The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

  Aside from looking after the weather, the Master also had a kind of private practice as an exorcist, as a maker of amulets and charms, and in some cases as a doctor, wherever medical matters were not reserved to the tribal mother. But for the rest, Master Turu lived the life of every other tribesman. He helped to till the common land when his turn came, and also had his own small garden near the hut. He gathered and stored fruit, mushrooms, and firewood. He hunted and fished, and kept a goat or two. As a farmer he was like all the others, but as hunter, fisherman, and herb gatherer he was not like anyone else. Rather, he was a solitary genius with a reputation for knowing a great many natural and magical tricks, devices, knacks, and aids. It was said he could weave a willow noose which no animal could escape. He had special recipes for fish bait; he knew how to lure crayfish; and there were some who thought that he understood the language of many a beast. But his real specialty was more arcane: observation of the moon and the stars, knowledge of the weather signs, ability to forecast weather and growth, and a command of many magical effects. Thus he was a great collector of plant and animal materials efficacious for remedies and poisons, for working magic, for conferring blessings, and for fending off dangerous spirits. He knew where to find even the rarest plants; he knew when they blossomed and ripened seed, and the right time to dig their roots. He knew where to find all kinds of snakes and toads, knew how to use horns, hoofs, claws, hair. He knew what to do with growths, deformities, weird and horrible excrescences: knots, tumors, burls, and scales, of wood, of leaves, of grain, of nuts, of horns and hoofs.

  Knecht had more to learn with his feet and hands, his eyes, skin, ears, and nose, than with his intellect, and Turu taught far more by example and by dumbshow than by words and prescription. The Master rarely spoke coherently, and even when he did his words were only a supplement to his singularly impressive gestures. Knecht's apprenticeship differed little from the apprenticeship a young hunter or fisherman undergoes with a good master, and it gave him great pleasure, for he learned only the things that were already latent within him. He learned to lie in wait, to listen, to stalk, to watch, to be on his guard, to be alert, to spy and sense; but the game that he and his master stalked was not only fox and badger, otter and toad, bird and fish, but essence, the whole, meaning, relationship. They sought to determine, to recognize, to guess and forecast the fleeting, unstable weather, to know the death lying hidden in a berry or snakebite, to eavesdrop on the secret relations between clouds or storms and the phases of the moon, relations that affected the growth of crops as they did the haleness or doom of man and beast. No doubt they were really seeking the same ends as the science and technology of later centuries, dominance over nature and a control over her laws; but they went about it in an entirely different way. They did not stand off from nature and try to penetrate into her secrets by violence. They were never opposed and hostile to nature, but always part of her and reverently devoted to her. It is quite likely that they knew her better and dealt more wisely with her. But one thing was utterly impossible for them: not even in their most audacious moments would it have occurred to them to meet nature and the world of spirits without fear, let alone to feel superior to them. Such hubris was unthinkable; they could not have imagined having any other attitude but fear toward the forces of nature, toward death and the demons. Fear loomed over the life of man. It could not be overcome. But it could be pacified, outwitted, masked, brought within bounds, placed within the orderly framework of life as a whole. The various systems of sacrifices served this purpose. Fear was the permanent pressure upon the lives of these people, and without this high pressure their life would have lacked stress, of course, but also lacked intensity. A man who had been able to ennoble his fear by transforming part of it into awe had gained a great deal. People of this sort, people whose fear had become a form of piety, were the good men and the progressive men of that age. There were many sacrifices and many kinds of sacrifice; and a certain portion of these sacrifices, with their accompanying rites, fell within the province of the Weathermaker.

  Alongside Knecht in the hut, little Ada grew up--a pretty child, the old man's darling; and when he thought the time had come, he gave her to his disciple for a wife. From this point on Knecht was considered the Rainmaker's assistant. Turu presented him to the village Mother as his son-in-law and successor, and thereafter allowed him to carry out many official acts and functions as his deputy. Gradually, as the seasons and years passed, the old Rainmaker lapsed into the solitary meditativeness of age and left all his duties to Knecht. By the time the old man was found dead, crouched over some small pots of magic brew on the hearth, his white hair singed by the fire--the boy, the disciple Knecht had long been familiar to the village as the Rainmaker. He demanded that the village council provide an impressive funeral for his teacher, and as a sacrifice burned a whole heap of precious medicinal herbs and roots over the grave. That, too, had happened long ago, and several of Knecht's children already crowded Ada's hut, among them a boy named Turu. In him the old man had returned from his death flight to the moon.

  Knecht fared much as had his teacher in times past. Part of his fear was transformed into piety and thought. Part of his youthful aspiration and his profound longings remained alive, part faded away and evaporated as he grew older in his work, in his love and solicitude for Ada and the children. His foremost passion was still for the moon and its influence upon the seasons and the weather; to this he devoted persistent study, and in knowledge of these matters he reached and ultimately surpassed his master, Turu. And because the waxing and waning of the moon are so closely bound up with the birth and death of men; because of all the fears in which men live, fear of having to die is the strongest, Knecht acquired from his adoration and knowledge of the moon a devout and purified attitude toward death. In his riper years he was less subject to the fear of death than other men. He could speak reverently with the moon, or supplicatingly or tenderly; he knew that he was linked to it by delicate spiritual bonds. He knew the moon's life with great precision, shared with all the force of his own soul in the episodes of the moon's destiny. He experienced its disappearance and rebirth like a mystery within himself, suffered with it, felt alarm when the dreaded event occurred and the moon seemed exposed to illness and dangers, change and harm, when it lost its brightness, changed color, darkened until it seemed on the verge of extinction. At such times, it was true, everyone sympathized with the moon, trembled for it, recognized menace and the imminence of disaster in its eclipse, and stared anxiously at its old, ravaged face. But precisely at such times Rainmaker Knecht showed that he was closer to the moon and knew more about it than others. For although he shared in its suffering, although his heart constricted with anxiety, his memory of similar experiences was keener, his confidence better founded. He had greater faith in eternity and a second coming, in the possibility of revising and conquering death. Greater, too, was the degree of his devotion; at such times he felt in himself a readiness to share the fate of the celestial orb to the point of doom and rebirth. At times he even felt something akin to temerity, a kind of rash courage and the resolution to defy death by the power of mind, to strengthen his own selfhood by surrender to superhuman destinies. Some trace of this was apparent in his manner; others sensed it and regarded him as knowing and devout, a man of great calm and little fear of death, one who stood well with the higher powers.

  He had to prove these gifts and virtues in many hard tests. Once he had to withstand a period of poor crops and adverse weather that extended over two years. It was the greatest trial of his life. Troubles and bad portents had begun with the repeatedly postponed sowing, and then every imaginable misfortune had affected the crops, until in the end they were virtually destroyed. The village had starved cruelly, and Knecht, the Rainmaker, with it. It was a considerable achievement in itself to have survived this bitter year without losing all credence and standing, so that he could still help the tribe bear the catastrophe with humility and some degree of composure. Whe
n the next year, after a hard winter in which many of the tribe perished, all the miseries of the preceding year were repeated, when during the summer the common land parched and cracked in a stubborn drought, the mice multiplied fearfully, and the solitary conjurations and sacrifices of the Rainmaker proved as vain as the public ceremonies, the drum choruses, and the processions of the whole community; when evidence mounted that this time the Rainmaker could not make rain, it was no small matter and more than ordinary strength was needed to bear the responsibility and hold up his head against the frightened and infuriated people. There were two or three weeks in which Knecht stood entirely alone confronting the entire village, confronting hunger and despair, confronting the ancient belief among the people that only sacrifice of the Weathermaker could propitiate the powers. He had won the victory by yielding. He had not opposed the idea, had offered himself as the sacrifice. Moreover, with enormous toil and devotion he had helped to alleviate distress, had repeatedly discovered sources of water, divining a spring here, a trickling stream there. Even in a time of greatest distress he had not allowed the villagers to slaughter all their livestock. Above all he had lent his support to the tribal mother, who had succumbed to fatalism and weakness in these difficult times. By advice, threat, magic, and prayer, by example and intimidation, he saved her from collapsing completely and letting everything drift wildly. In those times of calamity and universal anxiety it became apparent that a man is the more useful, the more his life and thinking is turned toward matters of the spirit, matters that go beyond the personal realm, the more he has learned to venerate, observe, worship, serve, and sacrifice. The two terrible years, which had almost cost him his life, ended with his being more highly regarded and trusted than ever, not by the thoughtless crowd, of course, but by the few who bore responsibility and were able to judge a man of his type.

  His life had passed through these and many other trials by the time he reached the best years of his maturity. He had officiated over the burial of two of the tribal mothers, had lost a charming six-year-old son who had been carried off by a wolf. He had survived a severe illness without outside help, acting as his own physician. He had suffered hunger and cold. All this had marked his face, and his soul no less. He had also made the discovery that, in a certain peculiar manner, men of thought gave offense and aroused the repugnance of their fellows. They might be valued at a distance and called on in emergencies, but others neither love them nor accept them, rather give them a wide berth. He had also learned that the sick and unfortunate are far more receptive to traditional magic spells and exorcisms than to sensible advice; that people more readily accept affliction and outward penances than the task of changing themselves, or even examining themselves; that they believe more easily in magic than reason, in formulas than experience. These are matters which in the several thousand years since his era have probably not changed so much as a good many history books claim. But he had also learned that a seeking, thoughtful man dare not forfeit love; that he must meet the wishes and follies of men halfway, not showing arrogance but also not truckling to them; that it is always only a single step from sage to charlatan, from priest to mountebank, from helpful brother to parasitic drone, and that the people would by far prefer to pay a swindler and be exploited by a quack than accept help given freely and unselfishly. They would much rather pay in money and goods than in trust and love. They cheat one another and expect to be cheated themselves. You had to learn to see man as a weak, selfish, and cowardly creature; you also had to realize how many of these evil traits and impulses you shared yourself; and nevertheless you allowed yourself to believe, and nourished your soul on the faith, that man is also spirit and love, that something dwells in him which is at variance with his instincts and longs to refine them. But all these thoughts are no doubt far too abstract and explicit for Knecht to have been capable of them. Let us say: he was on the way to them; his way would some day lead him to them and past them.

  While he went his way, longing for abstract thought but living far more in the senses, in the spell of the moon, in the pungency of an herb, the saltiness of a root, the taste of a piece of bark, in cultivating simples, blending salves, submitting to the whims of weather and atmosphere, he developed many abilities within himself, including some that we of a later generation no longer possess and only half understand. The most important of these abilities was, of course, rainmaking. Although there were a good many special times when the sky stayed obdurate and seemed to mock his efforts, Knecht nevertheless made rain hundreds of times, and almost every time in a slightly different way. He would, of course, never have dared to make the slightest change or omission in the sacrifices and the rite of processions, conjurations, and drumming. But that was only the official, the public part of his work, the priestly side, which was for show; and undoubtedly it was very fine and produced a fine exalted feeling when after a day of sacrifices and processions the sky gave way in the evening, the horizon clouded over, the wind began to smell damp, the first drops of rain splattered down. But it had taken the Weathermaker's art to choose the day well, not to strive blindly when the prospects were poor. You could implore the powers, even besiege them, but you had to do so with feeling and moderation, with submission to their will. Even more than those glorious triumphant experiences of felicitous intercession he preferred certain others that no one but himself knew about, and even he knew about them only timorously, more with his senses than his understanding. There were weather conditions, tensions of the atmosphere and of heat, cloud formations and winds, smells of water and earth and dust, threats and promises, moods and whims of the weather demons, which Knecht detected in advance with his skin, his hair, with all his senses, so that he could not be surprised by anything, could not be disappointed. He concentrated the very vibrations of the weather within himself, holding them within him in such a way that he could command the clouds and the winds--not, to be sure, just as he pleased, but out of the very intimacy and attachment he had with them, which totally erased the difference between him and the world, between inside and outside. At such times he could stand rapt, listening, or crouch rapt, with all his pores open, and not only feel the life of the winds and clouds within his own self, but also direct and engender it, somewhat in the way we can awaken and reproduce within ourselves a phrase of music that we know by heart. Then he needed only to hold his breath--and the wind or the thunder stopped; he needed only to nod or shake his head--and the hail pelted down or ceased; he needed only to express by a smile the balance of the conflicting forces within himself--and the billows of clouds would part, revealing the thin, bright blueness. There were many times of unusually pure harmony and composure in his soul when he carried the weather of the next few days within himself with infallible foreknowledge, as if the whole score were already written in his blood in such a way that the outside world must play every note exactly as it stood. Those were his best days, his reward, his delight.

  But when this intimate connection with the outside was broken, when the weather and the world were unfamiliar, incomprehensible, and unpredictable, then currents were interrupted and derangements occurred within him. Then he felt that he was not a real Rainmaker, that his responsibility for weather and crops was an error and nuisance. At such times he was domestic, behaved obediently and helpfully toward Ada, sedulously shared the household tasks with her, made toys and tools for the children, pottered about preparing medicines, craved love and wanted nothing better than to differ as little as possible from other men, to conform wholly to them in customs and morals, and even to listen to the otherwise vexatious gossip of his wife and the neighboring women about the life, health, and conduct of others. But in good times his family saw little of him, for then he roamed, fished, hunted, searched for roots, lay in the grass or crouched in trees, sniffed, listened, imitated the voices of animals, kindled little fires and compared the shapes of the smoke clouds with the clouds in the sky, drenched his skin and hair with fog, rain, air, sun, or moonlight, and incidentally
gathered, as his Master and predecessor Turu had done in his lifetime, objects whose inner character and outward form seemed to belong to different realms, in which the wisdom or whimsicality of nature seemed to reveal some fragment of her rules and secrets of creation, objects which seemed to unite symbolically widely disparate ideas: gnarled branches with the faces of men or animals, water-polished pebbles grained like wood, petrified animals of the primordial world, misshapen or twinned fruit pits, stones shaped like kidneys or hearts. He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousands of years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find--this is our firm belief--the mind of man, that Mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.