page_title: Alfred Schuler
section_title: "Blood Beacon" and "Cosmic Circle"
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred Schuler / "Blood Beacon" and "Cosmic Circle"
caption_attribution_description: English: Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler, Ludwig Klages, Stefan George, Albert Verwey.
context_page_description: Alfred Schuler was a religious founder, a gnostic, a mystic and a visionary. Franz Wegener has called Schuler the last of the German Cathars. Schuler saw himself as a reborn Roman of the late imperial era. Also a neopagan, he was the spiritual focus of the "Munich Cosmic Circle", and made a broad impact without ever publishing a book during his lifetime. Stefan George and Ludwig Klages were, amongst others, significantly influenced by him.
  Schuler studied Archaeology in Munich but came to see archaeologists as "desecrators of graves ripping out of the earth what has been sanctified by the rite of burial, and confining to the unwholesome air of museums the lustrous force rightly working its mighty influence under the cover of darkness". After his studies Schuler made his living as an 'independent scholar' in Munich. He held his own "rebirth into an unpleasant epoch" to be the responsibility of an evil demon. Schuler died during an operation meant to remove a malignant tumour.
context_section_description: At the end of the nineteenth century the Munich borough of Schwabing became the center of certain anti-bourgeois forces tending towards an interest in the 'occult', among which were found the secretive cult of the Blutleuchte ("Blood Beacon"). An occult circle (Munich Cosmic Circle) gravitating around Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages developed a doctrine according to which the Occident was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity, held to be responsible for the betrayal of life's primary forces. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to the pagan origins. No exact common ground did however exist, as to what this "homecoming" would entail.
  Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages came to know each other in 1893. They were, above all others, the leading personalities of the "Blutleuchte" and, with a few other 'initiates' such as Ludwig Derleth and the poet Karl Wolfskehl, the founders of this "occult circle". The first contact with Stefan George was established through Wolfskehl.
  As clearly signalled by the name, "Blutleuchte", "Blood" and "Light" were to play an important role. With the historical "degeneration of the blood", held to be a sacred life elixir and a metaphysical substrate of souls, "truthful" life was seen as sinking into an ever more weakened state. And thus it was found to be necessary to lead this conception of the blood up to its former state of light and power, as it was thought to have been in heathen times thousands of years ago, and to some degree in antiquity. In the sign of the "Blood Beacon" and the swastika, its incarnate emblem, a healthy state of life were to be regained.
  From a chosen few, among which they imagined themselves to be and in which the "untainted blood" was supposed to be still working its healthy influence, a reversal was thought to be possible. By the work of these chosen few, the "incarnation of the undying spark of a distant past" (L. Klages), the founding energies of the "cosmic solstice" were to be rekindled. The occult practices of the Blutleuchte was supposed to be a symbiosis of heathendom and "lordly leadership" in the service of a wayward humanity in need of a fundamental rebirth.
caption: "Münchener Kosmiker": Wolfskehl, Schuler, Klages, George, Verwey. Photograph by Karl Bauer
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