Into the Spindle of Silence: The Mystic Worlds of Gustav Meyrink
There is a rustling in the wings of forgotten literature, and from its shadowed folds steps a figure slender and eerie, a puppet master of esoterica, his ink dipped not only into language but into the obscure sum of mystery and transcendence. Gustav Meyrink (1868–1932), born Gustav Meyer in Vienna, was not so much a traditional novelist as he was a constructing architect of bizarre visions, spiritual vertigo, and Gothic absurdities. Most famously known for his novel Der Golem (1915), Meyrink’s deeper import lies not wholly in his narratives but in the disturbing spiritual machinery he sets humming beneath them.
Meyrink’s early life followed neither the trajectory of a canonized writer nor the itinerary of a clean philosophical soul. His illegitimate birth to a baron and an actress was symptomatic of a lifetime spent in between spheres: occultism and business, satire and mysticism, the solid and the permeable. At one point a financial clerk and then a co-founder of a banking house, Meyrink’s fate twisted irrevocably in 1902 when he attempted suicide, revolver loaded at hand, but found himself instead “interrupted by a trivial accident”—a pamphlet titled Afterlife mysteriously arrived at his door in that moment of deliberation. So began his lifelong devotion to spiritual investigation, particularly Western esotericism, Theosophy, and Kabbalah.
His writing was neither accepted nor comfortably situated within the mainstream, even while his popularity soared in German-speaking countries during the Weimar period. In his fiction, Meyrink forged new literary territory, one in which metaphysical horror served as a language of gnosis. Perhaps nowhere is this strange incandescence more focused than in his best-known novels: Der Golem, Das grüne Gesicht (“The Green Face,” 1916), and Der weiße Dominikaner (“The White Dominican,” 1921). These texts do not merely describe other worlds—they dislocate the reader into other modes of being.
We turn now to a phrase that has lingered in my own studies like a rune etched above a portal: “Er erkennt, daß er sein Leben nicht selber ist,” Meyrink writes in Der weiße Dominikaner, “He realizes that he is not his life” (Meyrink, 1921, p. 132). Here, beneath the typically ornate dialect and alchemical mystique of the author’s prose, lies the philosophical fulcrum of his entire worldview. This is no modest existential hiccup, no modern shrug of self-awareness. It is, rather, a rupture of identity so total that it resembles death—not a death of the body but of the self as myth.
In Meyrink’s cosmogony, the self is not sovereign. It is a borrowed tapestry, sewn from forgotten dreams and ancestral hauntings. Like the Kabbalistic notion of the klipot—shells that encase divine light—the ego in his work is something to be penetrated, scraped away. In The Green Face, the main character, Hauberrisser, wanders through the twisted alleys of a plague-drenched Amsterdam, only to discover his identity to be a multi-layered fiction. “The soul wears masks like a leper dressing wounds,” he says, rather wearily (Meyrink, 1916, p. 87).
One could liken Meyrink’s methods to a form of spiritual surgery—cutting through narrative itself to expose the rootless vastness that lies beneath. Yet, unlike the pure negation of nihilism, or the sterile liberal vanishing point of postmodernism, Meyrink’s void is a corridor into an ontological harvest of transformation. Reflection on becoming—true becoming, broken free from time—is central to his texts.
It warrants pondering why Meyrink’s appeal has waned in academic spheres. Perhaps it is precisely because he does not fit the trajectory of secular literature. His books are seditious in how they treat history and fact not as context but illusion. In Der Engel vom westlichen Fenster (1927), Lord Kelley emerges as a character born of both astral projection and historical speculation; a being who defies epistemological border control. “Time is the substance dreams are made of,” Kelley muses—not so much a homage to Shakespeare as a direct challenge to linearity (Meyrink, 1927, p. 203).
But let us now step away from the libraries and toward the whispered lane of praxis. For the real importance of Meyrink today lies not chiefly in literature but in living. His work insists on transmutation—not entertainment, not solace. When he writes, “Der Weg zur Unsterblichkeit ist schmal wie die Schneide einer Rasierklinge” (“The path to immortality is narrow as the edge of a razor blade”), he is not poeticizing; he is warning (Meyrink, 1921, p. 65). The narrowness is not aesthetic but ethical, an injunction against settling for appearance.
This brings me to a rather recent meditation, drawn up under the dim gaslight of our present liminality. Consider, if you will, a room—your room. Within it, the usual detritus: pens, half-read books, a screen perhaps still glowing. But suppose—for half a breath—that none of these things have bearings in the “real.” Suppose instead you are wandering through a dream that only mimics causality. This is not a metaphor, in Meyrink’s parlance, but an operative condition. He believed dreams and waking reality are interlinked stanzas of a greater poem, threaded by an author we are yet to remember we wrote.
His dream-labyrinths are not escapist literature. Far from it. They push us back toward reality with greater suspicion. What if your employer is not a man but a symbol? What if every street you walked is a circle in a mandala misread? What if your memories are the thoughts of another being who dreamt you briefly into toddling blood?
Of course, it is dangerous—this mode of being. And perhaps that’s why Meyrink has been left at the fringes, his name evoking only tenuous echoes among readers of Borges or devotees of esoterica. But more than ever, we need names like his. In a century made from code and surveillance, where metaphysics has been replaced by metadata, the call from his books is urgent, not quaint. He gestures to the cracked mirror before us—our face smiling inaccurately—and says: “Become what you are not yet, and have always been.”
Let Meyerink’s own life be the final glyph in our meditation. After his flirtations with Freemasonry and Eastern mysticism, he withdrew almost completely from the public sphere. He spent his final years meditating, speaking seldom. He was, as he prophesied in his fictions, no longer himself. Indeed, perhaps never had been. When he died, it is said his corpse smiled. What remains are the texts—peculiar skeletal keys. Unlocking what, precisely, may not matter. The important motion is the unlocking.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, Kabbalah, occult literature
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1 Goodrick-Clarke, N. (1985). The Occult Roots of Nazism. New York: NYU Press. Goodrick-Clarke provides a nuanced view of the cultural backdrop in which Meyrink operated, particularly the intersection of mysticism, politics, and art in early 20th-century Europe.
2 Sedgwick, M. (2004). Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Offers insightful commentary on Meyrink’s role in broader Traditionalist currents.
3 Walker, D. P. (1972). Spiritual and Demonic Magic: From Ficino to Campanella. University of Notre Dame Press. While not about Meyrink per se, this source gives essential philosophical coordinates on Renaissance occult thought influential to Meyrink’s perspectives.
4 Corben, R. (2010). “Haunted by Golem: Gustav Meyrink and the Kabbalistic Turn.” In Studies in Esoteric Literature, Vol. 2.