Kinship (motive)
In Plato's Dialog Symposium , the concept of kinship is presented: initially created as a spherical soul , a violent separation ensues, so that people search for their "second half" for life. When this other part of the spherical soul has been found, a deep connection is created between the two people, which cannot be separated again by anything.
In about 3000 years of literary history, two heroes of epics, dramas and short texts have been portrayed time and again - and with quite a changing context - as reincarnated souls who have connected with one another in the belief that they are meant for one another. Whether Isis and Osiris or Pyramus and Thisbe, Tristan and Isolde or Goethe's elective affinities - right up to Kleist's Katchen and Graf Wetter vom Strahl or Rosamunde Pilcher's never-ending series of princesses and princes made for one another: the idea is repeatedly articulated that there are two souls for a life together in an already physically pre-formed organism. The current concept of soul family (cf. also dual soul ) is structured by these diverse works of literary tradition. Its importance is revealed through its literary history.
Antiquity
Isis and Osiris
Isis is called the sister and wife of Osiris in Egyptian mythology . After the god Seth killed Osiris, Isis managed to reassemble her husband's dismembered body and bring it back to life.
The cult of Isis and Osiris was passed down in later antiquity mainly through Herodotus , Plutarch and Apuleius and has repeatedly found literary appreciation in modern times.
Orpheus and Eurydice
According to early Greek mythology, Orpheus was born the son of Apollo and the muse Calliope in Thrace. Married to the dryad Eurydice , the young bride is taken from him as a result of a snakebite. He follows the deceased lover by wandering into Hades and by playing the harp moves the gods to return Eurydice to him on earthly life. The only condition is that he does not turn to his companion on the way to this world. Tragically, he cannot avoid turning back. Eurydice is withdrawn to Hades and Orpheus falls into a deep depression. Finally he is slain by the mad maenads, and his head and lyre drift on the waters to the island of Lesbos, from where Apollo lifts the remains of the deceased into the constellation.
The literary and musical arrangements of Orpheus and Eurydice's material range from Monteverdi to Gluck, Offenbach, French Surrealism and German Modernism (Ingeborg Bachmann) to German postmodernism.
Pyramus and Thisbe
Ovid's Metamorphoses contain the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. The parents of the young couple have forbidden the two to meet. Since the families live wall to wall, the lovers communicate through a gap in the partition. They arrange a meeting near a well, from where they want to escape home together. Thisbe arrives at the well first. She is fleeing from a lioness who has just torn an animal apart. Thisbe's veil is smeared with blood from the lioness's mouth. When Pyramus arrives, he discovers the veil and suspects that Thisbe had been killed by the lioness. He throws himself into his sword. When Thisbe finds the body of Pyramus, she also throws herself into the sword lying next to Pyramus. The parents put the couple's ashes in a common urn to fulfill the lovers' desire for union.
Hero and Leander
According to Greek legend Leander swam through the Hellespont every night to visit his beloved Hero. Hero put a lamp in the window to give Leander an orientation at night. When the storm extinguished the lamp, the hero got lost and drowned.
middle Ages
Hartmann von Aue
In his novella, written around 1190, Hartmann von Aue tells of a high-ranking nobleman named Der poor Heinrich . His splendid life is suddenly interrupted when God sends him serious illness. He fell ill with leprosy ("leprosy"). After visiting a number of doctors in vain, he learns that only a sexually mature virgin can help him if she has her heart cut out for him. Heinrich leaves his castle and moves into a farm under the castle. The farmer's daughter falls in love with the lord and wants to sacrifice herself for him. During the operation, which Heinrich observes through a hole in the wall, Heinrich becomes aware of the girl's beauty and realizes the futility of preserving his corrupted body against this pure being. He interrupted the operation and had to listen to serious accusations from the farmer's daughter: he had robbed her of eternal life and the great joy of heart to be able to sacrifice herself for him. On the way home Heinrich was wonderfully healed and - despite the great difference in class - he married the young girl. The souls destined for one another are inextricably linked.
Gottfried of Strasbourg
The story of Tristan and Isolde tells the connection between two lovers outside of court society. King Marke sends his bravest vassal, the nephew Tristan, to the Irish royal court to ask for the hand of the Irish king's daughter Isolde. Brangäne, the servant of the beautiful king's daughter, serves a wine on the crossing to Cornwall, which was created by the sorceress Isolde-mother for the bridal night with mark. The drink has the property of forever connecting the couples who enjoy it together.
After Tristan and Isolde fell victim to Brangänes confusion in the Old French ( Thomas von Bretagne ) and early Middle High German epics ( Eilhard von Oberge ), Gottfried von Strasbourg describes the story of the lovers in a much more differentiated manner around 1210. The young couple is meant for one another and must follow their high destiny outside the courtroom. The love potion only symbolizes the fact of being determined for one another.
From now on Tristan and Isolde begin to love each other irresistibly. Their secret meetings are discovered and exposed through the use of cunning. First there is a trial through a divine judgment. Isolde can prove her innocence by not being hurt by a red-hot iron. The monk Gottfried allows God to justify the love of soul mates outside the courtroom.
Finally, the lovers escape the pursuit of the familiar Markes by finding refuge in the so-called Minnegrotte. Gottfried describes this grotto based on the idea of the paradise garden as a place of highest love. The kinship of Tristan and Isolde is glorified as a relationship beyond courtly constraints.
Nevertheless, Tristan has to flee to mainland France and leave Isolde behind in King Marke's custody. Tristan meets Isolde Weisshand in France. After Tristan and Isolde Weißhand had various love experiences, Tristan became aware of the similarities between the two lovers while reading the name “Isolde”.
The story of Gottfried von Strassburg reaches this far. However, from older Tristan poems it is known that Tristan is life-threateningly injured by a poisoned sword while serving in the war for Isolde Weißhand's brother. Only Marke's wife would be able to heal the wound. They send help to Cornwall and agree to set black sails on their return if Isolde is not on board. Out of jealousy, Isolde Weisshand arranges for black sails to be set, even though Marke's wife is on board the ship. Tristan dies of desperation and Isolde from Cornwall suffers death from grief in the face of her dead lover.
In order to prove that the love of soul mates is justified by God's providence, Gottfried had already forged things beyond his sources in his interpretation of the love potion, in God's judgment and in the depiction of the grotto. The story of the death of love would have fully disclosed the conception of kinship, persecuted as heretical around 1210.
It has often been puzzled as to why Gottfried's epic was not completed. Was the Strasbourg monk prevented from continuing his work by illness or natural death? Or has he been convicted or even executed as a member of a forbidden sect through monastic sanctions. In any case, the idea of reincarnation has been forbidden on the death penalty since Constantine the Great. It is also known that around 1200 the monastic order of the Cathars was persecuted by the Strasbourg Inquisition and silenced hundreds of times by public executions. The representation of the couple without magical exculpation by the Minne potion allows the conclusion that Gottfried's work was intended to be a demonstration of the belief in reincarnation. (It was only with Wagner's opera that such a development of the Tristan material was successful.)
Dante
.jpg)
In the years around 1290 the Italian poet Dante Alighieri created a "new" kind of soulmate. In order to highlight what is new in his life, he calls his poetry “Vita Nova” (later titled “Vita Nuova”). At a young age, the poet experienced the death of his beloved Beatrice and spent the rest of his life in the highest veneration of the deceased, whom he celebrated in alternating rhythmic and prosaic texts as an angelic being and experienced alongside Christ, God and Mary. Through his way of communicating with the deceased, he himself achieves an inner purification that transfigures him during his lifetime and leads him into a community of souls with the deceased.
Modern times
Romeo and Juliet `
In his early work Romeo and Juliet , William Shakespeare revisits the ancient material of Hero and Leander. The souls destined for one another are prevented by the prohibition of warring families from connecting with one another in love. Through malice and mistaken identity, the souls of kindred die tragically.
Elective affinities
Goethe's novel Elective Affinities tells the story of two men and two women who are fond of each other in different ways. Eduard, married to Charlotte, falls in love with Ottilie. Captain Otto arrives as a guest at Edward and Charlotte's estate and develops an intimate relationship with the host's wife. The new relationships are presented as the result of a kind of chemical reaction: the development is compelling because a certain predestination exerts a puzzling influence: the soul mates find each other.
The problem comes to a head when Eduard and his marital partner have a child who mentally belongs to Ottilie. The tragic end is reached when the child of the elective affinity drowns through an accident.
Hyperion and Diotima
.jpg)
In his epistolary novel Hyperion (1797–99), Friedrich Hölderlin described the relationship between an extremely sensitive young man and a young lady named Diotima. The Greek word hyper means something like 'over' and ion means something like ' going'. The enthusiastic young admirer is therefore already a crossover by name. His limitless love is a soul love, which Diotima reciprocates with just as soul orientation. The novel has autobiographical traits. Therefore a connection with Holderlin's psychiatric illness has often been emphasized. Hyperion's kinship with Diotima (Greek: 'the divine') becomes the subject of a poet who, over the years, confuses his real incarnation less and less with the visions of his dreams and waking dreams.
Finally, in his drama Empedocles , Holderlin tries to portray the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who descends into the volcano Etna in order to achieve a union with the gods. In Holderlin's judgment, Empedocles is a soul mate of the Greek gods.
Käthchen von Heilbronn
In his comedy Das Käthchen von Heilbronn , Heinrich von Kleist shows the affinity between a young girl and a count named Wetter vom Strahl. The young girl pursues the count on his rides through the country and seeks the immediate vicinity of the count as far as she can. Her father is suing the count before the Vote Court for having bewitched his daughter. But it turns out that she has an inner calling. Eventually she turns out to be the real daughter of the emperor and receives her lover as a husband. The kinship between the Count and his Kätchen is an esoteric love story with a comedy character that is characterized by the deviant and puzzling behavior of the young girl.
wagner
Richard Wagner's Tristan opera is influenced by his knowledge of the high medieval epic Gottfried von Straßburg, but it contains a very special content and all the more a profoundly new interpretation. Influenced by Schopenhauer's connection to Buddhist reincarnation theory, he lets the lovers experience a union in love-death, which he calls "transfiguration".
The love of the two poisoned is a love that can only be fulfilled in death. Wagner knew August von Platen's Tristan poem, in which the sight of the truly beautiful inevitably leads to death: only in the hereafter can beauty be experienced in its perfection.
Wagner's music expresses this basic conception in a harmonious exaggeration of the so-called tonality: in particular the “Tristan chord”, which runs through the entire opera as a leitmotif, creates a multi-sound of unidentifiable depth.
Thomas Mann
With his novella Tristan , published in 1902 , Thomas Mann takes up the theme of soul mates, which Wagner had radically designed. Spinell, a writer, listens to Gabriele Klöterjahn's piano performance. She interprets Wagner's Tristan opera, and the poet experiences the love of those determined for one another with the expression of great admiration. A few days later, Mrs. Klöterjahn succumbs to her serious lung disease. The poet blames Gabriele's husband for the fate of the pianist and indulges in bad abuse. Thomas Mann distances himself from the idea of an apotheosis of love through the writer's unworthy behavior. It belongs to a time that ends with the death of his protagonist Klöterjahn.
literature
- Abelard, Wolfgang: Eurydice. Confessions of a Leukemia Husband. Norderstedt 2008
- Assmann, Jan: Death and the afterlife in ancient Egypt. Beck, Munich 2003
- Berlinghof, Regina: Mirjam. Mary Magdalene and Jesus. Published by Klotz, Eschborn 2012
- Bhagavad Gita: the Song of Songs of Action. Complete edition with explanations. Drei Eichen Verlag, undated
- Boff, Leonardo: Ave Maria. The feminine and the Holy Spirit. Patmos, Düsseldorf 1982
- Elias, Sabine B .: Subject in variations, “poor Heinrich” and the problem of guilt. With Hartmann von Aue, Ricarda Huch and Gerhart Hauptmann. National Library of Canada, Ottawa 1985.
- Elisabeth Frenzel , Sybille Grammetbauer: Substances of world literature. A lexicon of longitudinal sections of the history of poetry (= Kröner's pocket edition . Volume 300). 10th, revised and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-520-30010-9 .
- Glenn, Jonas: The Spiritual Kinship on Baptist Origins. In: Journal of Baptist Studies 3, 2009, pp. 16-23.
- Hasselmann, Varda; : Archetypes of the soul. Munich: Goldmann 2010
- Hawass, Zahi; Vannini, Sandro: Tutankhamun. Frederking & Thaler, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-89405-711-4 (illustrated book: grave, sarcophagus, grave goods and history of discovery)
- Kreplin, Matthias: The Self-Understanding of Jesus, Zurich, 2001
- Klein, Hans-Dieter (Ed.): The concept of the soul in the history of philosophy, Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005
- Jung, Carl. G: Collected works. Volumes 1–20: Collected Works, 20 Vols., Letters, 3 Vols. And 3 Suppl. Vols., In 30 Tl. Vol., Vol. 9/1, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious: BD 9 / I . Munich: Pathmos 1993
- Leis, Mario; Sourek, Patrick (Ed.): Myth Hercules. Texts from Pindar to Peter Weiss. Reclam Library, Leipzig 2005
- Merkelbach, Reinhold: Isis regina - Zeus Serapis, BG Teubner, Stuttgart, Leipzig 1995.
- Musil, Robert: Isis and Osiris. In: Robert Musil. Collected works in new volumes. Edited by Adolf Frisé. Vol. 6. Reinbek near Hamburg (Rowohlt Verlag) 1978, p. 465
- Obst, Helmut: reincarnation. World history of an idea, Beck, Munich 2009.
- Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), Metamorphoseon libri (Metamorphoses), Artemis and Winkler, April 2004
- Ranke, Friedrich: The allegory of the Minnegrotte in Gottfried's Tristan. Berlin 1925
- Rougemont, Denis de: Love and the West. Publisher H. Frietsch. 5th edition 2007
- Sagehorn, Ricarda, Cornelia Mroseck: Dual souls & love: when fate meets two hearts. Norderstedt 2012.
- Schäfer, Gerhard: Investigations on the German-language Marienlyric of the 12th and 13th centuries. 1971
- Schmidt, KO: The light is in you. From I-Consciousness to Cosmic Consciousness. Drei Eichen Verlag 1959.
- Schmitt-von Mühlenfels, Franz: Pyramus and Thisbe. Types of reception of an Ovidian material in literature, art and music. Winter, Heidelberg 1972.
- Schumann, Hans Wolfgang: The historical Buddha. Life and teaching of Gotama. Hugendubel, Kreuzlingen 2004
- Sier, Kurt: The speech of Diotima. Investigations on the Platonic Symposium. Teubner, Stuttgart 1997
- Storch, Wolfgang (Ed.): Myth Orpheus. Texts from Virgil to Ingeborg Bachmann. Reclam, Leipzig 1997.
- Weber, Gottfried / Hoffmann, Werner: Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan. Stuttgart 1962
- Werner, Edeltraud: Muhammad's journey beyond the hereafter. Liber Scale Machometi. Kitāb al-miʿrāj. With an introduction and translated from Latin by Edeltraud Werner. Religious studies texts and studies. Volume 14. Georg Olms Verlag Hildesheim 2007
- Zipp, Friedrich: From the original sound to world harmony. Becoming and working of the idea of the music of the spheres. 2nd improved and supplemented edition. Merseburger, Kassel 1998.
- Zubke, Friedhelm: Motives of moral action in Lessing's "Nathan the Wise". University Press Göttingen 2008
Individual evidence
- ↑ Plato, Symposium 189d-193d
- ↑ See Glenn 2009
- ↑ cf. Sagehorn 2012
- ↑ See Hasselmann 2001. On reincarnation cf. Fruit 2009
- ↑ Assmann 2003
- ↑ cf. Musil 1978, Merkelbach 1995
- ↑ cf. Stork 1997
- ↑ cf. Abelard 2008
- ↑ Ovid 2004, cf. Schmitt-von Mühlenfels 1972
- ↑ On the survival of the material cf. Frenzel 2005, pp. 771-774
- ↑ Ancient sources of the material are Virgil's “Georgica” (3.258) and Ovid's “Heroides” (18:19). In modern times there are adaptations by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Handel, Schiller, Grillparzer and Lord Byron. A pastiche was created by Heinz Erhardt. See Frenzel 2005, pp. 381–383
- ↑ cf. Elias 1995
- ↑ See Rougemont 2007
- ↑ cf. Tendril 1925
- ↑ cf. Weber / Hoffmann 1962
- ↑ Diotima in Plato's Dialog Symposium is the manner questioned by Socrates who knows how to teach even the master about the high art of love. see. Sier 1997
- ↑ Behind the theory of a harmony in the hereafter stands the ancient (Pythagorean) conception of a harmony of the spheres , which has also reappeared in various concepts of recent music theory. See Zipp 1998