexual drive, which I had been able to dissolve into the adoration of Beatrice for a while, demanded new images and goals. Still no fulfillment came my way, and it was more impossible than ever for me to deceive my longing and expect something from the girls with whom my comrades sought their happiness. I dreamed again violently, more during the day than at night. Ideas, images or wishes arose within me and drew me away from the external world, so that I had more real and lively contact and lived with these images within me, with these dreams or shadows, than with my real surroundings.

A certain dream, or a fantasy that kept recurring, became meaningful to me. This dream, the most important and lasting of my life, was something like this: I returned to my father’s house – above the house gate the heraldic bird shone in yellow on a blue background – my mother met me in the house – but when I entered and wanted to hug her, It wasn’t her, but a never-seen figure, tall and powerful, similar to Max Demian and my painted sheet, but different, and despite her mightiness, completely feminine. This figure pulled me close and embraced me in a deep, shuddering embrace of love. Delight and horror were mixed, the embrace was worship, and was also a crime. Too much memory of my mother, too much memory of my friend Demian haunted the figure that surrounded me. violated all reverence and yet was bliss. I often woke up from this dream with a deep feeling of happiness, often with fear of death and a tormented conscience, as if from a terrible sin.

Only gradually and unconsciously did a connection come about between this completely internal image and the hint that came to me from outside about the God to be sought. But then it became narrower and more intimate, and I began to feel that I was calling on Abraxas precisely in this foreboding dream. Bliss and horror, man and woman mixed, the sacred and the terrible intertwined, deep guilt twitching through the tenderest innocence – that was my dream image of love, and that was also Abraxas. Love was no longer a dark, animalistic impulse, as I had initially felt in fear, and it was also no longer pious, spiritualized worship, as I had presented it to the image of Beatrice. She was both, both and much more, she was the image of an angel and Satan, man and woman in one, human and animal, supreme good and utmost evil. It seemed to me that living this way was destined to cost me my fate. I longed for it and was afraid of it, I dreamed of it and I fled from it, but it was always there, was always above me.

Next spring I was supposed to leave high school and go to college; I didn’t yet know where or what. A small beard grew on my lips; I was a full-grown person, and yet completely helpless and without goals. Only one thing was certain: the voice within me, the dream image. I felt it was my duty to blindly follow this lead. But it was difficult for me and I rebelled every day. Maybe I was crazy, I often thought, maybe I wasn’t like other people? But I could do everything that others did; with a little hard work and effort I could read Plato, solve trigonometric problems or follow a chemical analysis. There was only one thing I couldn’t do: tear out the goal that was darkly hidden within me and paint it somewhere in front of me, like others did who knew exactly that they wanted to become a professor or judge, doctor or artist, how long it would take and what advantages it would have. I couldnt do that. Maybe I became something like that once, but how was I supposed to know. Maybe I had to search and keep searching for years, but nothing came of it and I didn’t reach any destination. Maybe I reached a destination, but it was an evil, dangerous, terrible one.

All I wanted to do was try to live what wanted to come out of me on its own. Why was that so very difficult?

I often tried to paint the powerful love figure of my dream. But it never succeeded. If I had succeeded, I would have sent the paper to Demian. Where was he? I did not know it. I just knew he was connected to me. When would I see him again?

The friendly calm of those weeks and months of Beatrice’s time was long gone. At that time I thought I had reached an island and found peace. But that’s how it was always – no sooner had a situation become dear to me, no sooner had a dream done me good than it became withered and blind. In vain to complain about him! I now lived in a fire of unquenchable desire, of tense anticipation that often drove me completely wild and mad. I often saw the image of the dream lover before me with surviving clarity, much clearer than my own hand, spoke to him, cried before him, cursed him. I called it mother and knelt before it in tears, I called it lover and sensed its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss, I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It was tempting me to the most tender dreams of love and to wild shamelessness, nothing was too good and delicious for him, nothing too bad and low.

I spent that entire winter in an inner storm that I find difficult to describe. I had long been used to loneliness, it did not oppress me, I lived with Demian, with the sparrowhawk, with the image of the great dream figure who was my fate and my beloved. That was enough to live in, because everything looked big and wide, and everything pointed to Abraxas. But none of these dreams, none of my thoughts obeyed me, none I could call, none I could give their colors at will. They came and took me, I was ruled by them, lived by them.

I was certainly protected from the outside world. I was not afraid of people; my classmates had also learned that and showed me a secret respect that often made me smile. If I wanted to, I could see through most of them very well and occasionally amaze them. I just rarely or never wanted to. I was always busy with myself, always with myself. And I longed to finally live a bit, do something to give myself out into the world, to enter into relationship and struggle with it. Sometimes when I was walking through the streets in the evening and couldn’t return home until midnight because of my restlessness, sometimes I thought that now and now my beloved had to meet me, pass by on the next corner, call to me from the next window. Sometimes this all seemed unbearably painful and I was prepared to take my own life.

I found a strange refuge back then – by “coincidence”, as they say. But there are no such coincidences. When someone who needs something necessarily finds what he needs, it is not chance that gives it to him, but he himself, his own desire and necessity leads him there.

Two or three times on my walks through the city I had heard the organ playing in a small suburban church without stopping to listen. The next time I passed by, I heard it again and realized that Bach was being played. I went to the gate, which I found closed, and since the street was almost devoid of people, I sat down on a curb next to the church, turned the collar of my coat around myself and listened. It wasn’t a big organ, but it was a good one, and it was played strangely, well and almost virtuosically, but with a peculiar, highly personal expression of will and perseverance that sounded like a prayer. I had the feeling: the man who is playing knows there is a treasure hidden in this music, and he is wooing and pounding and struggling for this treasure as if it were his life. I don’t understand much about music in the technical sense, but I instinctively understood this expression of the soul from a child on and felt the musical element as something natural within me.

The musician also played something modern on it, it could have been by Reger. The church was almost completely dark, only a very thin light came through the next window. I waited for the music to end and then paced up and down until I saw the organist come out. He was still young, but older than me, stocky and stocky, and he ran away quickly with strong and, as it were, reluctant steps.

From then on I sometimes sat in front of the church in the evening or walked up and down. Once I found the gate open and sat in the chairs, shivering and happy, for half an hour the organist played upstairs in dim gaslight. From the music he played, I didn’t just hear him. Everything he played also seemed to me to be related, to have a secret connection. Everything he played was religious, devoted and pious, but not pious like the churchgoers and pastors, but pious like pilgrims and beggars in the Middle Ages, pious with reckless devotion to a feeling for the world that stood above all creeds. The masters before Bach were played diligently, and old Italians. And everyone said the same thing, everyone said what the musician had in his soul: longing, the deepest grasp of the world and the wildest separation from it, burning listening to his own dark soul, the rush of devotion and deep curiosity about the wonderful.

Once, when I was secretly following the organ player after he left the church, I saw him entering a small tavern far out on the outskirts of the city. I couldn’t resist and went after him. For the first time I saw him clearly here. He was sitting at the inn’s table in a corner of the small room, his black felt hat on his head, a glass of wine in front of him, and his face was just as I expected it to be. It was ugly and somewhat wild, searching and stubborn, headstrong and willful, yet soft and childlike around the mouth. The masculine and strong was all in the eyes and forehead, the lower part of the face was delicate and unfinished, uncontrolled and partly soft, the chin, full of indecision, stood boyishly like a contradiction to the forehead and eyes. I loved the dark brown eyes, full of pride and hostility.

I sat down opposite him in silence, no one else was in the bar. He glared at me as if he wanted to drive me away. However, I stood my ground and kept looking at him until he grumbled angrily: “Why are you looking so damn sharp? Do you want something from me?”

“I don’t want anything from you,” I said. “But I’ve had a lot from you.”

He frowned.

“So, are you a music enthusiast? I think it’s disgusting to have a crush on music.”

I wasn’t deterred.

“I’ve listened to you many times, in the church out there,” I said. “By the way, I don’t want to bother you. I thought I might find something with you, something special, I’m not sure what. But you’d better listen not on me! I can listen to you in church.”

“I always lock it.”

“The other day you forgot and I was sitting inside. Otherwise I’ll be standing outside or sitting on the curb.”

“So? You can come in another time, it’s warmer. All you have to do is knock on the door. But strong, and not while I’m playing. Now come on – what did you want to say? You are a very young man, probably a schoolboy or student. Are you a musician?”

“No. I like listening to music, but only the kind you play, very unconditional music, music that makes you feel like a person is shaking heaven and hell. The music is very dear to me, I think because it has so little morality. Everything else is moral, and I’m looking for something that isn’t so. I’ve always just suffered from moral issues. I can’t express myself well. — Do you know that there must be a God who is both God and devil? There was supposed to be one, I heard about it.”

The musician pushed back his wide hat a little and shook his dark hair from his large forehead. He looked at me penetratingly and leaned his face towards me across the table.

He asked quietly and eagerly: “What is the name of the god you are talking about?”

“Unfortunately I know almost nothing about him, actually just his name. His name is Abraxas.”

The musician looked around suspiciously, as if someone might be eavesdropping on us. Then he moved close to me and said in a whisper, “I thought so. Who are you?”

“I am a high school student.”

“How do you know about Abraxas?”

“Randomly.”

He hit the table so that his wine glass overflowed.

“Coincidence! Don’t talk shit. . . Damn, young person! You don’t know about Abraxas by chance, remember that. I’ll tell you more about him. I know a little about him.”

He remained silent and pushed his chair back. When I looked at him expectantly, he grimaced.

“Not here! Another time. — There, take it!”

He reached into the pocket of his coat He hadn’t put it down and pulled out a few roasted chestnuts which he threw to me.

I said nothing, took it and ate it and was very satisfied.

“So!” he whispered after a while. “How do you know about—Him?”

I didn’t hesitate to tell him.

“I was alone and at a loss,” I said. “Then I remembered a friend from earlier years who I think knows a lot. I had painted something, a bird coming out of a globe. I sent it to him. After a while, when I no longer really believed in it, I got a piece of paper in my hand that said: The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The god’s name is Abraxas.”

He said nothing, we peeled our chestnuts and ate them with the wine.

“Shall we have another drink?” he asked.

“No thanks. I don’t like drinking.”

He laughed, a little disappointed.

“As they want! It’s different for me. I’ll still stay here. Just go now!”

The next time I went to the organ music went with him, he wasn’t very communicative. He led me up an old alley through an old, stately house and into a large, somewhat gloomy and neglected room, where apart from a piano there was nothing to indicate music, while a large bookcase and desk gave the room something scholarly.

“How many books you have!” I said approvingly.

“Some of it is from my father’s library, where I live. — Yes, young man, I live with my father and mother, but I can’t introduce you to them, my company doesn’t enjoy much respect here in the house. I’m a prodigal son, you know. My father is a fabulously honorable man, an important pastor and preacher in this city. And I, so you know right away, am his gifted and promising son, who has gone off the rails and somewhat crazy. I was a theologian and left this staid faculty shortly before the state examination. Although I’m actually still in the field when it comes to my private studies. What kind of gods people came up with is still extremely important and interesting to me. Moreover I’m a musician now and it seems I’ll soon get a smaller organist position. Then I’ll be back at church.”

I looked along the spines of the books, finding Greek, Latin, Hebrew titles as far as I could see in the dim light of the small table lamp. In the meantime my friend had laid down on the floor in the dark near the wall and was busy there.

“Come on,” he called after a while, “we want to practice a little philosophy now, that is, keep our mouths shut, lie on our stomachs and think.”

He struck a match and set fire to paper and logs in the fireplace in front of which he lay. The flame rose high, he stoked and fed the fire with careful care. I lay down next to him on the tattered carpet. He stared into the fire, which also attracted me, and we lay in silence on our stomachs in front of the flickering wood fire for an hour, watching it flame and roar, sink and bend, flicker and twitch and finally brood on the ground in a quiet, sunken glow .

“Fire worship wasn’t the stupidest thing ever invented,” he once murmured to himself. Otherwise none of us said a word. I hung by the fire with staring eyes, sank into dreams and silence, saw figuresin the smoke and images in the ashes. Once I was startled. My comrade threw a piece of resin into the embers, a small, slender flame shot up, I saw in it the bird with the yellow sparrowhawk’s head. In the dying embers of the fireplace, glowing golden threads ran together to form nets, letters and pictures appeared, memories of faces, of animals, of plants, of worms and snakes. When I woke up and looked at the other person, he was staring devotedly and fanatically into the ashes, his chin on his fists.

“I have to go now,” I said quietly.

“Yes, then go. Goodbye!”

He didn’t get up, and since the lamp was out, I had to struggle to find my way through the dark room and the dark corridors and stairs out of the enchanted old house. I stopped on the street and looked up at the old house. There was no light in any window. A small brass sign gleamed in the light of the gas lamp outside the door.

“Pistorius, senior priest,” I read.

Only when I got home after dinner Sitting alone in my small room, it occurred to me that I had never heard anything about Abraxas or anything else from Pistorius, and that we had barely exchanged ten words. But I was very satisfied with my visit to him. And next time he had promised me a very exquisite piece of old organ music, a Passacaglia by Buxtehude.

OWithout my knowing it, the organist Pistorius had given me my first lesson as I lay with him in front of the fireplace on the floor of his dim hermit room. Looking into the fire had done me good; it had strengthened and confirmed tendencies in me that I had always had but never actually nurtured. Gradually I partially realized this.

Even as a small child, I always had the inclination to look at bizarre forms of nature, not observing, but surrendering to their own magic, their curly, deep language. Long woody tree roots, colored veins in the rock, spots of oil floating on water, cracks in glass – all similar things had once had great magic for me, especially the water and the fire, the smoke, the clouds, the dust, and especially the swirling patches of color that I saw when I closed my eyes. In the days following my first visit to Pistorius, this began to occur to me again. Because I realized that I owed a certain strengthening and joy, an increase in my feeling of myself, which I had felt ever since, simply to staring into the open fire for so long. It was strangely soothing and enriching to do that!

This new one was added to the few experiences that I had found so far on the way to my actual goal in life: looking at such structures, surrendering to the irrational, twisted, strange forms of nature creates in us a feeling of the harmony of our inner being with the will that made these structures become – we soon feel the temptation to take them for our own whims, for our own creations – we see the boundaries between us and nature tremble and dissolve and get to know the mood in which we We don’t know whether the images on our retina come from external impressions or from internal ones. Nowhere is it as simple and easy as this exercise to discover how how much we are creators, how much our soul always takes part in the constant creation of the world. Rather, it is the same indivisible Deity who operates within us and who operates in nature, and if the external world were to perish, one of us would be able to rebuild it, for mountain and stream, tree and leaf, root and flower, everything What is formed in nature is prefigured in us, comes from the soul, whose essence is eternity, whose essence we do not know, but which we mostly feel as the power of love and creativity.

It was only a few years later that I found this observation confirmed in a book, namely Leonardo da Vinci, who once talked about how good and deeply stimulating it was to look at a wall that had been spit on by many people. Before those spots on the damp wall he felt the same as Pistorius and I felt before the fire.

The next time we were together, the organ player gave me an explanation.

“We always draw the boundaries of our personality far too narrowly! We always count as our person only what we recognize as individually different, as deviant. We persist But from the entire world, each of us, and just as our body carries within itself the genealogy of development all the way back to fish and even further back, so we have in our soul everything that has ever lived in human souls. All the gods and devils that have ever existed, be it among the Greeks and Chinese or among the Zulu kaffirs, are all with us, are there as possibilities, as wishes, as ways out. If humanity were to die out except for a single, somewhat gifted child who had not received any instruction, this child would find the whole course of things again; he would find gods, demons, paradises, commandments and prohibitions, Old and New Testaments, everything would be there again can produce.”

“Yes, well,” I objected, “but then what is the value of the individual? Why are we still striving when we have already finished everything within ourselves?”

“Stop!” Pistorius shouted violently. “There is a big difference whether you just have the world inside you or whether you know it too! A madman can produce thoughts that are reminiscent of Plato, and a pious little schoolboy in a Moravian institute thinks creatively about deep mythological connections that… the Gnostics or Zoroaster. But he doesn’t know anything about it! He is a tree or a stone, at best an animal, as long as he does not know it. But then, when the first spark of this knowledge dawns, he becomes human. Surely you don’t think all the two-legged creatures walking on the street are human, just because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months? You see how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or leeches, how many ants, how many bees! Well, in each of them the possibilities for man are there, but only when he senses them, when he even partially learns to make them conscious, do these possibilities belong to him.

Our conversations were something like this. Rarely did they bring me something completely new, something completely surprising. But all of them, even the most banal ones, hit the same point in me with a quiet, steady hammer blow, all of them helped form me, all of them helped peel off skins from me, break eggshells, and from each one I raised my head a little higher, a little freer, until my yellow Bird pushed his beautiful bird of prey head out of the shattered world shell.

We often told each other our dreams. Pistorius knew how to give them an interpretation. I just remember a strange example. I had a dream in which I could fly, but in such a way that I was, as it were, thrown through the air by a great momentum that I was not in control of. The feeling of this flight was exhilarating, but soon turned into fear as I found myself being dragged to dangerous heights without my will. Then I made the liberating discovery that I could regulate my rising and falling by holding and letting my breath flow.

Pistorius said: “The momentum that makes you fly is our great human possession that everyone has. It is the feeling of connection with the roots of every power, but it soon becomes fearful! It’s damn dangerous! That’s why most people are so happy to avoid flying and prefer to walk on the sidewalk in accordance with legal regulations. But not her. They fly on, as befits a capable fellow. And behold, you discover the wonder that you gradually become master of it, that in addition to the great general force that pulls you away, there is a subtle, small, own force, an organ, a rudder! That’s great. Without that you would go in without will the skies, that’s what madmen do, for example. They have deeper intuitions than the people on the sidewalk, but they have no key or steering wheel and are hurtling into the ground. But you, Sinclair, you do the job! And how, please. You don’t even know that yet? They do it with a new organ, with a respiratory regulator. And now you can see how little ‘personal’ your soul is in its depths. She doesn’t invent this regulator! He’s not new! It is a bond, it has existed for thousands of years. It is the balance organ of fish, the swim bladder. And in fact there are still a few strange and conservative fish species today in which the swim bladder is also a kind of lung and can actually be used for breathing under certain circumstances. So exactly like the lungs,

He even brought me a volume of zoology and showed me names and pictures of those old-fashioned fishes. And I felt, with a strange thrill, a function from early epochs of development alive within me.