Champagne Supernovalis

I’ve lately become interested in Novalis, one of the late 18th Century German romantic poets. He appears to have been a mystic/philosopher, and some of his writings effect me deeply—I feel a kind of interior Klang.

Even his assumed name reminds one of a supernova, the explosion of a very big star, without which there would have been no life on earth. Like Novalis, supernovas make a huge blast—using up their energy quickly, making for a very short life. Indeed Novalis’ thoughts contain the sparkle of the latest understandings in space and physics, in tune with Hawking and Einstein. And this, more than two hundred years ago, when science as we know it was only newly born.

Novalis was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 to March 25, 1801), an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism. He was born into nobility in the Harz Mountains, then one of the most inaccessible areas of Germany, known for its ancient underground mines, and suspected to be the final, remote hiding place of a middle-German witch cult. Novalis was the second child of eleven born to the second wife of a deeply pious member of the Moravian church.

Like most of his privileged contemporaries, Novalis was homeschooled and taught by relatives as a child, up until he successfully graduated from law study in 1794. He also met and befriended the core members of the German Romantic movement, including Goethe, Schiller, Herder, Tieck and the Brothers Schlegel. He became influenced by Johann Fichte’s scientific ideas, which he merged with his own spiritual revelations into ideas he called a “Religion of Love,” into a philosophy called “magical realism.”

When he was 22 years old, he met and instantly felt a soul bond with Sophie von Kuhn, then a 12 year old child. They became engaged a year later, but she began to suffer from a kind of liver cancer. Her struggle for life became an emotional and poetic focus of Novalis’ entire circle of friends. Before they could be married, Sophie died at the age of 15.

Novalis became the auditor of the family salt mines in Weissenfels, while still studying at the Mining Academy of Freiburg, where he pursued a wide range of sciences including geology, mathematics, chemistry, biology, history, and philosophy. Here he began to collect materials to create an encyclopedia, which he intended would seamlessly blend the sciences and spirituality, the language of nature with the word of God.

“The magical idealist wonderfully refracts the inner light, and poetically transforms nature by the enchanted, potent faculty of thought. This involves reinstating the Renaissance concept of the magus and applying it systematically to modern science.”

He invented a new literary form called ‘fragments,’ which he later published in a book called Pollen. (he also finished and published Faith and Love or the King and the Queen, and Hymns to the Night) These fragments are separately listed revelations and statements which range in power from simple musings to potent oracular truths. It is in these works especially, along with his poetry, that Novalis can be assumed to be a mystic, speaking forth universal truths from nature itself...perhaps spoken into his ear by land spirits.

I can only speculate as to how he reached these understandings, for they don’t seem purely intellectual, but they contain a sound of the eternal. They hold at times a power that I have myself only experienced during trance or shamanic journeying—the voice is that of beings who live beyond the veil. Apart from journeying to speak with Novalis himself in spirit, we may never know how he came to arrive at these apparent otherworldly communications.

For his life was very brief. After study he became engaged to Julie von Charpentier, a professor’s daughter, and in December 1800 was named mining ‘magistrate’ for the district of Thuringia. Yet the following summer he began to suffer from tuberculosis, from which he eventually died in March 1801.

“We are connected to every part of the universe, as with future and prehistory.
It only depends on the direction and length of our concentration which relation
we particularly wish to develop, which will become the most important for us,
which will take effect.”

He seems to know here that thought is just matter-to-be.

(To be continued...)