Chapter 74PythiaPYTHIA
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
To wash my soul clean of all that was degrading, I threw myself head over heels into a new novel, for which I had already been making thorough Greek studies for a year. I wanted to write the “story of the first somnambulist.”1 When I stood years ago at Delphi before the cleft in the rock, over which the tripod was set for twelve hundred years, this idea flew through my soul for the first time. Then other conflicts held me fast, I had to write other novels. For that is the signature of my whole existence as an artist — I can never make the thing I want, but always and only again the thing I must. So that in truth it is never I who paint or write, but always the thing in itself that writes or paints out of me. That is a blessing and a curse. But in any case it is no serviceable, money-earning talent machine. And therefore, in our heavy times, a most impractical disposition. But the Pythia possessed me quite particularly. And the more I lived my way into her age — the imperishable age of Alcibiades — and into the dark shudderings of the Thracian cult of Dionysus, the more I felt it: of all my novels this one was becoming the deepest! I felt occult airs blowing in it. I should like now to dedicate it to the great champion of occult research, the once derided Dr. von Schrenk-Notzing2. But in the soul of this Pythia there lives a piece of me, or rather: in me and in all strong artist souls there lives a piece of this Pythia, who raged above the adyton in dark shudderings and, dragged this way and that by earthly and unearthly burnings, can never find rest and peace, never “enough.”
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the “story of the first somnambulist.” — The Pythia novel, begun in the winter of 1914 out of the ruin of the last chapter. Conceived at Delphi more than ten years before; no printing of it has been found. She had stood at Delphi during the Greek journey of the middle of the book, and recorded there the first dawning of a later novel called Pythia. This chapter is where it gets written, and it is her fourth book in fifteen months — after Yoshiwara at Biskra, the Mormon novel at Algiers and the leprous king at the Tempio. Her subject is the oracle read as a case of somnambulism, which is what the psychical research of her decade would have called a trance medium, and the dedication two sentences later says so outright. No edition under this title or the description has been found in any catalogue searched in this project, and Fischer 2019 and Eberhardt 2005 remain unread here. Of the four books of these fifteen months, one was printed in her lifetime and appeared after her death; the other three have left no trace but this. (Her works)
- ↑Dr. von Schrenk-Notzing — Albert von Schrenck-Notzing (1862–1929), the Munich physician who made psychical research a laboratory subject in Germany — and by 1914 the most ridiculed serious scientist in the country. He had trained in medicine and hypnotism, investigated mediums under what he insisted were controlled conditions, and published in 1914 the book on the materialisation phenomena that made him notorious. Her phrase for him, der einst verlachte, the once derided, is written years later and gets the story right: he was laughed at, and he kept going. What the sentence records is that she wanted her novel to carry his name on its dedication page. She is placing the book, and by extension the oracle at Delphi, inside the psychical research of her own decade rather than inside classical antiquity — the Pythia as the first medium, studied rather than believed. Whether the dedication was ever printed cannot be said, because no printing of the book has been found. (Albert von Schrenck-Notzing)