Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel (review)

REVIEWS 183 Christian faith, not by heterodox magic, which is not to deny the influence of shamanism upon the construction of the figure of Faust, but to question its significance. Another dimension in the book emerges most decisively in the afterword, pointing 'Toward a Shamanology." Here we have a series of insights and speculations about the nature of shamanism, its phenomenology. In conjunction with Michael Taussig's Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man (1986), this important book should stimulate us all to make strides in undiscovering the eighteenth century as we have known it. Arnd Böhm Carleton University Scott Abbott. Fictions of Freemasonry: Freemasonry and the German Novel. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991. 240pp. US$29.95. ISBN 0-81431992 -0. Freemasonry took its modem form in 1717 with the association of four old London lodges into a Grand Lodge; it quickly spread abroad, reaching Germany via Hamburg in 1737. On the Continent it took much more extravagant forms than the British institution, which was always sober and fairly conservative and never sought intellectual or political influence. French Freemasonry soon built on a legend of Templar origins (for which Abbott's "(semi)-historical" [p. 178] is far too generous) a system of "higher" degrees beyond the British Apprentice, Fellowcraft, and Master. This predominated in Germany as "Strict Observance" from the 1760s, but soon suffered rivalry and infiltration from new systems on the right and left: first the Rosicrucians, somewhat aligned with the Counter-Enlightenment stance of the Roman Catholic Church, then their polar opposite, the anticlerical and intellectually radical Illuminati. During the early 1780s, as Strict Observance was losing adherents after the discrediting of its foundation legend, the Illuminati sought influence particularly in Bavaria and Austria, and the Rosicrucians achieved it in Prussia with the conversion in 1781 of Friedrich Wilhelm II, the heir of Frederick the Great. Both shortly suffered a general collapse, leaving their followers disillusioned: the Illuminati in 1787 with the publication of their papers, the Rosicrucians by a fast decline over the next few years. Of the freelance Rosicrucian-type practitioners running their own systems for private profit, tiie latest-flourishing and most famous, Cagliostro, disappeared in 1789, after scandals in France and Germany, into the prisons of the Roman Inquisition. In the climate ofsuspicion and repression following the French Revolution, German Freemasonry was left to refashion itself, which it did in the 1790s by a widespread return to the British model (shaped, incidentally, by the actor-manager F.L. Schroder, the "original" of Goethe's Serio in Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). While a few writers experienced in the world of the lodges tried to embody in fiction something of these rivalries and disillusionments (Abbott lists Starck's Saint Nicaise), the largest category of German eighteenth-century novels with quasi-Masonic concerns is the so-called Bundesroman ("league novel"), whose most famous examples, Schiller's Ghost-Seer and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, Abbott discusses. Like the English Gothic novel to which it is a counterpart, the Bundesroman belongs chiefly to the 1790s; it is a form of romance dealing usually with the exotic (Eastern) and/or long-ago (chivalric) and the occult: mystic journeys, venerable mages, veiled ladies, and much pageantry and ceremonial betokening hidden power. As did the more colourful brotherhoods of the time 184 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 5:2 for their rituals and legends, it draws on a long history of initiatory fictions, from 77ie Golden Ass through the Chemical Wedding ofChristian Rosenkreuz to Terrasson's Séthos, 1731. (Its best-known English relatives are Radcliffe's The Italian and Maturin's Family of Montorio, both exploiting these novels' frequent theme of the traps laid for naive faith.) The most comprehensive study remains Marianne Thalmann's Der Trivialroman des 18. Jahrhunderts (1923), which analyses some seventy-eight of them in terms of recurring motifs. Abbott deals only briefly and at some distance with this background, as with the immediate contexts of his novels: for example, his list of who "were Masons" (pp. 16-17) could use some qualification, and he does not note either that the real subject of the Berlinische Monatsschrift articles is Rosicrucian activities or that Goethe joined the Illuminati...