[Main Blog Post] [Book] The Rebirth

[jprussell]

k_a_nitz was kind enough to send me a copy of The Rebirth by Karl Kolb, which is a quirky little book on Christian "letter mysticism," which is, on its own, not so directly within my spiritual wheelhouse, but the book turned out to have lots of interesting bits in its few (~100) pages.

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

Thanks for the review! I must say you have summed up many of my own thoughts on it in a way that I never could have. I certainly found the vagueness over the actual practice and the lack of description of it in the book somewhat frustrating. Subsequently I have discovered that Karl Weinfurter's Man's Highest Purpose (available here) has a more detailed description of the actual practice on about page 90 and talks about how it connects with chakras and mudras (he believes Krebs' system was developed independent of any Eastern influence as Eastern texts hadn't made their way west by that point).

You will certainly find Krebs' approach very different, though also a bit vague on specifics. ;-)

[jprussell]

My pleasure, and thank you for the kind words and the pointer to Weinfurter! As I said in the review, receptivity seems to be a keyword for what I need to learn of late, so I'll see what these works have to say to me.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for writing about this topic. I think there is indeed a mystery to the letters as their is to the vowels. Most of the alphabets we have seem to have started off at least in some ways, as magical.

If you want to go into an avant-garde art take on the power of letters you might look into the oblique works of the Lettrism movement. What is striking about Lettrism is how they used it for visual poetry, leading to the idea and practice of hypergraphics. They evolved calligraphic techniques to give intense focus on letters. They also made up a conceptual kind of art called infinitesimals, based on the works of Gotfried Leibniz. Of course your mileage with this kind of stuff, that isn't really occult at all, may vary!



Just googling, I found this, which you already may be aware of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_the_Mystery_of_the_Letters

I wonder, was this an influence on Kolb and Kreb? Either way it's interesting stuff, and could well be adapted to Runes or some other alpha-beth.

Justin Patrick Moore

[jprussell]

Thank you for this! I agree, as one of our most flexible tools of imagination and will, language (and the bits that make it up) must be wrapped up in magic, and it's clear that the creation or introduction of literacy would be very obviously magical among folks for whom words can only come out of another's mouth.

Huh, I think maybe I've heard the term Lettrism, but I didn't really have any ida what it was about, but since I enjoy calligraphy and have found Leibniz interesting ever since reading Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, I'll have to give it a look.

I was not aware of About the Mystery of Letters, but a quick skim makes it seem like a rather likely influence to the tradition. I'll have to check it out!

Cheers,
Jeff

[k_a_nitz]

Now that is fascinating. I haven't encountered the Mystery of the Letters yet in my ongoing monthly translation of Dornseiff's The Alphabet in Magic and Mysticism, but I expect it will turn up in later chapters.