Demian

by Hermann Hesse

  I drank my wine and gave him a hostile look.

  "Yes, well, we can't all be Faust," I said curtly.

  He looked at me a little suspiciously.

  Then he laughed his old cool and superior laugh.

  "Let's not fight about it! In any case, a drunkard's or sensualist's life is presumably more lively than a blameless middle-class life at least. Also--I read somewhere--the life of a sensualist is one of the best preparations there is for mystics. It's always people like St. Augustine who turn into visionaries. He was a rake and a sensualist beforehand too."

  I was suspicious, and wanted at all costs to avoid bowing down to him and his lessons. So I said, in a blase voice, "Yes, well, to each his own. To tell you the truth, I have no interest in becoming a visionary or whatever."

  Demian looked knowingly at me from his slightly narrowed eyes.

  "My dear Sinclair," he said slowly, "I wasn't trying to say anything disagreeable. And anyway--neither of us really knows the real reason why you're drinking. Whatever it is inside you shaping your life knows already. It's so good to know that there's something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do! -- But forgive me, I have to go home now."

  We said brief goodbyes. I stayed at the bar in a bad mood, drank my whole bottle of wine, and then, when I got up to go, found out that Demian had already paid for it. That annoyed me even more.

  I could not stop thinking back to this little incident. It was Demian to a T. And the words he had spoken in that bar on the edge of town came back to my mind, strangely fresh, as though he had just said them: "It's so good to know that there's something inside us, and that it knows everything, wants everything, and does everything better than we do!"

  How I longed to see Demian. I didn't know anything about him and had no way to reach him. I knew only that he was probably at university somewhere, and that his mother had left our hometown after he'd graduated high school.

  I tried to call up all my memories of Max Demian, even back to my history with Kromer. So many things he had said to me echoed in my ears then, all still meaningful, still current, still relevant to me! What he had said about the sensualist and the visionary at our last meeting, unsatisfactory as it had been, suddenly stood shining before my soul too. Wasn't that exactly what had happened with me? Hadn't I lived in drunkenness and filth until a new vital urge brought the exact opposite to life within me--a desire for purity, a longing for the sacred?

  I continued to pursue my memories. Night had long since fallen, and it was raining outside. In my memories I heard the rain too--it was that time under the chestnut tree when he had first asked about Franz Kromer and guessed my first secrets. One scene after the other rose up in my mind: conversations on the way to school, confirmation classes. Last of all, my very first meeting with Max Demian came to mind. What had we talked about again? I couldn't recapture it right away, but I plunged completely into the past and waited as long as it took, and then it came back to me--that too. We were standing in front of my house after he'd told me his ideas about Cain, and he was saying something about the old, faded coat of arms above our door, in the keystone that grew wider at the top than it was at the bottom. He said it interested him, and that you should pay attention to such things.

  That night I dreamed about Demian and the coat of arms. It changed from one thing into another in a continual metamorphosis while Demian held it in his hands: now it was small and gray, now multicolored and tremendously large. He explained to me that it nevertheless remained always one and the same. Finally he made me eat it. When I swallowed it, I felt, with monstrous horror, that the bird on the coat of arms I had swallowed was still alive inside me--it filled me entirely and started to eat away at me from the inside. I was terrified I would die, and I started up in bed.

  Soon I was fully awake. It was the middle of the night, and I could hear the rain coming into my room. I stood up to close the window and stepped on some pale thing on the floor. In the morning I realized it was my painting. It lay in a puddle on the floor and had gotten warped and bent. I smoothed it out and put it between sheets of blotting paper in a heavy, thick book. When I looked at it again the next day, it was dry. But it had changed. The red mouth was paler and thinner. Now it was exactly Demian's mouth.

  I decided to paint another picture, of the heraldic bird. I no longer knew exactly what it looked like, and I knew that some of its features could not be made out even if you stared right at it from up close, since the thing was old and had been painted over many times. The bird was standing or sitting on something, maybe a flower, or a basket or nest, or the crown of a tree. I didn't worry about it and started with what I had a clear mental picture of. Some inchoate need compelled me to start with strong, bright colors--in my picture, the bird's head was golden yellow. I worked on it as the mood took me, and finished it in a few days.

  It had turned into a bird of prey, with the aquiline, pointed head of a sparrow hawk. Half of its body was stuck inside a dark globe that it was working its way out of, as though out of a giant egg. The more I looked at the picture, the more it seemed like the brightly colored coat of arms I had seen in my dream.

  There was no way I would have been able to write a letter to Demian, even if I'd known where to send it. I decided, though, in the same dreamlike intuitive state with which I did everything at that time, to send him the picture of the sparrow hawk, whether or not it would ever reach him. I did not write anything on it, not even my name; I carefully trimmed the edges of the paper, bought a large envelope, and wrote my friend's former address on it. Then I mailed it off.

  An exam was approaching, and I had to work harder than usual at my schoolwork. The teachers had taken me back into their good graces, ever since I had changed my contemptible ways. Not that I was a good student even now, but neither I nor anyone else still thought about how close I had been to expulsion only six months before.

  My father was writing to me again, the same way as before, without threats or recriminations. But I felt no urge to explain to him or anyone else how my transformation had taken place. It was purely by chance that the change coincided with the wishes of my parents and teachers. It did not bring me any closer to them, or to anyone--it only made me lonelier. It was aiming in another direction: at Demian, at a distant fate, I myself didn't know yet, I was still in the middle of the transformation. It had started with Beatrice, but I had been living with my paintings and my thoughts of Demian for so long, in such an unreal world, that she too had vanished utterly from my eyes and my thoughts. There was no one I could say anything to about my hopes, my dreams, my inner transformation, even if I had wanted to.

  And how could I have wanted to?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE BIRD FIGHTS ITS WAY OUT OF THE EGG

  My painted dream-bird was on its way, in search of my friend. Then, in the strangest way, an answer came back to me.

  One day in class, after a break between lessons, I found a note stuck in the book on my desk. It was folded exactly the way my classmates typically folded the notes they would occasionally pass during class; I wondered only who might have given it to me, since I had never had that kind of friendship with any of my classmates. I thought it must be an invitation to join in on some kind of schoolboy prank, which I wouldn't do anyway, and I stuck the note unread in the front of my book. Only later, during the lesson, by chance, did my hand come across it again.

  I played with the sheet of paper, unfolded it without thinking, and found a few words written inside. I glanced at it, my eyes rested on one of the words, and I read the note in shock while my heart clenched as though freezing cold at this new turn of fate:

  "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to god. The god is called Abraxas."

  I read these lines over and over and sank deep into thought. There could be no doubt: it was an answer from Demian. No one knew about the bird exce
pt him and me. My picture had reached him. He had understood and was helping me interpret it. But how did everything fit together? And--what tormented me most of all--what did "Abraxas" mean? I had never heard or read the word before in my life. "The god is called Abraxas!"

  The lesson went by without my hearing a word. Then the next class started--the last class of the afternoon. It was taught by a young assistant teacher, Doctor Follen, only recently out of university; we liked him for just that reason, because he was so young and didn't put on airs with us.

  He was taking us through Herodotus--one of the few subjects in school that truly interested me. But this time I couldn't pay any attention to it. I had mechanically opened my book, but I didn't follow the translation and remained sunk in thought. Incidentally, I had already confirmed for myself, many times over, how true what Demian had told me in confirmation class was: whatever you wanted strongly enough happened. Whenever I was deeply occupied with my own thoughts during class, I could relax and know the teacher would leave me alone. If you were distracted or drowsy, then he would suddenly be standing there, true: that had happened to me as well. But when you were really concentrating, really lost in thought, you were protected. I had also tried out his trick of the fixed stare and found it reliable too. Back when I was in school with Demian, it had not worked for me; now I often had reason to feel that there was a lot you could do with your gaze and with your thoughts.

  That time too, I sat there a million miles away from Herodotus and from school. But then the teacher's voice unexpectedly shot into my consciousness like a bolt of lightning and I snapped awake in panic. I heard his voice, he was standing right next to me, and I even thought he had called my name. But he was not looking at me. I breathed easier.

  Then I heard his voice again. It loudly pronounced the word: "Abraxas."

  Doctor Follen went on with his explanation, the beginning of which I had missed: "We must not imagine the views of these ancient sects and mystic communities as naive, the way they might seem from a rationalistic perspective. Science in our sense of the word was unknown to Antiquity, but in return they engaged in a very advanced way with philosophical and mystical truths. These pursuits gave rise to magic spells and other such trickery, to some extent, and no doubt to crime and deception often enough too. But even this magic had a noble heritage and embodied profound thought. For example, the teachings of Abraxas I just mentioned. This name is mentioned in connection with Greek magic formulas and is often considered the name of some kind of magical devil, like the ones savage tribes still believe in today. But Abraxas seems to mean much more than that. We can think of the name as referring to something like a deity whose symbolic task is to unite the divine and the satanic."

  The erudite little man eagerly went on with his splendid lecture. But none of the students paid much attention, and since the name did not come up again, I too soon turned my attention back to myself.

  "To unite the divine and the satanic": the words resounded within me. Here was a place to start. I was familiar with that idea from the conversations I'd had with Demian in the last phase of our friendship. He had said that the god we worshipped represented only an arbitrarily sectioned-off half of the world (the official, permitted world, the "world of light"). But we should worship the whole world, so either we needed a god who was also the devil, or we needed to establish devil's services along with the church services that honored God. -- And so here was the god who was devil and god in one: Abraxas.

  I eagerly tried to follow this trail for some time, but I didn't get anywhere. I rummaged through whole libraries looking for more information about Abraxas, without success. Well, my nature was never one for this consciously directed seeking, the kind where at first you find only truths that lie in your hand like a dead weight.

  The figure of Beatrice I had thought so much and so deeply about for a time now gradually subsided, or rather strode slowly away from me, getting closer and closer to the horizon and becoming ever more shadowy, pale, and distant. She no longer satisfied the longings in my soul.

  Then a new formation began to emerge in the life I was strangely both sleepwalking through and spinning inside myself. A longing for life blossomed within me, or rather a longing for love. The sexual urges I had been able to dispel for a while with my worship of Beatrice began to clamor for new objects, new images. Again it found no fulfillment, but I was even less able than before to deny these feelings, or hope that the girls my schoolmates used to try their luck with might satisfy them. Again I had intense dreams, and the truth was I dreamed them more by day than at night. Ideas, images, or wishes rose up in me and pulled me away from the outside world, to the point where my relationship with these pictures inside me, these dreams and shadows, were truer and more vital than those I had with my true surroundings.

  One particular recurring dream or play of the imagination became very meaningful for me. It was the most important and lasting dream of my life, and it went something like this: I was returning to my father's house--the heraldic bird glowing yellow on a blue background above the door--my mother came up to me from inside the house, but when I went in and tried to hug her it wasn't her, it was someone I had never seen, big and powerful, resembling Max Demian and the picture I had painted but different from them, and absolutely, completely feminine, despite its great power. This figure pulled me to her and took me in a deep, trembling embrace. Bliss mingled with horror--the embrace was in the service of god and also a terrible crime. There was too much about the figure wrapping me in her arms that recalled my mother, too much too that recalled my friend Demian. Her embrace violated every kind of reverence and was nonetheless blissful salvation. I often woke up from this dream with a deep sense of happiness, often in deathly terror and with a tortured conscience, as though I had committed a horrible sin.

  Only gradually and unconsciously did this entirely interior image start to seem linked to the hint I had received from without about the god I should seek. But then the link grew tighter and deeper, and I began to feel that this dream-premonition was nothing other than a summoning of Abraxas. Bliss and horror, man and woman blended together, the most sacred holiness intertwined with the most hideous abomination, deep guilt flashing through the loveliest innocence--such was the image I saw in my sex dream and so too was Abraxas. Love was no longer either the dark, animalistic drive I had fearfully felt it to be at first, or the pious, spiritual worship I had offered up to the image of Beatrice. It was both--both and much more: angelic and Satanic, man and woman in one, human and animal, the highest good and the uttermost evil. To live this love seemed to be my destiny, to taste of it my fate. I longed for it and was terrified of it at the same time, but it was always there, always above me.

  The next spring I was due to graduate high school and go to university, although I did not know where, nor what I should study. I had a thin moustache on my upper lip; I was a grown man, and yet utterly aimless and helpless. My only certainty was the voice within me, the dream image. I felt a duty to follow its lead, blindly. But it was hard, and every day I rebelled against it again. Maybe I was crazy, I often thought--maybe I was not like other people. . . . Still, I could do everything the others did, without much effort: read Plato, solve trigonometry problems, follow a chemical analysis. There was only one thing I couldn't do: wrest the darkly hidden goal from inside me and see it before me, the way the others did, the ones who knew they wanted to be professors or lawyers, doctors or artists, who knew how long their path would take and what advantages it would bring. That was what I could not do. Maybe I too would become one of those things someday, but how could I know? Or maybe I would search and search for years, and nothing would come of me, I would reach no goal at all. Or maybe I would reach a goal, but it would turn out to be wicked, dangerous, terrible.

  All I wanted to do was try to live the life that was inside me, trying to get out. Why was that so hard?

  I tried many times to paint the love-image from my dream in all her power. I never succe
eded. If I had, I would have sent the picture to Demian. Where was he? I didn't know. I knew only that he and I were linked. When would I see him again?

  The happy tranquility of the weeks and months of my Beatrice period were long since gone. At the time I thought I had reached an island of peace, but it was always the same--no sooner had I gotten used to a situation, no sooner had a dream helped me a little, then it too shriveled and went blind. No use complaining! Now I was living in a raging fire of unsatisfied longings and tense waiting that often left me completely wild, almost insane. I saw the image of my dream lover before my eyes, clearer than life--much more clearly than I could see my own hand. I talked to it, cried before it, cursed it; I called it Mother and kneeled before it in tears, called it Beloved and foresaw its ripe, all-fulfilling kiss, called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It lured me into the most tender and beautiful dreams, and into vile shamelessness; nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too low and bad.

  I spent that whole winter in an inner turmoil I find hard to describe. I had long since grown used to solitude, so I was not oppressed by loneliness: I lived with Demian, with the sparrow hawk, with the image of the tremendous dream-shape that was both my fate and my beloved. That was enough for me, because everything in my life looked out into vast open spaces, everything pointed to Abraxas. But none of these dreams and thoughts were mine: I could not summon them up at will or give them whatever color I wanted. They came and took possession of me; I was ruled by them, my life was lived by them.

  At least I had nothing to fear from the outside world--I was not afraid of anyone and my schoolmates knew it too. They treated me with a furtive respect that often made me laugh. I could see right through most of them whenever I wanted, and I sometimes startled and amazed them by doing so. But I rarely or never wanted to. I cared only about myself, always myself. But I desperately yearned to someday, at long last, live a little too: to put something of myself out into the world; to struggle against, and connect with, that world. Sometimes, wandering the streets at night, too restless to go back home before midnight, I thought that now, now, I would have to see my beloved, crossing the street at the next corner or calling to me from the next window. At other times my whole existence felt like unbearable torture, and I was prepared to take my own life.