Demian

by Hermann Hesse

  Pistorius, an outsider himself, gave me courage and taught me to keep my self-respect. The way he always found something valuable in my words, my dreams, my thoughts and imaginings, always took them seriously and discussed them in earnest, became exemplary for me.

  "You've told me you like music because it is outside of morality," he said. "Well and good. But now stop being a moralist yourself! You can't keep comparing yourself to other people--if nature has made you a bat, you can't decide you want to be an ostrich. You sometimes feel like you don't belong, you blame yourself for following a different path than most other people. You have to unlearn that. Stare into the fire, look at the clouds, and when ideas or intuitions come to you and the voices in your soul start to speak, trust them and don't worry about whether your teacher or your daddy or any other lord above likes what they have to say! That's what ruins a person. That's how you end up on the law-abiding sidewalk, just another fossil. My dear Sinclair, our god is called Abraxas, and he is God and Satan both, he contains the world of light and the world of darkness. Abraxas does not reject a single one of your thoughts and dreams. Never forget that. But he will leave you if you ever turn normal and irreproachable. Then he will leave you, and look for another pot to cook up his thoughts in."

  Out of all my dreams, the dark sex dream was the most faithful. I dreamed it many, many times: stepping under the bird on the coat of arms into our old house, trying to take Mother in my arms and instead finding in my arms the large, half-masculine half-maternal woman I was afraid of and at the same time drawn to with the most desperate, burning desire. But I could never tell my friend about this dream. It was something I kept back even after I had revealed everything else to him. It was my private place, my secret, my refuge.

  Whenever I felt depressed, I asked Pistorius if he would play me Buxtehude's passacaglia. I sat in the church in the evening darkness, lost in this strange, interior, self-absorbed music. It seemed to be listening to itself, and every time I heard it it helped me and made me more ready to heed my own inner voices.

  Sometimes we stayed for a while, after the last notes of the organ faded away, and watched the weak light shine through the high windows with their pointed arches and disappear into the space of the church.

  "It seems strange," Pistorius said, "that I used to be a divinity student and almost became a pastor. But it was just an error in form. It truly is my calling and my goal to be a priest. But I took the easy path and put myself at Jehovah's service before I knew Abraxas. Ah, every religion is beautiful. Religion is soul, irrespective of whether you take Christian communion or make the pilgrimage to Mecca."

  "In that case," I said, "you could have gone ahead and become a pastor after all."

  "No, Sinclair, no. I would have had to lie. Our religion is practiced as though it weren't a religion at all. It pretends to be a construction of reason. I could probably be Catholic if I had to, but a Protestant minister? No! The few true believers out there--I do know some--like to cling to literal meanings, I couldn't tell them that Christ for me is not a person but a mythical hero, a prodigious shadow picture in which humanity sees itself silhouetted on the wall of eternity. As for the others, the ones who come to church to hear a clever sermon, to do their duty, not miss anything, and so on--what could I say to them? Convert them, you think? But I don't want to, not at all! A priest doesn't want to convert anyone, he wants to live among the faithful, among people like him, and be the bearer and expression of the feeling out of which we make our gods."

  He broke off. Then he continued: "Our new faith, for which we are choosing the name Abraxas, is a beautiful one, my friend. It is the best we have. But it is still in its infancy! It has not yet grown wings. A lonely religion, alas, is not yet the true one. It has to become communal, has to have rites and raptures, holidays and mysteries. . . ."

  He sank into his own thoughts.

  "Isn't it possible to celebrate mysteries alone, or in small groups?" I asked hesitantly.

  "It's possible," he nodded. "I have done it myself, for a long time. I have performed rites that would land me in jail for years, if they knew. But I know that that is not yet the true way."

  Suddenly he startled me by clapping me on the shoulder. "My boy," he said urgently, "you have mysteries too. I know that you must be having dreams you don't tell me about. I don't want to know what they are. But I tell you: Live your dreams! Act them out, build altars to them! It is not ideal, but it is a path. Time will tell whether or not we will renew the world--you and me and a few other people. But we have to renew it within ourselves, every day, otherwise we have nothing. Think about it! You're eighteen years old, Sinclair, you don't go with streetwalkers, you must have sex dreams, sexual urges. Maybe you're someone who's afraid of them. Don't be! They are the best things you have! Believe me. I lost a lot by strangling the sexual dreams I had when I was your age. You can't do that. Once you know about Abraxas, you mustn't. We cannot fear anything or treat anything our soul desires as forbidden."

  I was shocked, and I objected: "But you can't just do anything you want! You can't kill someone just because you don't like him."

  He moved closer to me.

  "In certain circumstances, you can--that too. Only it's usually a mistake. And I'm not saying you should simply do whatever comes into your head. No, but these ideas have their own good sense, and you shouldn't make them harmful by repressing them and moralizing about them. Instead of nailing yourself or anyone else to the cross, you can drink wine from a chalice, think ceremonial thoughts, and consider the mystery of sacrifice that way. It is possible to treat your drives and so-called temptations with respect and love, even if you don't act on them. Then they show you what they mean--and they all do mean something. The next time something truly crazy or sinful occurs to you, Sinclair--when you want to kill someone or commit some other enormous horror--stop for a moment and think that this is Abraxas imagining within you! The person you want to kill isn't Mr. So-and-so: he is surely just a disguise. When we hate someone, what we hate is something in him, or in our image of him, that is part of ourselves. Nothing that isn't in us ever bothers us."

  Nothing Pistorius ever said struck me so deeply, penetrating my innermost secrets. I couldn't respond. What affected me most powerfully and strangely, though, was the resonance between these words of encouragement and Demian's words I had carried inside me for so many years. They didn't know a thing about each other, and yet both of them had told me the same thing.

  "The things we see," Pistorius said softly, "are the same things that are in us. There is no reality other than what we have inside us. That is why most people live such unreal lives, because they see external images as reality and never give their own internal world a chance to express itself. You can be happy living like that, but once you know that there is another way, you can no longer choose to follow the path of the many. The path of the many is an easy one, Sinclair. Ours is hard. -- We are trying to follow it."

  A few days later, after I had waited for him twice in vain, I saw him on the street late at night. He came around the corner as if blown by the cold night wind, alone, stumbling drunk. I did not want to call his name. He walked past me without seeing me; he was staring straight ahead with burning, lonely eyes, as though he were following a dark summons from the unknown. I followed him down the street; he drifted along as though pulled by an invisible string, with a fanatical and yet exhausted gait, like a ghost. I sadly walked back home to my own unrealized dreams.

  "So that's how he renews the world inside him!" I thought, and at the same moment I felt that this was a low and moralizing thing to think. What did I know of his dreams? Maybe he was on a surer path in his drunkenness than I was in my timidity.

  *

  I had started to notice, in the breaks between classes, that a fellow student I had never paid attention to was trying to approach me. He was a short, skinny, weak-looking boy with thin reddish-blond hair and something strange about how he acted and the look in his eye. One evening w
hen I was walking home, he was loitering in the street waiting for me; he let me pass, then ran after me and stopped in front of our front door with me.

  "Do you want something?" I asked.

  "I just want to talk to you," he said shyly. "Please be so good as to walk a little ways with me."

  I followed him and could feel that he was deeply excited and full of anticipation. His hands were shaking.

  All of a sudden he asked: "Are you a spiritualist?"

  "No, Knauer," I said with a laugh. "Not a bit. What makes you think that?"

  "But you're a theosophist, then?"

  "No, not that either."

  "Oh, don't be so secretive! I can see perfectly well that you're different somehow. It's in your eyes. I'm sure you communicate with spirits. . . . I'm not asking out of curiosity, Sinclair, no! I am a seeker too, you know, and I feel so alone."

  "Tell me about it," I encouraged him. "I don't know anything about spirits, I just live in my dreams, that's what you noticed. Other people live in dreams too, but they're not their own dreams, that's the difference."

  "Yes, you may be right," he whispered. "It all depends what kinds of dreams a person lives in. . . . Have you heard of white magic?"

  I had to say no.

  "That's where you learn self-mastery. You can become immortal, cast spells too. You've never practiced the exercises?"

  I asked curious questions about these exercises, which made him cagey until I turned to walk away, then he dredged something up: "For example, when I want to fall asleep, or concentrate on something, I do one of these exercises. I think of something, a word or a name, a geometrical shape. Then I think it into myself as hard as I can. I try to see it inside my head, until I can feel it there, then I think it down into my neck, and so on, until it entirely fills me up. Then I am firmly grounded, and nothing can shake me."

  I had a general sense of what he meant. Still I could tell he had something else on his mind. He was strangely excited and jittery. I tried to put him at ease, and before long he came out with what he actually wanted to say.

  "You're abstinent too, aren't you? he asked anxiously.

  "What do you mean? Sexually?"

  "Yes, yes. I've been abstinent for two years now, ever since I first heard the teachings. Before then I committed a vice, you know. . . . So you've never been with a woman?"

  "No," I said. "I haven't found the right one."

  "But if you did find one you thought was right, you would sleep with her?"

  "Yes, of course! If she didn't mind . . ." I said, a little mockingly.

  "Oh, but that's a mistake! The only way to train your inner powers is to stay completely abstinent. I've stayed that way for two years. Two years and a little more than a month! It's so hard to do! Sometimes I think I can't stand it much longer."

  "Listen, Knauer, I don't think abstinence is so terribly important."

  "I know," he countered, "everyone says that. But I didn't expect it from you! Anyone trying to follow the higher spiritual path has to remain pure, absolutely!"

  "All right, then do it! But I don't understand why someone who represses his sexuality is supposed to be 'purer' than anyone else. Can you keep sexuality out of all your thoughts and dreams too?"

  He looked at me in despair.

  "No, that's just it! Good God, and yet we have to. I have dreams at night that I can't even tell myself afterwards. Terrible dreams!"

  I remembered what Pistorius had told me. But no matter how true I thought his words were, I could not relay them to someone else--I could not give advice that did not come from my own experience, advice that I myself didn't feel able to follow. I fell silent, humbled that someone was asking me for advice when I didn't have any to give.

  "I've tried everything!" Knauer groaned, standing next to me. "I've done everything you can do--cold water, snow, exercise, running--but nothing helps. Every night I wake up from dreams that I can't bear to even think about. And the horrible thing is that I'm losing everything I've learned, spiritually. I can almost never do it anymore, concentrate on something or put myself to sleep. Sometimes I lie awake all night long. There's no way I can live like this for long. But if I finally have to throw in the towel, if I give up and make myself impure again, I'll be worse than all the others who never even tried. You understand that, don't you?"

  I nodded but had nothing to say. The fact is, he was starting to bore me. Even though I was shocked at myself for not caring more deeply about his obvious pain and despair, all I felt was: I cannot help you.

  "So, you have nothing to tell me?" he said at last, exhausted and miserable. "Nothing at all? There must be a way! How do you do it, then?"

  "I have nothing to tell you, Knauer. No one can help anyone else. No one helped me either. You have to just reflect on yourself and then do what truly comes from your nature. There's nothing else. If you can't find yourself, then you won't find any spirits either, it seems to me."

  The little fellow looked at me, disappointed and suddenly speechless. Then his eyes burned with sudden hate; he grimaced at me, furious, and screamed: "Oh you're a nice saint for me! You have your vices too, I know it! You act so wise and you secretly cling to the same filth as me and everyone else! You're a pig, a pig, like me. We are all pigs!"

  I walked away and left him there. He took two or three steps after me, then stopped, turned around, and ran off. I felt queasy with pity and revulsion, and could not break free of the feeling until I got back to my little room, hung my couple pictures on the wall, and abandoned myself with the most fervent intensity to my own dreams. Right away my dream came back--of the door to the house and the coat of arms, my mother and the strange woman--and I saw the woman's features so clearly that I started to paint her picture that same night.

  When, after a few days, the picture was finished--set down on paper almost unconsciously in dreamlike fifteen-minute bursts--I hung it on my wall, pulled the study lamp over to it, and stood before it as though it were a spirit I had to wrestle with until one of us won and the other one lost. It was a face like the earlier face; it was like my friend Demian's, and in some features like my own face too. One eye was noticeably higher than the other. The picture's gaze passed over me and was gone, in a glassy stare, full of destiny.

  I stood there before it and felt a chill reaching deep into my chest from inner strain. I asked the image questions, I accused it, caressed it, prayed to it; I called it Mother, lover, whore, and slut, called it Abraxas. At some point Pistorius's words--or were they Demian's?--came to mind: I could not remember when I had heard them before, but felt that I was not hearing them for the first time. They were about Jacob wrestling with the angel of God, and his "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."

  The painted face in the lamplight was transformed every time I appealed to it. It was bright and shining, then black and dark; it closed wan lids over eyes that had died away into nothing, then opened them again so that burning looks flashed out. It was woman, man, girl--a young child, an animal, a blurry patch on the wall--and then big and clear again. Finally, obeying a powerful inner command, I closed my eyes and I saw the image within me, stronger and more powerful than ever. I wanted to kneel down before it, but it was so much a part of me that I could no longer distinguish it from myself. It was as though it had become entirely I.

  Then I heard a dark, heavy roaring like that of a spring downpour, and I trembled with an indescribable new feeling of fear and experience. I saw stars flash and go out; memories reaching back to my earliest, most forgotten childhood and even farther, back to pre-existence and early stages of becoming, thronged past me, but these memories that seemed to repeat my whole life, down to its most hidden secrets, did not stop with yesterday, or today, they continued on, reflecting the future, tearing me away from the present into new forms of life. The images were immensely bright, almost blinding, but afterward I could not remember a single one, not the way they really were.

  That night I woke up out of a very deep sleep, lyin
g diagonally across the bed in my clothes. I turned on the light, felt that I had to remember something crucially important, but could not recall anything from the past few hours. I turned on the light, and gradually it came back to me. Then I looked for the picture, but it was not on the wall anymore--not on the table either. Then I thought I dimly recalled having burned it. Or was it a dream? That I had held it in my hands as it burned, and eaten the ashes?

  Great spasms of anxiety drove me from my room. I put on my hat and hurried out of the house, down the street, as though under some kind of compulsion--through the streets, across the squares of the city, as though blown by a storm; I stopped and listened in the darkness in front of my friend's church; I searched and searched, driven by dark urges, not knowing what I was looking for. I passed through a part of the city where there were brothels, here and there with a light in the window. Farther out were building sites, piles of bricks partly covered with gray snow. As I passed like a sleepwalker roaming through a wasteland, compelled by a pressure from somewhere outside myself, I remembered the construction site at the edge of town where my tormentor, Kromer, had pulled me through the doorway and made me give him his first payment. There was a similar building here before me, the black hole of its door gaping open in the gray night. It drew me inside; I wanted to escape, and I dragged my feet in the sand and stumbled over the rubble, but the pull was too strong for me, I had to go in.

  I stumbled over planks and broken bricks into the desolate room; there was a murky smell of stones and damp cold. A pile of sand, a light-gray patch, otherwise all was dark.

  Then a horrified voice called out: "For God's sake, Sinclair, where did you come from?"