Ludwig Staudenmaier

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Ludwig Staudenmaier (born February 14, 1865 in Krumbach ; died August 19, 1933 in Rome ) was a German priest, natural scientist and esotericist.

Life

Ludwig Staudenmaier was born out of wedlock to a seamstress and, thanks to church grants, attended school and from 1884 to 1888 a church lyceum. He was a chaplain in Nördlingen for a year and was then able to study zoology and chemistry at the University of Munich with a further scholarship . Staudenmaier received his doctorate and was appointed associate professor of experimental chemistry at the Lyceum Freising in 1896 and then as full professor in 1907 .

From a theological and scientific point of view, Staudenmaier dealt with the spiritism that was in vogue at the time and wanted to give the matter a scientific basis. Since 1901 he carried out self-experiments with automatic writing . He then experimented with hearing voices , which he suspected was the source of the ear. He tried to prove that the thinking activity of the brain is transported to the ear and triggers noises there. An article appeared in 1910, the book for the first time in 1912. It was ignored by science, but it was reissued in 1918 and 1920 and appeared in 1922 in a revised edition. This was published again in 1968 by the Scientific Book Society .

Staudenmaier had been suffering from nervous diseases since 1879, which were influenced by the rigid self-experiments. In 1918 and 1920 he visited the psychiatric clinic in Munich. In 1923 he was given early retirement. He was working on a medical paper entitled On the Problem of Age to Prove Immortality . He underwent intense exercises to keep individual parts of his body young. The manuscript is lost.

Disappointed about the lack of recognition of his work, he moved to warmer Rome in 1927 , where he continued to experiment and continued to lose weight. Staudenmaier died of uremia in the hospital on the Tiber Island and was buried on Campo Verano . His estate is administered by the Munich University Library.

The Staudenmaier receptionist leads a niche existence in esoteric circles.

In 2014, the Swiss neuropsychologist Peter Brugger compared Staudenmaier's theories with more recent results from neuroscientific research, in which voices were found to have speech activity in the larynx .

Fonts (selection)

  • Attempts to establish a scientific experimental magic , in: Annalen der Naturphilosophie 9 (1910), pp. 329-367. Excerpt in: Torsten Hahn; Jutta Person; Nicolas Pethes (ed.): Borderlines between delusion and knowledge: on the coevolution of experiment and paranoia 1850-1910 . Frankfurt: Campus, 2002, pp. 73-93 ISBN 3-593-37057-3
  • Magic as an experimental natural science . Leipzig: Akad. Verlagsgesellschaft, 1912 (reprints 1922, 1968, 1982, 2013)
  • Investigations on tellurium . Hamburg, 1895. Dissertation
  • with M. Chikashige: The atomic weight of tellurium , in: Zeitschrift für Analytische Chemie , v36 n1 (1897 12): pp. 281–284

literature

  • Nicolas Pethes : “L'aliéné ne raisonne plus expérimentalement”? Ludwig Staudenmaier's experimental magic between occultism and psychoanalysis . In: Torsten Hahn; Jutta Person; Nicolas Pethes (Ed.) Boundaries between madness and knowledge: on the coevolution of experiment and paranoia 1850-1910 . Frankfurt: Campus, 2002, pp. 293-314 ISBN 3-593-37057-3
  • Carl Amery : Faust in Freising: the strange life of the professor and priest Ludwig Staudenmaier . Munich: Bayer. Rundfunk, August 11, 1988 (2nd manuscripts, with handwritten notes; incl. A press release)
  • Matthias Hermanns : shamans, pseudo-shamans, redeemers and saviors. Part 1 shamans . Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1970, pp. 138-146

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Brugger: Genius in madness. Modern neuroscientific findings on hearing voices underpin the theses of a Munich researcher who a hundred years ago first drifted into the world of ghosts and then into mental derangement . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , January 2, 2014, p. 16
personal data
SURNAME Staudenmaier, Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German priest, scientist and esotericist
DATE OF BIRTH February 14, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Krumbach
DATE OF DEATH August 19, 1933
Place of death Rome