Eduard Renner

Eduard Renner (* 1891 ; † June 23, 1952 ) was a doctor and ethnographer from Uri . He became known in 1941 for his folklore book Golden Ring about Uri , in which he interpreted the sagas and customs of mountain farmers and alpine herders into a magical worldview. Renner's writing is still very popular for dealing with the myths and legends of the Alpine region.

Renner differentiated a theory of evolution of the human mind that had already been developed by James Frazer (on whose main work The Golden Branch he also derived the title of his Golden Ring ). Frazer postulated the sequence of magic, religion, science, whereas Renner made a strict distinction between magic (exercise of supernatural powers) and animism (belief in the all-animatedness), which he understood as temporally, socially and locally separate stages. While he located the magic, which dates back to the Stone Age, among the mountain dwellers, he saw animism as a later development of the handcrafted and technically oriented valley communities.

Renner summarized the magical worldview in terms of id, ring and sacrilege : The person experiencing magic stands as the protector of his world in the ring (the symbol of security), endangered by the id (the hardness and power of the environment and its forces); the danger is averted (through gestures of deceit, taking possession and drawing) as long as no outrage is committed. Renner understood magic as the most primeval human experience and thought; In its pure form it knows neither gods nor demons, but only the directly felt nature, man and his community. In contrast, the world of animism, as a kind of clouded magic, is filled with gods and demons, witches and humanized forces. The gestures that were further developed into cult and magic (for example in the carnival with mask creatures, fire and noise customs) no longer served the ban of danger, but the change of the environment and the control of the transcendent.

Its strong reference to time becomes clear in Renner's work. The image of the Swiss as a “people of shepherds” and of the shepherd as the primordial core of the Swiss trait was part of the common projection screen of theses-like interpretations before the Second World War. Renner was also clearly influenced by the work of the prehistorian and religious researcher Herbert Kühn and the depth psychological approaches in the teachings of CG Jung (who also believed to recognize the Swiss being in the closeness to nature). This is particularly evident in his posthumously published investigations, in which he wanted to use the interpretation of prehistoric and ancient symbols (especially the spiral ) to prove the norms of animistic thought that are valid worldwide.

Works

• Eduard Renner: About the magical and animistic in the experience and thinking of the Uri mountain farmers. Dissertation from the University of Bern, 1937.
• Eduard Renner: Golden Ring about Uri: a book about the experiences and thoughts of our mountain people, about magic and ghosts and about the first and last things. Metz (Helvetische Bücherei), Zurich 1941. ISBN 3250101532 (new edition 1991)
• Eduard Renner, Jakob Wirsch (ed.): Brazen bowls: about the animistic forms of thought and experience. Haupt, Bern 1967.

Web link

• Roland Müller: Review of Brazen Bowls , 1968