The Glass Bead Game
The Glass Bead Game
Das Glasperlenspiel
is the last full-length novel by the German author Hermann Hesse.
It was begun in 1931 and published in Switzerland in 1943
In 1946, Hesse won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In honoring him in its Award Ceremony Speech, the Swedish Academy said that the novel "occupies a special position" in Hesse's work.[2]
"The Glass Bead Game" is a literal translation of the German title, but the book has also been published under the title Magister Ludi, Latin for "Master of the Game", an honorific title awarded to the book's central character.
"Magister Ludi" can also be seen as a pun: magister is a Latin word meaning "teacher", while ludus can be translated as either "game" or "school". But the title Magister Ludi is misleading, as it implies the book is a straightforward bildungsroman.
In reality, the book touches on many different genres, and the bulk of the story is on one level a parody of the biography genre
DISSECTION
Set in Central Europe some five hundred years in the future,
The Glass Bead Game is a way of playing with the ideas of human culture; it uses them like a painter paints with the colors on the palette.
The insights of the world’s great scholars and artists have been reduced to core topics, with which the Glass Bead Game player plays. It is up to us to design and perfect the game. Theoretically this game can contain the entire knowledge of the universe.
It is a truth-seeking process which is played by monks in the futuristic enigmatic province of Castalia.
Unlike the culture of Hesse’s time, as we travel into a new millennium, as new and better visions have manifested, mysteriously the rules have been revealed...
The Glass Bead Game is a game of co-creating ideas, of making sense of our world and finding meaning.
Description
Castalia elements:
Castalian Order, castalia is home to an austere order of intellectuals
runs boarding schools of elite students,
Devotees cultivate and play a Glass Bead Game,
the exact nature of the game remains elusive. The rules of the game are only alluded to.
Game devotees occupy a special school in Castalia known as Waldzell.
Playing the game well requires years of hard study of music, mathematics, and cultural history.
The game is essentially an abstract synthesis of all arts and sciences.
It proceeds by players making deep connections between seemingly unrelated topics
The novel is an example of a Bildungsroman, following the life of a distinguished member of the Castalian Order, Joseph Knecht, whose surname means "servant" (and is cognate with the English word knight). The plot chronicles Knecht's education as a youth, his decision to join the order, his mastery of the Game, and his advancement in the order's hierarchy to eventually become Magister Ludi, the executive officer of the Castalian Order's game administrators.[5]
Plot
The novel's beginning introduces the Music Master, the resident of Castalia who recruits Knecht as a young student and who is to have the longest-lasting and profoundest effect on Knecht throughout his life. At one point, as the Music Master nears death in his home at Monteport, Knecht obliquely refers to the Master's "sainthood". Knecht also develops another meaningful friendship with Plinio Designori, a student from a politically influential family, who is studying in Castalia as a guest, and holds vigorous debates with Designori, who views Castalia as an "ivory tower" with little to no impact on the outside world.
Although educated in Castalia, Knecht's path to "Magister Ludi" is atypical for the order, as he spends much of his time after graduation outside the province's boundaries. His first such venture, to the Bamboo Grove, results in his learning Chinese and becoming something of a disciple to Elder Brother, a recluse who had given up living in Castalia.
Next, as part of an assignment to foster goodwill between the order and the Catholic Church, Knecht is sent on several "missions" to the Benedictine monastery of Mariafels, where he befriends the historian Father Jacobus—a relationship that also profoundly affects Knecht.
As the novel progresses, Knecht begins to question his loyalty to the order, gradually coming to doubt that the intellectually gifted have a right to withdraw from life's big problems. Knecht, too, comes to see Castalia as a kind of ivory tower, an ethereal and protected community, devoted to pure intellectual pursuits but oblivious to the problems of life outside its borders. This conclusion precipitates a personal crisis, and, according to his personal views regarding spiritual awakening, Knecht does the unthinkable: he resigns as Magister Ludi and asks to leave the order, ostensibly to become of value and service to the larger culture. The heads of the order deny his request, but Knecht departs Castalia anyway, initially taking a job as a tutor to his childhood friend Designori's energetic and strong-willed son, Tito. Only a few days later, the story ends abruptly with Knecht drowning in a mountain lake while attempting to follow Tito on a swim for which Knecht was unfit.
The fictional narrator leaves off before the final sections of the book, remarking that the end of the story is beyond the scope of his biography. The concluding chapter, "The Legend", is reportedly from a different biography. After this final chapter, several of Knecht's "posthumous" works are then presented.
The first section contains Knecht's poetry from various periods of his life, followed by three short stories labeled "Three Lives".
These are presented as exercises by Knecht imagining his life had he been born in another time and place.
The first tells of a pagan rainmaker named Knecht who lived "many thousands of years ago, when women ruled".[6] Eventually the shaman's powers to summon rain fail, and he offers himself as a sacrifice for the good of the tribe.
The second is based on the life of St Hilarion and tells of Josephus, an early Christian hermit who acquires a reputation for piety but is inwardly troubled by self-loathing and seeks a confessor, only to find that same penitent had been seeking him.
The final story concerns the life of Dasa, a prince wrongfully usurped by his half-brother as heir to a kingdom and disguised as a cowherd to save his life. While working with the herdsmen as a young boy, Dasa encounters a yogi in meditation in the forest. He wishes to experience the same tranquility as the yogi, but is unable to stay. He later leaves the herdsmen and marries a beautiful young woman, only to be cuckolded by his half-brother (now the Rajah). In a cold fury, he kills his half-brother and finds himself once again in the forest with the old yogi, who, through an experience of an alternate life, guides him on the spiritual path and out of the world of illusion (Maya).
The three lives, together with that as Magister Ludi, oscillate between extroversion (rainmaker, Indian life—both get married) and introversion (father confessor, Magister Ludi) while developing the four basic psychic functions of analytical psychology: sensation (rainmaker), intuition (Indian life), feeling (father confessor), and thinking (Magister Ludi).
Castalia
Castalia, where most of the novel is set, is described in English translation as the "pedagogical province". It forms part of a large and prosperous state whose leaders are broadly but not uncritically sympathetic to the Castalian ideal of scholarship.
Castalia is an entirely male community, whose members are or aspire to be members of a secular Order similar to monastic orders. Prospective members are recruited in their pre-/early teens from the most promising scholars in its host state's regular schools.
One of Castalia's roles (not explored in depth in the book) is provision of school teachers to its host state.
Another is the advancement of learning, primarily in the fields of mathematics, musicology (of Western music up to the 18th century), philology and the history of art. This role is entirely analytical: creativity and scientific research appear to be dead. A third role is to cultivate and develop the Glass Bead Game.[9]
The name of the pedagogic province in the story is taken from Greek legend of the nymph Castalia, who was transformed into an inspiration-granting fountain by the god Apollo.
Castalia the goddess of fountains, associates well with the Naiads. She owns her own fountain on Mount Parnassus, the sacred meeting place of the nine muses; Calliope, Clio, Urania, Euterpe, Erato, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Melpomene and their mother and one of the main Titans, Mnemosyne.
The game
The Glass Bead Game is "a kind of synthesis of human learning"[10] in which themes, such as a musical phrase or a philosophical thought, are stated. As the Game progresses, associations between the themes become deeper and more varied.[10]
Although the Glass Bead Game is described lucidly, the rules and mechanics are not explained in detail.[11] In the book however, he never explains the gameplay.
The gameplay cleverly merges each player's viewpoint, making our complex world easier to understand in a non-confrontational way.
Allusions
Many of the novel's characters have names that are allusive word games.[11] For example,
Knecht's predecessor as Magister Ludi was Thomas van der Trave, a veiled reference to Thomas Mann, who was born in Lübeck, situated on the Trave River.
Knecht's brilliant but unstable friend Fritz Tegularius is based on Friedrich Nietzsche,
Father Jacobus is based on the historian Jacob Burckhardt.[12]
The name of Carlo Ferromonte is an Italianized version of the name of Hesse's nephew, Karl Isenberg,
the name of the Glass Bead Game's inventor, Bastian Perrot of Calw, was taken from Heinrich Perrot, who owned a machine shop where Hesse once worked after dropping out of school.[12]
As utopian literature
In his biography of Hesse, Freedman wrote that the tensions caused by the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany directly contributed to the creation of The Glass Bead Game as a response to the oppressive times.[13]
"The educational province of Castalia, which provided a setting for the novel, came to resemble Hesse's childhood Swabia physically while assuming more and more the function of his adopted home, neutral Switzerland, which in turn embodied his own antidote to the crises of his time. It became the 'island of love' or at least an island of the spirit."[13]
According to Freedman, in the Glass Bead Game, "contemplation, the secrets of the Chinese I Ching and Western mathematics and music fashioned the perennial conflicts of his life into a unifying design.
Castalia is the fictional province imagined by Hermann Hesse in The Glass Bead Game (1943).
Castalia hosts a peculiar society entirely dedicated to the pursuit of pure knowledge. Mobilising Castalia as an equivocal image, at once archetype of modern universalism and fortress delegitimized by its own enclosure, the aim of this issue is to revisit and transform the Castalian model for the unification of reason.
Site 0. Castalia: the game of ends and means is structured around partially overlapping charts. These charts are meant to figure specific routes drawn in the site by the contributors to this issue.
The bulk of the novel is presented as a chronicle of the future, written by a historian of the year 2400 about an educational order for the elite, Castalia, which had been established to maintain those values considered worth preserving after the chaos of the 20th‐cen tury's wars. Yet this future world is also a world of the past, for the setting to which Hesse returns is akin to the Middle Ages. It exhibits, in addition to Castalia, tidy provincial towns, Benedictine monasteries and an astonishing number of women.
Into this world Hesse places his hero, the master and apostate Josef Knecht, who rises in Castalia's intricate educational hierarchy until he becomes its most exalted exponent — the Magister Ludi, highest servant of the Glass Bead Game.
This game is brilliantly conceived as a ceremony both mystical and rational—a secular sacrament.
Something like chess yet far more intricate, the Glass Bead Game vividly and concretely illustrates how the most varied aspects of nature and human experience can become part of a universal harmony (such as we find in music, mathematics and scientific law). Yet all this emphasis on a transcendent, rather Platonic unity
In opposition to this Cas talian attitude, the religious orders devote themselves to an active involvement in human time and suffering. It is the Benedictine Father Jacobus (a thin disguise for the Swiss his torian Jacob Burkhardt) who states the issue succinctly in a crucial conversation with Josef Knecht: “You [Cas talians] treat history as a mathematician does mathemat ics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, noth ing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
This charge is decisive. When toward the end of the novel Knecht defects from the order, he makes his decision on these grounds. But in the “legendary conclusion”, which follows, we learn that he has not really chosen a commitment to hu manity as a whole. He has not gone to teach in the schools of the world as he had at first proposed to do. Rather, he has chosen a personal relationship, and a very special one at that, as the tutor of his best friend's son.
Finally, while swimming with his pupil (in a somewhat over zealous exercise of his peda gogical duties) across an iso lated mountain lake, he dies in an icy rite of baptism and rebirth. As a recent critic, Mark Boulby, has accurately perceived, this final gesture, which in effect surrenders all reason and social commitment to a self‐annihilating act merg ing guru and disciple, lies at the heart of the novel's appeal to those who wish to see in Hesse an anti‐cultural force.
Theodore Ziolkowski suggests in his excellent introduction, that Knecht's death represents the matured intellectual's choice of “responsible action controlled by dispassionate reflection,” that a commitment to human life has indeed been made. Still, the ending, and much of the novel's elaborate apparatus, suggest a personal dissolution outside the life of reason. As in many of Hesse's books in “Steppenwolf,” in “Narcissus and Goldmund,” or in the con cluding scene of “Journey to the East” which shows HH and Leo joined back to back— the hero's passive embrace of his own extinction, his merg ing with another person, blurs the boundaries between selves —and between selves and the world — and paints everything into a single cosmic vision in which all distinctions will be ultimately erased.
The dualities in “The Glass Bead Game” are evident: a book about the future which is really about the past; a time less, universal game which is also the toy of a quaint passing culture; a work filled with im pressive learning yet leading to a negation of reason and knowl edge. Finally, the interplay of contraries and harmonies is part of the novel's theme and game. Some of these paradoxes, then, are surely intentional; others may have been due to lapses in revision during the many years Hesse was at work on the book. Basically they are all part of the novel's theme and of the total vision of unity, melting all characters, and all contradictions, into one, which it conveys with such great suc cess.
q Castalia
Cosmology of the Glass Bead Game
Metaphysics - The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse - Part 1
Hermann Hesse - Metaphysics - The Glass Bead Game - 2
Hermann Hesse's Long Summer (1997)
BrisScience (July 2015): The Glass Bead Game
Notes
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castalia
Dog; who was Hesse?
See annex i002
>>>o<<<
See Annex I001
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MSNiwlABbltQWA0KHH3MoIuGOOqqrX78gJPKyG95j5I/edit
Well, ...
The giants Fafner and Fasolt seize Freyja in Arthur Rackham's illustration of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen.
In Norse mythology, Fáfnir (Old Norse: [ˈfɑːvnez̠]) or Frænir is a son of Hreidmar and brother of Regin, Ótr, Lyngheiðr, and Lofnheiðr.[2] After being affected by the curse of Andvari's ring and gold, Fafnir became a dragon and was slain by Sigurd.
Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung),
WWV 86, is a cycle of four German-language epic music dramas composed by Richard Wagner.
The works are based loosely on characters from Germanic heroic legend, namely Norse legendary sagas and the Nibelungenlied. The composer termed the cycle a "Bühnenfestspiel" (stage festival play), structured in three days preceded by a Vorabend ("preliminary evening"). It is often referred to as the Ring cycle, Wagner's Ring, or simply The Ring.
Wagner wrote the libretto and music over the course of about twenty-six years, from 1848 to 1874. The four parts that constitute the Ring cycle are, in sequence:
Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)
Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)
Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)
In a dragon’s form Fafner now watches the hoard.
Arthur Rackham, from Siegfried & The twilight of the gods, by Richard Wagner, London, 1911.
Dog: Wasn't Warner the bloody jew who reinvented opera?
Wilhelm Richard Wagner (/ˈvɑːɡnər/ VAHG-nər; German: [ˈʁɪçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ] (listen); 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, theatre director, polemicist, and conductor who is chiefly known for his operas (or, as some of his mature works were later known, "music dramas"). Unlike most opera composers, Wagner wrote both the libretto and the music for each of his stage works. Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works in the romantic vein of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, Wagner revolutionised opera through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"), by which he sought to synthesise the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts, with music subsidiary to drama. He described this vision in a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realised these ideas most fully in the first half of the four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung).
His compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex textures, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs—musical phrases associated with individual characters, places, ideas, or plot elements. His advances in musical language, such as extreme chromaticism and quickly shifting tonal centres, greatly influenced the development of classical music. His Tristan und Isolde is sometimes described as marking the start of modern music.
Wagner had his own opera house built, the Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which embodied many novel design features. The Ring and Parsifal were premiered here and his most important stage works continue to be performed at the annual Bayreuth Festival, run by his descendants. His thoughts on the relative contributions of music and drama in opera were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg).
Until his final years, Wagner's life was characterised by political exile, turbulent love affairs, poverty and repeated flight from his creditors. His controversial writings on music, drama and politics have attracted extensive comment – particularly, since the late 20th century, where they express antisemitic sentiments. The effect of his ideas can be traced in many of the arts throughout the 20th century; his influence spread beyond composition into conducting, philosophy, literature, the visual arts and theatre.
See Annex I002
Dog; who was Hesse?
“Demian” (1919), “Siddhar tha” (1923), “Steppenwolf,” or “Nar cissus and Goldmund” (1930),
Annexe
THE GLASS BEAD GAME DISSECTION
A Co-Creative Sensemaking Game
The simplest form of the game is a spoken improvisation of one minute turns between two players. Players choose from a set of archetopics as a starting point, and play a total of 10 one minute turns on the subject.
Each of these turns is called a bead.
A great bead is elegant, sincerely expresses the most truth in the smallest space, and connects closely with the previous bead.
But a game doesn't have to be eloquent to be good. A good game is fun, and players will have a sense of being heard, of personal achievement and connection.
Some players may be slower and more reflective, or even silent, but every silence is a space for reflection. Sometimes ideas run dry, the thread might drift... it is all acceptable. We return to the breath, the void at the core, and allow our next truth to emerge.
The practice is more important than any pressure for a notion of “success” which could inhibit players from giving their valuable contribution. Indeed, each player's contribution is only part of the whole. And players will find they improve and increase in confidence they play.
The aim of the game is to develop clear ideas, deep, unselfish listening, and game awareness which will allow us to participate in the collective intelligence of humanity.
The Magister Ludi serves the players by organising the logistics and facilitating the flow of the gaming session.
IDEALS
A typical thread of beads lasts 10 x 1 minute turns and is played between two players. But a game can be of any length and be played by any number of players.
Time is kept with the online timer at https://glassbead.seph.codes/. Each game has a specific timer name, given before the game begins, which allows the players to easily connect to it.
A bead is chosen from the set of archetopics, either by prior agreement, or by random.
Players are encouraged to develop their own bead sets, with their own symbols.
Using a timer to measure the turns, the game begins with a one-minute meditation with players consciously releasing their ego in preparation to enter the “intermind”, which is what we call the co-creating space.
In-person games have players then attune to their fellow players through 30 seconds of eye gazing at each other. Be gentle with your eye gaze, no unblinking maniac stares! As you become more comfortable with eye gazing you should increase it to one minute. We tend to miss this stage out in online games, as it doesn’t translate well.
With the timer set for one minute, the first player speaks upon the topic as clearly and reflectively as possible. Upon the timer sounding one minute, the next player will use what they have heard to respond, explore and expand on what the first has shared.
This continues for a total of 10 turns, making a ten minute game. If you have a set of glass beads on a thread, you can count off the turns as you play.
During a game, aim to avoid all usage of ‘I’,‘you’, ‘my’, and ‘mine’, in order to bypass the ego. This makes it a safe space, removing contention. It is easy to accidentally use an ‘I’ or ‘you’, if you do, just let it pass and resolve to avoid it next time. It gets easier with practice.
An in-person ideal game is accompanied by (live) music, and standing and movement is encouraged to enable a flow state. You can pace, gesticulate, dance, whatever feels comfortable for you, keeping a comfortable eye gaze with the other player/s.
In fact, games may be played with a written text, instead of speaking, or with drawings, or with musical instruments.
At the end of the session the players have a period of contemplation to let the ideas settle. In person games will include another eye-gazing session.
Where there have been more than one set of players playing concurrently, players convene together for a harvesting and sharing session which we call the “sobremesa”, a Spanish word for the leisurely chat that happens after a good meal together.
FURTHER INFORMATION & DEVELOPMENT
Players are initiated into a set of topics - the archetopics - inspired by Donald Brown’s Human Universals and by visual philosophy, that serves as the foundation for a communal practice.
The game is based on an open-source model, with players free to create topics and card sets and design new ways of playing. We are currently planning games based on the Nolan principles of public life, which will help us explore the loss of trust in our public figures, and are eager to hear about ideas for other topics.
We are seeking glass artists to create beads that can be played along threads or rings, just as an abacus has beads, in order to count turns. We also encourage artists to design their own card sets.
A game’s bead topics can be announced in advance to allow preparation, or chosen at random.
A game can be played in all media.
Instead of two speakers, two dancers, two musicians, two illustrators or two writers can take turns exploring a bead. Instead of two players.
Any combination of these media can be played simultaneously. Games can be played online, either live, or in pre-recorded sessions, and added to incrementally.
Players are encouraged to form guilds – micro-collective intelligences – where they regularly meet to practice and share resources to explore bead sets and games of their choice.
Guilds are organized into classes of Initiate, Apprentice, Magister, and Magister Ludi. Each guild decides what must be achieved to reach each class. Higher levels can only be attained by mentoring lower levels.
The harvesting of games will be shared onto a digital platform once it is launched and discussion and interactions with other groups will be available. A topic and timer app is being developed.
You can read more behind the philosophy of the game in the appropriate chapter here.
Things to consider:
Cocreate a positive communication loop of listening and self-expression.
Raise awareness that every action taken is a move in the game of life.
Free yourself from old thought patterns by growing your own understanding of the world to join in in the collective intelligence of humanity.
Replace the closed doors of the academic world by breaking subject and educational boundaries through a gamified dialogue accessible to, and built by, all people.
Move beyond your ego into the non-dual dance of co-creation.
Finally, actually playing the game is the only way of really understanding its power, it literally starts to improve the way you use your brain, so share...and have fun!
[DOG] Que son Los Autonautas:
“Cortázar y su esposa Canadian writer Carol Dunlop emprenden “La Odisea” (narration de Homero) de una jornada ,un viajes dos meses París Versalles. She would die 2 months after the adventure. Cortazar would be assasinated 2 years after her death by aids injection courtesy NWO which probably was the first political assasination cases by using Aids virus as bio-weapon.
Con la diferencia de que las aventuras de Ulysses duraron 10 años (Troy to Ithaca) para volver a su casa y encontrarse con su amada esposa. His adventures happen while navigating his amazing boat: the Argos, that is why its travellers are called the Argonauts.
Similarly Me and lucas went to Mullingar an saw Ulysses Hotel, where James Joyce spend some time while written his book Ulysses, who took 10 years to write but was the adventures that happen to him in Dublin during just 1 Day… The book start when Ulysses wakes up and ends when he got to bed with his wife saying YES, YES, YES… which was the word Yoko Ohno wrote in her master piece who allow her to be noticed by John Lennon who started the aventure of the destruction of the Beatles.
Those are the Autonauts.
Preamble:
Argonauts are the companions of Ulyses which takes 10 years to return home after war.
10 years took James Joyce to write Ulyses in Dublin (mean Water city?)(city founded by biking in a aztec style) a 1 day journey in dublin.
The astral journey is a 10 years journey after a 28 years war in EU-rope.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNywylAzsz0
qPlanet
FIELD NOTEBOOKS
Stories of Planet Quimbaya
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