HUMANISM IN THOMAS MANN
163
gories in the story of
The Magic Flute,
showing the marked influence
of ancient occult tradition upon his work. It would be less easy,
however, to determine when the novelist has drawn deliberately upon
a common store of magic symbolism and when, on the contrary,
symbolic images or myth-type incidents are born spontaneously from
the internal chemistry of his composition. Among themes relating to
initiation may be counted the stress upon Hans Castorp's grotesque,
uncontrollable laughter in the opening pages of
The Magic Mountain,
a first effect of a cure for all set habit; likewise, the description of
an evening at the cinema, toward the middle of the same book, so
close to Plato's image of the Cave of Shadows, a theme reinforced
later on by accounts of necromantic seances in a basement office
of the sanatorium; and again, the typical episode of "descent in–
to the tomb" symbolized in
joseph and His Brothers
by the pit
and by the prison, in
The Magic Mountain
by the shrouding in the
snow. Symbolic of initiation in
Doctor Faustus
is the vision of descent
by diving bell among the creatures of the deep, a variant of the
Hebraic vision of the abyss. Esoteric, too, is the particular significance
attached to the traditional device of disguise in the
]
oseph
narrative:
Jacob-in-Esau, Leah-in-Rachel, brother-in-stranger; and still more
esoteric is the conception of self-detachment, that almost sinister game
of the man-who-knows-more-than-he-knows, played both by Joachim
and the young dressmaker in
The Magic Mountain
as death draws
near for each. Especially hermetic is the role assigned to physical
suffering, which relates in these non-Christian works not to the idea
of salvation, but to processes of awakening and renewal. In
Budden–
brooks
sickness is still primarily a refuge: there little Hanna escapes
from the burden of existence. Later on, however, sickness becomes
a means of approach to the Mysteries. The moist spot on Hans
Castorp's lung, Leverkiihn's syphilis, these symbolize entry into dan–
gerous knowledge; they are parts of the initiatory themes of the
toll-gate and the pact.
Intimately allied to the conception of change-sickness-death, and
slyly pervasive in Mann, is the erotic element, treated by him as
another aspect of the physiological which serves as channel to the
universal; as such
it
relates to initiatory themes. The objects of love,
Frau von Rinnlingen, Tadzio, Clavdia Chauchat, Esmeralda, and
Ken
1
are little more than conquctors of souls
1
divinities
in
Hel'Jll~'
