Kulturmorphologie und Neopaganismus. Der Glaube des Leo Frobenius - Kulturmorphologie and Neopaganism. The beliefs of des Leo Frobenius

Anthropologists are used to describing the religions of others, nut not their own beliefs. In the human sciences we rarely find information about the religious beliefs of researchers. But carefully examining published and unpublished writings, we can still find some indications regarding the authors’ values, which they may not have always intended to disclose to the public. This is in spite of the fact or perhaps, more correctly, because they are closely related to the theory and practice of their science. To illustrate this rather apocryphal relationship between an author’s basic convictions and his published opinions, in this essay we take the example of Leo Frobenius (1873-1938), a researcher who remained on the fringes of the academic world. As an autodidact ethnologist he was already very enthusiastic about the mythologies of the world at a very young age, but instead of a “global myth” he published a catalogue of mythological themes or “mythologems”, which he considered as universal (Die Weltanschauung der Naturvölker – “the worldview of primitive peoples”, 1898; Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes – “In the era of the Sun God”, 1904). Unlike the mythologies written much later (1964-1971) by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), they do not deal with formal structures of thought, but rather with an archaic cosmology similar to the archetypes we find in the later works of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) or Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). In search of these archetypal images of cosmic evolution, Frobenius collected folk tales and later rock paintings, which he copied by hand during his field research (12 expeditions to Africa between 1904 and 1935). The birth in death, the ritual murder of the Holy King or High Priest, the complementarity of the sexes (for example the numbers 3 and 4 in the sum 7), the law that a culture's rise must inevitably be followed by its decline – these all are ideas that have determined the work of this researcher, so that one wonders if they are based solely on his ethnographic observations or if they are rather related to influences received before his training as a researcher and could be explained from his biography. As the faithful son of the Prussian lieutenant colonel and military architect Herman Theodor Frobenius (1841-1916), Leo Frobenius grew up with an ideology sometimes called “military religiosity”, which was widespread in Germany since the Napoleonic wars and may find its first literary expression in the war song of Ernst Moritz Arndt Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ ... (“The God who let the iron grow, did not want any serfs...”). Christian faith is more or less reduced to an almost blind belief in a fatalistically accepted destiny, which rather recalls pagan patterns than the gospel of faith, love, hope. For Frobenius, the idea of service lies at the heart of his opinions and demands sacrifice or selfsacrifice of the king as well as of the subject. Culture is a strategic plan. In the eyes of militarists and nationalists (only German ones?), acts of homicide committed against others as well as those committed against oneself, carry the seeds of renewal. Prussian reformers saw the defeat of Jena in 1806 as an opportunity to change and renew armaments. Later, even an expressionist painter like Franz Marc (1880-1916) expected a “purification” from the First World War