Discovering Johannes Hohlenberg

Beginnings

It all began with a bout of pneumonia. Anusuya Kumar was a student of English Literature. She had been writing her Ph.D dissertation on Paul Scott, the author of The Raj Quartet, when she came down with pneumonia. However, even though she had a high fever, her deadline was close and she pushed on. “I had been approaching the topic from a fairly conventional Marxist perspective but suddenly, in my delirium, the novel seemed to open up and I could see through to a subtext. There seemed to be a central mystery, an invisible spiritual core, to these novels, and I saw that some of the English characters in the novels are initiated into this mystery. There is also an archetypal symbol that would resurface again and again which I could identify as a dancing figure in a circle of fire.”

Born in India, Anusuya was living in the U.S.A. at the time, but after this experience she decided to explore more deeply aspects of Indian spirituality. She began studying Sanskrit in Varanasi, but fell seriously ill and decided to continue her Sanskrit studies in Denmark. “But because of my literature background I couldn’t just sit and parse Sanskrit grammar all day, it would have been too boring, so I would go to the bookshops looking for some evidence of spirituality in Denmark. Within a month, in one of the second-hand bookshops I found a book called Yoga and its Importance for Europe, written by Johannes Hohlenberg. The rest, as they say, is history.”

A renaissance man

Hohlenberg, who was born in 1881 and died in 1960, was something of a renaissance man. Philosopher, painter, journalist, musician, biographer, political economist, publisher, he is little known today in Denmark or, indeed, elsewhere except as the author of two respected books on the philosopher Kierkegaard.

However, alert readers of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo may recall that he appears fleetingly in their reminiscences. The Mother, for example, speaks of going on a trekking holiday in the early 1900s with three friends, one of whom was Hohlenberg. He also asked her to teach him how to exteriorise from his body. She recalled that when he succeeded, he was terrified by the experience.

Hohlenberg also visited Sri Aurobindo in Pondicherry in 1915. During that time, he took a photograph and sketched Sri Aurobindo (his oil painting of Sri Aurobindo, completed on his return, is in the Ashram’s Prosperity Room). Sri Aurobindo recalls that Hohlenberg, after their daily evening interviews and mediations, would say, “Let us now talk of the ineffable”. And Sri Aurobindo would oblige.

All interesting, no doubt, but until now not worth much more than a footnote or two in the lives of The Mother and Sri Aurobindo. However, Anusuya has discovered a great deal more about Hohlenberg. It confirms, among other things, that his work with The Mother (Mirra as he knew her) was deeper and went on far longer than formerly supposed, and that he was also a good receptacle and propagator of Sri Aurobindo’s ideas. In fact, his book, Yoga I dens betydning for Europa [Yoga and its Meaning for Europe] which was published in 1916, was the first introduction to Sri Aurobindo’s yoga for a Danish, Swedish and German readership. Actually, it was the first book on the Integral Yoga anywhere (Sri Aurobindo was already writing his Arya essays but these were not put into book form until later).

However, discovering more about Hohlenberg and his relationship to The Mother and Sri Aurobindo was no easy matter.

“He was a very private man,” says Anusuya. “His widow, Eli, was responsible for his papers after his death and she burned what she thought were all his private papers. In doing this, she believed she was following her husband’s wishes. The only papers she spared were those that had been in or related to the public domain, like his publications, newspapers articles etc.”

Anusuya heard that the widow had donated the papers she had spared to the Royal Library in Copenhagen. When Anusuya went there, she discovered that there were twenty-five boxes of them. However, as she trawled through the boxes, it seemed that the widow had, indeed, destroyed all his personal papers.

His work with The Mother

“But in September last year, I found a very brief journal from his Paris years between 1906 and 1911. I knew I had hit pay-dirt when on the second page there is a reference to meeting Mirra Morisset, along with other painters. On later pages, he writes of having ‘another deep philosophical conversation with Mirra last night’, and of having dreams in which she visits him. Then there are references to her inviting him to do a kabbalah study with her.”

Hohlenberg, who had come to Paris to study painting, was already interested in occultism and having out of body experiences. In the journal, he reveals that Mirra tells him that if he wants to have such an experience, he should seriously study Max Theon’s system (Mirra had just returned from her first stay with the Theons in Tlemcem). And to do that he had first to study Hebrew. So they began studying the kabbalah together (as Peter Heehs has pointed out, Theon’s ‘system’ – the Philosophie Cosmique – was partially based upon the kabbalah).

“There are these intriguing and cryptic messages in the diary about the need to start studying Hebrew with Mirra, and there is another kabbalah notebook, which I have yet to go through in detail, which refers to dreams and lessons about the cosmic system of Max Theon and a very esoteric form of the kabbalah. Hohlenberg says he is trying to understand this through numbers. There are also extended references to his teacher, ‘Mirra Richard’, as she then was after her second marriage. This notebook concludes in 1911. It suggests she had been teaching him since 1907!”

The studies, however, were not necessarily limited to the kabbalah. In 1911, she sent him a postcard when he was in Egypt (he had gone there on her suggestion to continue his kabbalistic studies) referring to, “our fine evenings in Paris and our long philosophical conversations...” She later recalled that he “used to come and see me almost every evening” during his time in Paris.

And what about his exteriorisation experience that The Mother refers to in her evening class of March 3rd, 1954? The Mother says he was very insistent. She finally taught him how to do it, it happened in her presence and he was terrified. Anusuya says that he later wrote an article, called The Silver Cord, about the experience.

“I finally found it in an obscure journal and managed to copy it. As The Mother reported, although he was a courageous man he did panic when he exteriorised. This, he said, caused the silver cord to be jarred, and The Mother was concerned that it would be disconnected, which would have been very serious for him. I interviewed one of the few people still alive who knew him, and she said that he was still talking about that experience a few years before his death. Clearly, it was a very significant moment that remained with him for the rest of his life.”

Hohlenberg and Sri Aurobindo

But what about Pondicherry and his meetings with Sri Aurobindo?

Paul Richard had met Sri Aurobindo when he first came to Pondicherry in 1910 and Sri Aurobindo and the Richards had been corresponding ever since Paul returned to France.

Hohlenberg returned from Egypt in 1912 and began planning to visit Pondicherry along with the Richards. The Richards came to India in 1914, and invited Hohlenberg to join them and collaborate with them and Sri Aurobindo on the writing of the Arya. He agreed. “The idea was he was going to stay indefinitely.” But when he arrived in October, 1915 the Richards had already left.

Sri Aurobindo evidently made a huge impression upon him, and he describes their first encounter with a painter’s eye. However, after a stay of just over a month, Hohlenberg was arrested by the British and deported.

What happened was that he had entered English territory to buy cigars (quite possibly for Sri Aurobindo: Hohlenberg did not smoke). He had been warned by a friendly British police inspector, who, incidentally had great respect for Sri Aurobindo, that this would happen if Hohlenberg strayed across the line because anybody who consorted with Sri Aurobindo was automatically under suspicion. He was shipped first to Colombo, then Paris and then London, suspected of being a German spy. Here he was kept under surveillance. He was finally allowed to return to Denmark in 1916.

Hohlenberg made good use of his time in London. He went daily to the British Library to work on his book on yoga. But from where did he get his material?

By this time, Anusuya had examined almost all the boxes of Hohlenberg’s papers in the Royal Danish Library, but still she had found nothing about his contacts with Sri Aurobindo. Perhaps, after all, nothing had survived.

“But just when I was about to bail out, in box number 24 I found a handwritten notebook about his travels in Pondicherry that contained notes of his conversations with Sri Aurobindo.

I think it survived because of some cosmic irony. When he returned, Hohlenberg began writing articles on yoga and Sri Aurobindo for many magazines in Europe. I think his widow thought these were notes for these articles and did not burn them because, for her, they qualified as public rather than private material.”

Anusuya has not yet had a chance to examine the notebook in detail, nor does she have extensive knowledge of Sri Aurobindo’s work. What she has ascertained, however, is that this notebook contains much of the material that was used in his book, Yoga and its Meaning for Europe, which Hohlenberg published in 1916. This was later confirmed by Hohlenberg himself. In a letter in 1948 he recalls, “I wrote a book Yoga, which I dedicate to him and that for a great part is based on the entertainments I had with him.” And in the third edition of the book, published in 1952, he writes, “The preconditions for this book were created during my stay in India in 1915, in daily talks with a man to whom it is also dedicated: Sri Aurobindo Ghose. He was then about thirty years of age and already known all over India as a thinker and mystic.”

In fact, Anusuya has ascertained from the Pondicherry notebook that Hohlenberg had considerable contact with Sri Aurobindo during his brief stay. Sometimes he would spend whole days in his company, sketching him, meditating with him and listening to him speak. “It must have been like a continuous darshan for a man like Hohlenberg who was relentless in his pursuit of spiritual knowledge.”

Hohlenberg’s book

So how does Hohlenberg present Sri Aurobindo’s yoga to a European readership?

Anusuya says that Hohlenberg introduces himself not as a scholar or Indologist but as a layperson interested in the topic of yoga and prepared to probe it to its depths.

“He then goes on to say he had recently been in India with ‘a very holy man’, from whom he had learnt the deep mysteries and secrets of yoga which he will now present.

“He clarifies that, firstly, unlike the arid spiritual traditions of that time, this yoga is not a spirituality that exists in some kind of never-never land based on some promised future. It is about the here and now, and it is scientific, based on observing nature and how nature works. This is very important for his readers because there is a very deep materialist tradition in Denmark: it is very grounded, very anchored in matter.

“He explains that nature is animated by a force, and this force has a telos, an ultimate object or aim. If you look at any plant or tree, he writes, what you see is that it is becoming more and more itself; it is in a process of self-realization. This is nature’s unstoppable evolutionary pathway. Moreover, this animating force is a unifying force, harmonising disparate elements in the being.

“In terms of the individual, Hohlenberg explains that the more you become truly yourself, the more unified and universalised you become. So, by understanding and practising yoga, one understands and accelerates the process of self-realisation, unification and universalisation.”

Hohlenberg believed that the book contained a message of real pertinence for a fragmented Europe in the throes of the First World War. Yoga, he wrote, is the process of building higher and higher unities, more universal levels of being, through the harmonisation of conflicting parts and this is what Europe needed, above all, at that time. He had also understood from Sri Aurobindo that the point of historical evolution is not to dominate others but to realise oneself; and this can only take place if there is freedom for the individual and for the collective. This was a theme that informed the rest of his life.

Anusuya mentions that he also talks in the book about different levels of development. “He writes that Europe has now reached a certain stage of material development but this is not an end in itself, neither is the next stage, which is that of intellectual development. There is something still further. And now, he says, we are ready for that, we are able to manifest this other level, and there will come pioneers, visionaries, who herald this future. He identifies Sri Aurobindo as one of these: he calls him an arrow shot across the river to the other side.

“It’s a beautiful book,” concludes Anusuya. “The clarity of thought is uncanny – he was, after all, a philosopher – and the contents are profound but very simply presented. Through it, he brings a message to a Europe at war of the possibility of mutual cooperation without repression, of individualism harmonised with cooperation. This is a message that is still very relevant today. The book has been out of print for many years, but I have translated the book into English and it will be published soon.”

How influential were Hohlenberg’s writings?

Anusuya says he was trying to reach popular readers because at that time there were many misunderstandings about India and the Orient. So, in addition to the book, he also wrote articles about the yoga and Sri Aurobindo in various European newspapers and magazines.

What impact did this make?

Anusuya says it is very difficult to assess. The first Swedish Nobel prizewinner for literature, Selma Lagerlof, was his yoga student for some time. She read the book and wrote about it. But the book and the articles on Sri Aurobindo appeared at a time of great interest in the esoteric and the occult in Europe and its message may have been subsumed in the plethora of writings about other movements like Theosophy, psychical research etc.

In fact, soon after writing the book Hohlenberg himself takes another path. Anusuya mentions that Hohlenberg had been encouraged to publish the book by Carl Vett, a Danish millionaire, and Hohlenberg came increasingly under his influence. “In 1917 this man begins to woo him away from Sri Aurobindo and draws him into anthroposophy, which was then a very new thing in Europe.”

Rudolf Steiner invited him to study with him in Switzerland and when Hohlenberg returned in 1920, he established the first Anthroposophical Society in Denmark and later in Sweden and Norway. He finally left the Society in 1942 after a disagreement with Steiner’s widow over her instructions not to obstruct Nazi censorship in Norway.

For some years he lived in self-imposed exile on an island in a Norwegian fjord. It is then that he began to translate Sri Aurobindo again, including his Essays on the Gita. In 1948, he returned to Denmark and re-edited Yoga and its Meaning for Europe. He started up yet another magazine where he printed, among other things, a selection from The Life Divine (in his own translation).

“His last period,” says Anusuya, “is like Rembrandt’s last period: there is an incandescence to his writing. And his last articles are on Sri Aurobindo – on freedom and the pursuit of universal consciousness: he comes back to him in the end. In fact, I don’t think he ever left. Those who knew him said he always lived and thought of himself as a yogi, and I think the alpha and omega of his life remained his connection with Sri Aurobindo and The Mother.”

Hohlenberg died, unknown, in 1960 at the age of 79.

Anusuya admits she is only at the beginning of her research into the material, and, in particular, the three key notebooks – the Paris Journal, the kabbalah journal and the Sri Aurobindo diaries. “There is much more to discover.”

Meanwhile, coming to Auroville has been a bit like a homecoming for her. “I have been a lone ranger in Denmark, so I am astonished and touched to find so much support and encouragement for my research both here and in the Ashram. I intend to stay in India now to pursue these studies.”

Alan (with additional informational

Input from Gilles Guigan)

As to the conversations I had with him it is impossible to me, after so long time, to give you any detailed record. They treated religions and moral topics, and my impression was of a very wise and noble spirit. Of the mystical experiences you say he went through at that special epoch he gave no direct evidence, but of course it was felt through his acts and words.

He received me on a big overshadowed verandah which is open to the one side. The furniture there is extremely simple. There is a table with three chairs around it. On the bare and naked whitewashed walls are a pair of Japanese mats or rugs hanging. Below the ceiling are some garlands of dried mango-leaves... One of the young men led me up to the verandah and I waited there for some minutes. Suddenly, it seemed that I was not alone in the space and turned around to see him standing just in front of me. He had soundlessly entered from a threshold. I looked into an extraordinarily beautiful face. He had a finely chiselled forehead framed with mahogany hair falling down over his shoulders. The eyes were dark with flashes of sienna-terra light. A decisively shaped sharp nose and unusually defined lips that were full and sensuous. A thin black beard fell below the throat. He was dressed in a kind of white cotton robe with a length thrown over his shoulder on one side. The robe was open in the front to the bare chest. He had naked slender feet lightly touching the floor. It was late afternoon with a hint of dusk in the air. The light gave his olive skin a transparency as if it were self-illuminating. When I shook hands with him I could not help becoming self-conscious how his golden arm contrasted with my own red-grey-white European skin. My own body beside his standing there seemed like it had been scrubbed by some abrasive cleanser and washed of natural color. Bleached to the bone. We sat down and began to talk in French and English. Both languages were equal to him. It was amazing to hear him quote Homer one moment and then the Vedas or Shakespeare. It was as if he belonged to all worlds and cultures at once.... But this was only one side of his personality. Another seemed to live in infinity. I seemed to sometimes notice a slight hint of a smile on his face when he saw my amazement at his penetrating words. It was like I had been shot through the heart and mind.