Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932)

Baron Muller, a Viennese dealer in antiquities, discovers he's a descendant of John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth's astronomer and adviser and, most famously, a seeker of occult truths. The significance of this link becomes both more evident and changes, as Muller reads through Dee's diaries. The world becomes double, with the hitherto occult one gradually emerging from beyond the shallow appearance of reality. The story (or history) becomes double too, as contemporary events mirror events in show more the past, and the figures from John Dee's time reappear in Muller's life as modern counterparts. Some of these people are Dee's (and Muller's) mortal enemies; some are friends, but he struggles to recognise their identities and aims. There is an overarching occult theme to the plot too, the alchemical rite which was foiled in Dee's time, a mystical wedding, to which Muller now blindly grapples in a very literal sense--but has he identified his "bride" correctly? Does he understand what the rite is supposed to mean, and which elements need to unite to bring it through?

Meyrink's a master at making the stitches between dreams and reality shimmer uncannily, at projection of mysteries that point to the deepest being. show less

A disappointing excursion into the eerie, even allowing for my perhaps unreasonably high hopes for the book. Gustav Meyrink's 1915 novel The Golem is occasionally touted as a more obscure, 'hidden gem' counterpart to Gothic horror classics like Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde, but I found it to be a story that didn't settle.

There's a decent sense of atmosphere and gloom – the Jewish ghetto in turn-of-the-century Prague – but no storytelling spine to help it stand upright. I like to show more think of myself as a reasonably attentive reader, but I never really knew what was happening or the motivation of the characters; even before the cop-out "it was all a dream"-style ending, I had lost faith in the intentions of the novel. It also has a melodramatic style – typical of Gothic novels, of course – but in lesser fare such as The Golem the histrionics were grating and I longed for something more suitably brooding and stone-like.

Although it was not enough to redeem it in my eyes, one merit of the book was the totality of its protagonist's fear and madness and loss of identity. So complete was this unpinning of the character's mores that I found it to be a detriment: the protagonist was lost and I, seeking to follow the plot, was lost also. When Meyrink writes of his paranoid protagonist that "all my senses [were] permanently ready to pounce, but with nothing to clutch at" (pg. 147), I recognised it not only as a decent line but a fitting description of my own experience of The Golem. The book's concept promises more than it delivers, and in reading it I became exhausted, my reading instincts restlessly searching for something more than I could find. show less

The legend of the Wandering Jew is a thread connecting the episodes of this novel of occult initiation, set in early 20th-century Amsterdam. But Meyrink was neither a folklorist nor a religious propagandist. His literary skill serves to give the reader a sense of the tenuousness of the mundane events and places that we consent to call real, and he captured the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the early years of the New Aeon of the Crowned and Conquering Child.

Franz Rottensteiner's afterword in the show more Daedalus European Classics edition of The Green Face goes further than any other single source I have read in attempting to call out the specific occultist interests and involvements of Meyrink. I would certainly like more detail on Meyrink's 1895 correspondent from Manchester, who assigned him a new name or occult motto; it sounds as if this instructor was an initiate of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. In fact, Rottensteiner insists that Meyrink "apparently had no knowledge of English fiction of the supernatural," (221) although Godwin, Chanel and Deveney relate that Meyrink was responsible for a German edition of P.B. Randolph's Dhoula Bel (The Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor, p. 365). Meyrink was also involved "with French and British Freemasons," including the Antient and Primitive Rite, and Rottensteiner claims that he joined the "Order of Illumination" (Reuss' Illuminati Order?) in 1897. All these details serve to make his work of special historical interest to initiates of O.T.O. and its emulators, as well as relating far more clearly to the metaphysical content of Meyrink's work than the usual biographical gloss of him simply being Theosophist.

The Green Face has a status in Meyrink's oeuvre second only to The Golem, and the two were written during the same period (1910-1916). While brimming over with supernatural revelation, it maintains a vigorously esoteric perspective independent of any social institution or codified tradition.

The Dutch setting, largely in the shadow of the Sint Nicolaas Kerk, was especially effective for me as a reader. In fact, it worked almost exactly like my viewing of The Matrix (a curiously similar story, despite its science-fictional premises). In that film, there were frequent dialogue references to Chicago street geography, although the movie's cityscape was actually shot in Sydney, Australia, which created an alienating sense of familiarity for this Chicagoan. Just so, my time in 21st-century Amsterdam helped me achieve the same sense of situated displacement with respect to Meyrink's Zeedijk. show less

In the first of these delicious comic stories, a little orphaned lion cub is raised by sheep and thinks he's one too. I totally LOL'd at his encounter with an older lion who couldn't believe his eyes when grass-grazing Alois started baa-ing at him. The animals speak Viennese, which is all the more hilarious. Another story expands on a tale of a murderer (from The Golem) who ends up as a mild-mannered gardener in a nunnery; there's a report from the Otherworld, run just as burocratically as show more This World; and another modern fable, of a high-thinking Oriental sage (a camel), eventually coming to a dire end when his Western pals lose ideals to hunger. show less