Du Prel’s Spiritualism and Theosophy
By Franz Hartmann, M. D. (Torbole, Lago di Garda)[1]
Translation from German by Robert Hutwohl
It wasn’t long ago that Germany, like the rest of Europe, was mired in the swamp of blind materialism. The scientific luminaries of the country that had produced Jacob Böhme, Kant, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Schiller, F. Rückert, Eckartshausen, Kerning, and so on, seemed to have lost all sense and feeling for the spiritual, the divine, the sublime, and the ideal, which, as is well known, is the only true reality, and dreamed only of dead matter and blind mechanical motion on their school desks. It had become fashionable to declare belief in everything that cannot be grasped with the hands to be heresy, to deny the existence of a universal principle of life that manifests itself in the various forms of existence as vital activity, to ridicule the existence of the soul, i.e., of individuality, and the concept of immortality had sunk so low that it was believed to consist of making a “great name”—that is, doing something that people would still be talking about long after the author’s death; a kind of immortality that any outstanding criminal can easily acquire. If we are to believe the “philosophers” of that time, their highest ideal aspirations were to be reduced to dead matter after death, instead of rising above the material world. We recall the legacy of a much-praised garden arbor poet who, upon committing suicide, left behind a poem in which he triumphantly emphasized that he was now becoming “earth again”.
Nowadays, the materialism that once prevailed among the “educated” has sunk to the level of common pub philosophers and wine tourists. While some scholars fear damaging their doctoral titles by publicly opposing this superstition or asserting something they cannot prove through tangible experiments, no reasonable person today truly believes in the identity of man with his corpse. The distinction between what is transient and what is imperishable within a person is becoming increasingly prevalent. The death of Ludwig Büchner, the champion of materialism, has barely registered, and the name of this self-proclaimed “monkey-keeper” now only enjoys ridicule in the junk room of memories of the aberrations of a ignorance permeated by folly and megalomania, parading in the cloak of science.
Germany owes this transformation of thinking in large part to the tireless efforts and struggles of Dr. Carl du Prel, whose writings, more than many others, directed the attention of the thinking public to the study of supersensible facts and their laws. Du Prel believed he had found proof of the continuation of the human personality in the phenomena of modern spiritualism, and although he did not succeed in penetrating the innermost sanctuary of the soul and fathoming the secrets of the divine existence of the human soul as described by Böhme, Meister Eckhart, etc., he nevertheless made a great step forward, and his conclusions obtained through the inductive method approach in some respects the teachings of the great sages and saints who knew these secrets through the elevation of the soul to the highest, through inner illumination, revelation, and contemplation; They largely agree with the teachings of the Indian sages (Sankaracharya, among others), or in short, with what divine wisdom teaches every person who has attained self-knowledge of the truth, and thus form, as it were, the transition from rationalism to theosophy. Indeed, du Prel was one of the first members of the “Theosophical Society,” founded in Munich in 1885, and when the author of this article spent the summer of 1886 with him near Kufstein, du Prel took an active interest in the teachings of H. P. Blavatsky. However, he later broke away from this “Theosophical Society” because it consisted mostly of immature elements and did not meet his expectations.
In order to clarify the standpoint of scientific spiritualism adopted by du Prel and its difference from the standpoint of religious knowledge or “theosophy”, it will be necessary to outline in brief what theosophy teaches in contrast to the theories of the “spiritualists” regarding the states of the soul after death:
According to the teachings of the sages, as contained, for example, in the Upanishads, that is, in the books of esoteric teachings, the destiny awaiting the human soul after death is threefold and depends on the soul’s state: For in the end, every being returns to the source from which it sprang, the material to the material, the spiritual to the spiritual, the divine to God. The soul of a person who, during their lifetime, was incapable of any noble sensation, never received a ray of divine light, and, immersed in the night of spiritual unknowing, departs from the body, will also be incapable of any higher consciousness after this departure. After perhaps remaining for a short time in a dreamlike state in the “middle realm,” it will be reborn in another body to begin a new life as a new personality. Those few who have attained self-knowledge of the divine spirit within them, whose soul is permeated and illuminated by this spirit, and who have already achieved perfection and unity with the divine on earth, have nothing more to do with earthly things; they enter Nirvana, that is, the state of supreme bliss.
But the souls of the vast majority of ordinary people, in whom the sensation and intuition of a state elevated above sensory life (the power of faith) still resides, who still feel and hope deep within that there is a higher existence than this earthly one, are borne aloft by their higher aspirations to a higher sphere of consciousness, which the Christian Church calls “Heaven,” and Buddhist philosophy “Devachan,” that is, the realm of the gods. These aspirations and virtues represent a sum of heavenly powers, comparable to the powers slumbering in a seed from which a tree develops. Thus, too, from the soul, that is, from the spiritual individuality, the heavenly life of the human being develops in the celestial realm. There, the soul rests in its self-generated world of ideals, perhaps for millennia, until the heavenly powers it has brought with it are exhausted and it returns to reincarnation.
Nothing can enter this heavenly state that is not inherently of a heavenly nature, and the soul only enters heaven when it has shed all earthly concerns; unpleasant memories, worries about political or family affairs, and the like have no place in heaven. It is not the person’s personality as it was before death that enters heaven, but their heavenly soul, which is as different from their deceased personality as the flower of a plant is from the plant itself. Just as the flower reveals the beauty of the plant and contains its best qualities, yet presents itself as a distinct entity, so too does the heavenly soul absorb from the life of the individual only that which is appropriate and worthy of its heavenly nature.
One might think it self-evident that the heavenly soul, blessed in its ideal conceptions, can no longer participate in the dream life of this earthly world and certainly will not concern itself with table-turners and spirit-beaters. However, this view is contradicted by a number of facts in the field of spiritualism, among which are primarily the so-called “identifications” of communicating “spirits”—deceptions to which anyone easily falls prey who engages in spiritualist experiments without understanding the psychic and spiritual elements in the composition of human nature and their laws. For what many devout spiritualists consider the “transcendental self” of a deceased person is, in most cases, if it has anything to do with the deceased at all, nothing other than the psychic remnants that the soul shed before ascending to its state of heavenly bliss. It is the eidolon of the Greeks, the umbra or shadow image of the Romans, the kama-rupa [kāma-rūpa] of the Indians, and the “elemental body” of the occultists. This dual human nature and its destiny were taught even in ancient times: [Latin]
“Bis duo sunt hominis: manes, caro, spiritus, umbra;
Quatuor ista loca bis duo suscipiunt.
Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra,
Orcus habet manes, spiritus astra petit.”
“There are two of man: ghosts, flesh, spirit, shadow;
These four places receive two of them.
The earth covers the flesh, the shadow flies around the tomb,
The underworld has ghosts, the spirit seeks the stars.”
In the shadow body left behind in the underworld, the lower and earthly instincts, passions, and memories of the deceased slumber. This “astral body” represents a sum of the lower soul forces; it is, as it were, the larva left behind on the astral plane or “middle region” by the butterfly rising towards the heavens. It exists in an unconscious or dreamlike state, from which it can be briefly roused by spiritualist experiments. This means that these lower elements are then placed back into a kind of illusory existence, and with the help of a suitable “medium,” a certain degree of identification can be achieved. However, these spirits generally lack true spirit, and if spirit is found in their communications, it originates from entirely different sources than the soul of the deceased.
It is impossible in this brief outline to address all the sources from which the deceptions of spiritualism arise. The assertion that all spiritualistic phenomena are based on fraudulent mediums is a claim made only by those who are completely ignorant of the subject and is not worth discussing. However, it is equally certain that much self-deception occurs in the explanation of these phenomena as a result of a lack of understanding of the higher nature of humankind. Spiritualism is a natural science which, like any other science, requires a study of the laws of nature. The yogi or saint seeks to become one with the supreme spirit in his consciousness and, from his elevated perspective, recognizes the laws of spirit in nature. By attaining union with God, he recognizes himself as the creator and cause of all things, and sees the entire universe and spiritual realm within himself. The scientific researcher, confined within his personal self, looks out into the world. He sees as far as his limited horizon allows and seeks, through deduction, to form an opinion regarding that which lies beyond. The yogi cannot err because his knowledge is based on his own experience and perception; the speculative metaphysician has many errors to overcome, but in the end, the two agree.
Carl du Prel was not a trained yogi, but rather a deeply sensitive and perceptive thinker and philosopher who had a sincere desire to discover the truth and the courage to express his convictions. Whether he succeeded in seeing to the bottom of all things before his death is a question we cannot answer; but he raised spiritualism to a higher level and brought the realm of the supersensible closer to everyday science. He added “consciousness” to the mindless doctrine of “force and matter.” In doing so, he gave spirit (life) to matter and dealt the death blow to dull materialism in Germany. He was, in his own way, an instrument of that power which guides the progress of the human spirit, and he faithfully fulfilled his task.
Note:
[1] Du Prel’s Spiritualism and Theosophy. Franz Hartmann, M. D. Wiener Rundschau 3, No. 20 (September 1899), 480–483 [Du Prels Spiritismus und die Theosophie] Translation from the German by Robert Hutwohl, ©2025