"Gustavus Adolphus: The Lion of Midnight" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Nightside Of The Runes: Uthark, Adulruna, And The Gothic Cabbala"
ON THIS DAY IN OCCULT HISTORY
November 6
Gustavus Adolphus: The Lion of Midnight
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On the
morning of November 6, 1632, a fog so thick that Swedes still call heavy mist
“Lützen fog” settled over a flat plain in Saxony, where two armies waited to
destroy each other. Somewhere inside it, the King of Sweden rode forward at the
head of his cavalry, lost sight of his own men, and was cut down by enemy
horsemen. When the fog lifted, his horse Streiff came back to the Swedish lines
alone, wounded, with an empty saddle. Gustavus Adolphus
was dead at thirty-seven.
To millions
of Protestants across Europe, he hadn’t simply been a king. He had been the
fulfillment of a prophecy, and his death on that foggy field is one of the
strangest chapters in the history of the Rosicrucian dream…
Protestant Sweden still used the old Julian calendar in 1632, while the Catholic imperial army used the Gregorian, so the Battle of Lützen happened on November 6th for the Swedes and November 16th for their enemies. Sweden has commemorated it on the 6th ever since, even after adopting the Gregorian calendar, and still does: November 6th is Gustavus Adolphus Day, marked in Swedish bakeries with a pastry topped by the king’s silhouette. And by that same Julian reckoning, readers of yesterday’s post will notice, the Wizard Earl died in Sussex on November 5, 1632, just one day before the Lion of the North fell in Saxony.
The prophecy
that made Gustavus a Lion was decades older than he was. Through the late
sixteenth century, apocalyptic texts circulated across Protestant Germany
foretelling a “Lion of Midnight,” Mitternacht being an old German way of
saying “the North,” who would rise to overthrow the Eagle of the South, shatter
the power of Rome, and usher in a final age of peace before the end of the
world. These prophecies were almost universally attributed to Paracelsus, the brilliant, combative Swiss
physician-alchemist, and that attribution deserves the same scrutiny this
column gives everything else. Paracelsus died in 1541, and much of the
prophetic material bearing his name was written or heavily reworked by later
followers, a common fate for famous names in the period. The giveaway sometimes
borders on comic: even Victorian historians of Rosicrucianism repeated the
claim that Paracelsus had interpreted the new star of 1572 as a harbinger of
revolution, a star that appeared thirty-one years after his death.
The single
most influential source turns out to be a far more obscure figure: Paul Grebner, a German schoolteacher,
claimed that on June 23, 1573, the political future of Europe had been revealed
to him in a vision, a vision apparently stirred by that same new star, the
supernova now known as Tycho’s. Grebner modeled his prophecies on Paracelsian
ones, foretold a great northern monarch, and in 1582 presented a manuscript of
his work to Queen Elizabeth I; it still sits in the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge. When his predictions finally reached German print around 1619,
promising the New Jerusalem within a few years, they landed in a culture
already electrified by something else entirely.
That something
was the Rosicrucian manifestos.
The Fama Fraternitatis of 1614 and the Confessio Fraternitatis of
1615 announced a secret brotherhood of enlightened adepts preparing a “general
reformation” of learning, religion, and society, and the Confessio in
particular breathed the same air of imminent, world-changing transformation as
the Lion prophecies. The two currents blended so thoroughly that Grebner’s
prophecy is reported to have been printed alongside a 1625 edition of the Confessio
itself. Then the Thirty Years’ War
broke out in 1618, Protestant Bohemia was crushed at White Mountain in 1620,
and by the late 1620s the Protestant cause in Germany looked finished.
Rosicrucian hope, Paracelsian prophecy, and plain military desperation all
needed a Lion. In 1630, one landed on the Pomeranian coast with a Swedish army.
Gustavus
Adolphus was almost tailor-made for the role. He came from the North, he fought
the Habsburg eagle, and after his crushing victory at Breitenfeld in September
1631, pamphlets, prints, and sermons across Protestant Europe hailed him openly
as the Lion of Midnight. The engraver Matthäus Merian, the same Merian whose
plates illustrate Michael Maier’s alchemical masterpiece Atalanta Fugiens,
produced celebrated battle prints of his campaigns. More remarkably, the king
had grown up with a genuine esotericist at his elbow. Johannes Bureus, appointed as his tutor
when Gustavus was still a boy and later Sweden’s royal antiquarian, was a
runologist, Christian kabbalist, and prophet who built an entire mystical
system, the Adulruna, out
of Scandinavian runes, Hermeticism, and kabbalah, drawing in part on John Dee’s
Monas Hieroglyphica.
Bureus read the Rosicrucian manifestos closely enough to write a reply to the Fama
in 1616, and he believed the ancient Goths of Sweden had possessed a lost
primordial wisdom that history was now calling back into the world. Whatever
Gustavus himself privately made of all this, the man who taught him to read was
convinced Sweden had a sacred destiny.
Even the enemy
at Lützen belongs in an occult history. The imperial commander, Albrecht von Wallenstein,
was among the most astrologically obsessed generals of the century. Johannes
Kepler himself had cast his horoscope years earlier, and Wallenstein kept a
personal astrologer, Giovanni Battista Senno, in his service, the figure
Friedrich Schiller later immortalized as Seni in his Wallenstein trilogy.
So on that fogbound field, a commander who consulted the stars faced a king
whom half of Europe believed the stars, and the prophets, had already chosen.
And then the
chosen king died. The Swedes held the field, but the Lion who was supposed to
topple Rome and inaugurate the last age lay among the dead, his body stripped
and only found after the fighting. The prophecy didn’t die with him, of course;
prophecies rarely do. It simply moved. Alchemists later hailed his daughter,
Queen Christina, as the promised northern monarch, and Bureus dedicated his
apocalyptic Roar of the Northern Lion to her in 1644. In England,
Grebner’s prophecy was argued over through the Civil War, claimed for the
Stuarts, turned against them by the astrologer William Lilly, and even parodied against
Cromwell. The “Lion of Midnight,” it turned out, was less a man than a vacancy,
a shape that hope kept trying to fill, and Gustavus Adolphus remains the person
who came closest to fitting it before the fog closed in.
If you find
yourself near a Swedish bakery today (and we’re quite jealous if you do!),
raise a Gustavus Adolphus pastry to the Lion of the North, and to the strange,
stubborn dream that rode beside him…
By Thomas Karlsson | Inner
Traditions
Today, in
honor of the king who grew up under the tutelage of Sweden’s most extraordinary
Renaissance mystic, we’re recommending the most accessible English-language
guide to that mystic’s work.
Thomas
Karlsson’s Nightside of the Runes, published by Inner Traditions in
2019, is a revised and expanded English edition of material Karlsson first
published in Sweden, and its second half is devoted entirely to Johannes
Bureus, the Adulruna, and what Karlsson calls the Gothic Cabbala.
Karlsson is unusually well placed to write it: he earned his doctorate at
Stockholm University with a dissertation on Bureus and Gothic esotericism, so
the book rests on genuine archival scholarship rather than secondhand
romanticism. Readers get a clear account of how Bureus pared the runic row down
to fifteen “noble runes,” layered each with multiple levels of meaning, and
fused them with kabbalah, alchemy, and Hermetic cosmology into a single
initiatory map, along with an extensive selection of illustrations reproduced
from Bureus’s own manuscripts.
What makes it
the right pairing for today’s post is that it shows the Lion prophecy’s Swedish
soil from the inside. Bureus’s conviction that the ancient Goths held a lost
primordial wisdom, and that Sweden was destined to restore it, is exactly the
intellectual climate in which a young king could be cast as an apocalyptic
deliverer. Reading Karlsson on the Adulruna makes it much easier to
understand why so many Northern Europeans found the idea of a sacred Swedish
mission not just plausible but obvious. It also shows how seriously a royal
court could take esoteric speculation in the age of the Rosicrucian manifestos,
when a king’s tutor could be a kabbalist and nobody thought it strange.
Readers should know going in that the book’s first half covers a separate, twentieth-century runic system, Sigurd Agrell’s Uthark, and that Karlsson writes as the founder of Dragon Rouge, a left-hand path magical order, which shapes the practical material throughout. Readers wanting a straight military or political history of Gustavus Adolphus should look elsewhere. But for readers who finished today’s post wanting to understand the remarkable esoteric system taught by the man at the young king’s side, this remains the best available door into Bureus’s world in English.
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