Faust Without

Mephistopheles
The Historical Background
of Oswald Spengler’s
Philosophy of Science
[Expanded Edition]
By Amory Stern

© 2019, Amory Stern

San Diego, CA
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019915821
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Amory Stern

FAUST WITHOUT MEPHISTOPHELES 3

THRACE AND TURAN 41

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Faust Without Mephistopheles

Faust Without
Mephistopheles
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Amory Stern

Growth and Death

Oswald Spengler’s writings on the
subject of the philosophy of science are
very controversial, not only among his
detractors but even for his admirers. What
is little understood is that his views on
these matters did not exist in a vacuum.
Rather, Spengler’s arguments on the
sciences articulate a long German tradition
of rejecting English science, a tradition
that originated in the eighteenth century.
Luke Hodgkin notes:

“It is today regarded as a matter of

historical fact that Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz both
independently conceived and
developed the system of
mathematical algorithms known
collectively by the name of calculus.
But this has not always been the
prevalent point of view. During the
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
eighteenth century, and much of the
nineteenth, Leibniz was viewed by
British mathematicians as a devious
plagiarist who had not just stolen
crucial ideas from Newton, but had
also tried to claim the credit for the
invention of the subject itself.”1

This wrongheaded view stems from

Newton’s own catty libel of Leibniz on
these matters. During this time, the
beginning of the eighteenth century,
Leibniz’s native Prussia had not yet
become a serious power through the wars
of Frederick the Great. Leibniz, together
with Frederick the Great’s grandfather,
founded the Royal Prussian Academy of
Sciences. Newton’s slanderous account of
Leibniz’s achievements would never be
forgiven by the Germans, to whom
Newton remained a bête noire as long as
Germany remained a proud nation.
1
Luke Hodgkin, A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to
Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2005)
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Amory Stern

In the context of inquiring into the

matter of how such a pessimist as
Spengler could admire so notorious an
optimist as Leibniz, two foreign members
of the Prussian Academy of Sciences merit
attention. The thought of French scientist
and philosopher Pierre Louis Moreau de
Maupertuis, an exponent and defender of
Leibnizian ideas, was in many ways a
precursor to modern biology. Maupertuis
wrote under the patronage of Frederick the
Great, about a generation after Leibniz.
Compared to other eighteenth century
philosophies, Maupertuis’ worldview, like
modern biology and unlike most
Enlightenment thought, presents nature as
rather “red in tooth and claw.”
An earlier foreign member of the
Prussian Academy of Sciences, a
contemporary and correspondent of
Leibniz, Moldavian Prince and eccentric
pretender to descent from Tamerlane
Dimitrie Cantemir, left two cultural
legacies to Western history. Initially an
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
Ottoman vassal, he gave traditional
Turkish music its first system of notation,
ushering in the classical era of Turkish
music that would later influence Mozart.
Later – after he had turned against the
Ottoman Porte in an alliance with Petrine
Russia, but was driven out of power and
into exile due to his abysmal battlefield
leadership – Cantemir wrote much about
history. Most impactful in the West was a
two-volume book that would be translated
into English in 1734 as The History of the
Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire.
Voltaire and Gibbon later read Cantemir’s
work, as did Victor Hugo.2
Notes one biographer, “Cantemir’s
philosophy of history is empiric and
mechanistic. The destiny in history of
empires is viewed . . . through cycles
similar to the natural stages of birth,
growth, decline, and death.”3  Long before
2
See the booklet of the album Istanbul: Dimitrie Cantemir 1630-
1732, written by Stefan Lemny and translated by Jacqueline Minett.
3
Eugenia Pospescu-Judetz, Prince Dimitrie Cantemir: Theorist and
Compose of Turkish Music (Istanbul: Pan Yayıncılık, 1999), p. 34.
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Nietzsche popularized the argument,

Cantemir proposed that high cultures are
initially founded by barbarians, and also
that a civilization’s level of high culture
has nothing to do with its political
success.4 Thus was the Leibnizian
intellectual legacy mixed with pessimism
even in Leibniz’s own lifetime.

Goethe Against Numerology

It was most likely in the context of
this scientific tradition and its enemies that
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, generally
recognized as Germany’s greatest poet (or
one of them, at any rate), later authored
attacks on Newton’s ideas, such as Theory
of Colors. Goethe, an early pioneer in
biology and the life sciences, loathed the
notion that there is anything universally
axiomatic about the mathematical
sciences. Goethe had one major
4
Dimitrie Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the
Othman Empire, vol. I, tr. by Nicholas Tindal (London: Knapton,
1734) p.151, note 14
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
predecessor in this, the Anglo-Irish
philosopher and Anglican bishop George
Berkeley. Like Berkeley, Goethe argued
that Newtonian abstractions contradict
empirical understandings. Both Berkeley
and Goethe, though for different reasons,
took issue with the common (or at least,
commonly Anglo-Saxon) wisdom that
“mathematics is a universal language.”
By the early modern age of
European history, when
Goethe’s Faust takes place, cabalistic
doctrines, notes Carl Schmitt, “became
known outside Jewry, as can be gathered
from Luther’s Table Talks, Bodin’s
Demonomanie, Reland’s Analects, and
Eisenmenger’s Entdecktes Judenthum.”5 
This phenomenon can be traced to the
indispensable influence of the very
inventors of cabalism on the West’s
transition from feudalism to modern
5
Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas
Hobbes: Meaning and Failure of a Political Symbol, tr. by George
Schwab and Erna Hilfstein (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2008), p. 8
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capitalism since the Age of Discovery, and

in some cases even earlier. In 1911’s
rigorous study The Jews and Modern
Capitalism, Werner Sombart finds that
“Venice was a city of Jews” as early as
1152.6
Later, the 1492 voyage of Columbus
revolutionized Europe’s jurisprudential
conception of space, transforming it into
an open-ended one. Closed seas gave way
to what seemed, at the time, like the
virtually infinite ocean. This transition to
history’s first global ideas of empire and
international law greatly expanded the
scope of the Jewish moneylenders,
transforming their enterprises from
already-powerful medieval underworlds
into vital sectors of early modern Europe’s
political economies.

6
Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, tr. by M.
Epstein (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1951 and
1982), p. 69. Originally published as Die Juden und das
Wirtschaftleben, 1911.
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
Cabalism deeply permeates the
worldviews of many influential secret
societies of Western history since
medieval times, and certainly continuing
with the official establishment of
Freemasonry in 1717. Although the
details will never be entirely clear, it is
known that Goethe was involved with the
Bavarian Illuminati in his youth. He
seems to have experienced conservative
disillusionment with it later in life. It is
possible that the posthumous publication
of Faust: The Second Part of the
Tragedy was due at least in part to the
book’s ambivalently revealing too much
about the esoterica of Goethe’s former
occult activities.
What is clear is that he was directly
interested in cabalistic concepts. Karin
Schutjer persuasively argues that “Goethe
had ample opportunity to learn about
Jewish Kabbalah – particularly that of the
sixteenth-century rabbi Isaac Luria – and
good reason to take it seriously…
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Amory Stern

Goethe’s interest in Kabbalah might have

been further sparked by a prominent
argument concerning its philosophical
reception: the claim that Kabbalistic ideas
underlie Spinoza’s philosophy.”7
At one point in the second part
of Faust, Goethe shows an interest in
monetary issues related to usury or empty
currency, as Schopenhauer after him
would.8 This is fitting for a story that
takes place in early modern Europe and
concerns an alchemist. Some early
modern alchemists were known as
counterfeiters and would have most likely
had contact with Jewish moneylenders.
Insofar as his scientific philosophy had a
social, and not just an intellectual
significance, this desire on Goethe’s part
for economic concreteness was perhaps

7
Karin Schutjer, “Goethe’s Kabbalistic Cosmology,” Colloquia
Germanica, vol. 39, no. 1 (2006).
8
J.W. von Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act I, “Imperial Palace” scene;
Schopenhauer, The Wisdom of Life; Chapter III, “Property, or What
a Man Has.”
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what led him to reject and combat one key
cabalistic doctrine: numerology.
Numerology is the belief that
numbers are divine and have prophetic
power over the physical world. Goethe
held virtually the opposite view of
numbers and mathematical systems,
proposing that “strict separation must be
maintained between the physical sciences
and mathematics.” According to Goethe,
it is an “important task” to “banish
mathematical-philosophical theories from
those areas of physical science where they
impede rather than advance knowledge,”
and to discard the “false notion that a
phrase of a mathematical formula can ever
take the place of, or set aside, a
phenomenon.” To Goethe, mathematics
“runs into constant danger when it gets
into the terrain of sense-experience.”9
That numerology is a key tenant of
cabalism has been noted by the latter’s
9
Jeremy Naydler (ed.) Goethe on Science: An Anthology of
Goethe’s Scientific Writings (Ediburgh: Floris Books, 1996), pp. 65-
67
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critics as well as its proponents. In his

well-researched 1927 book on
Freemasonry, General Erich Ludendorff
remarks, “One must study the cabala in
order to understand and evaluate the
superstitious Jew correctly. He then is no
longer a threatening opponent.”10  In his
proceeding discussion of the subject,
Ludendorff then focuses exclusively on
the numerological superstitions in
cabalism. Such beliefs are affirmed by a
Jewish cabalistic source, which informs us
that “Sefirot” is the Hebrew word for
numbers, which represent “a Tree of
Divine Lights.”11
Everything about Goethe’s rejection
of scientific materialism can be seen as a
rebellion against numerology in the
sciences – and certainly, the modern
mathematical sciences stand on the
10
Erich Ludendorff, The Destruction of Freemasonry Through
Revelation of Their Secrets (Mountain City, Tn.: Sacred Truth
Publishing), p. 53.
11
Warren Kenton, Kabbalah: The Divine Plan (New York:
HarperCollins, 1996), p. 25
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
shoulders of numerology, as modern
chemistry does on alchemy. Schmitt once
mentioned the “mysterious Rosicrucian
sensibility of Descartes,” a reference to the
mysterious cabalistic initiatory movement
that dominated the scientific philosophies
of the seventeenth century.12 In this
Descartes was hardly alone; the entire
epoch of mostly French and English
mathematicians in the early modern
centuries, which ushered in the modern
infinitesimal mathematical systems, was
infused with cabalism. Francis Bacon, the
founder of what is to this day considered
“the scientific method,” was a major
leader of the Order of Rosicrucians.13
(Goethe, like another disillusioned
Freemason, Catholic philosopher Joseph
de Maistre, disliked Francis Bacon’s
teachings.)
12
Schmitt, Leviathan, p. 26
13
Kerry Bolton, The Occult and Subversive Movements: Tradition
& Countertradition in the Struggle for World Power, (London:
Black House Publishing, 2017); see the sections “Revival of
Interest” and “Rosicrucians & the ‘Society of Unknown
Philosophers’.”
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Even if it were possible to ignore the

growing Jewish intellectual and economic
influence on that age of seemingly
boundless maritime conquests – and
investments – one would still be left with
the metaphysical affinities between
numerology and even the most
scientifically accomplished worldview that
takes literally the assumption that numbers
are eternal principles.
Sombart remarks of modern state-
builders like Oliver Cromwell and
Frederick the Great that “when speaking
of these modern statesmen and rulers, we
can hardly do so without perforce thinking
of the Jews: it would be like Faust without
Mephistopheles.”14 The same may as well
be said of modern mathematical doctrines.
According to early National Socialist
economist Gottfried Feder, “When the
Babylonians overcame the Assyrians, the
14
Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, tr. by M.
Epstein (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1951 and
1982), p. 49. Originally published as Die Juden und das
Wirtschaftleben, 1911.
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
Romans the Carthaginians, the Germans
the Romans, there was no continuance of
interest slavery; there were no
international world powers… Only the
modern age with its continuity of
possession and its international law
allowed loan capitals to rise
immeasurably.”15  Writing in 1919, Feder
argues with the help of a graph that that
“loan-interest capital… rises far above
human conception and strives for
infinity… The curve of industrial capital
on the other hand remains within the
finite!”16 Goethe may have similarly
drawn connections between the kind of
economic parasitism he satirizes in the
second part of Faust and what he, like
Berkeley, saw as the superstitious modern
art of measuring the immeasurable.

Zalmoxis Versus Verjudung

15
Gottfried Feder, Manifesto for Breaking the Financial Slavery to
Interest, tr. by Alexander Jacob (London: Black House Publishing,
2016), p. 38.
16
Ibid, pp. 17-18.
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Cabalism attempts to synthesize

numerology with empirical science. The
fusion of science with numerology, it
should be noted, is actually not of Hebrew
or otherwise pre-Indo-European origin. It
originates from pre-Socratic Greek
philosophy’s debt, particularly that of the
Pythagoreans, to the northern Indo-Iranian
world, chiefly Thrace. The ancient Greek
Orphic initiatory religious movement,
controversial for its ascetic pessimism and
a faith that one scholar shows to have been
very heavily borrowed from the Thracians,
was a known influence on Pythagorean
ideas.17 The pre-Socratic philosopher
Zeno, among others, claimed that
Pythagoras plagiarized the Orphics. In his
Thracological study, Mircea Eliade
analyzes the significance of Herodotus’
skeptical account of Thracian (or “Getic,”
after the northern Thracian tribe known as
17
See, i.e. Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek
Spirit,” collected in Joseph Campbell (ed.) The Mysteries: Papers
from the Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1955).
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
the Getae) cults of the deity Zalmoxis,
whom Herodotus held to have been based
on a real historical figure:

“The account is consistent: The

Hellespontine Greeks, or Herodotus
himself, had integrated what they
had learned about Zalmoxis, his
doctrine, and his cult into a
Pythagorean spiritual horizon. That
the Hellespontine Greeks, or
Herodotus himself, had done this for
patriotic reasons (how could such an
important doctrine possibly have
been discovered by barbarians?) is
not important. What is important is
that the Greeks were struck by the
similarity between Pythagoras and
Zalmoxis. And this in itself is
enough to tell us what type the
doctrine and religious practices of
the cult of Zalmoxis were. For the
interpretatio graeca permitted a
considerable number of
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homologations with Greek gods or

heroes. The fact that Pythagoras was
named as the source of Zalmoxis’
religious doctrine indicates that the
cult of the Getic god involved belief
in the immortality of the soul and
certain rites of the initiatory type.
Through the rationalism and
euhemerism of Herodotus, or his
informants, we divine that the cult
had the character of a mystery
religion. This may be the reason
why Herodotus hesitates to give
details (if – which is not certain – his
sources had informed him); his
discretion in regard to the mysteries
is well known. But Herodotus
declares that he does not believe the
story of Zalmoxis as the slave of
Pythagoras; on the contrary, he is
convinced that the Getic daimon was
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by far the earlier of the two, and this
detail is important.”18

Of note and perhaps ironic in this

regard is that Schopenhauer admired the
Thracians for their arch-pessimistic ethos,
as though this mindset were the polar
opposite of the world-affirming Jewish
outlook he loathed.19 Taking into account
18
Mircea Eliade, tr. by Willard R. Trask, Zalmoxis, the Vanishing
God: Comparative Studies in the Religions and Folklore of Dacia
and Eastern Europe, (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 23-24
19
Arthur Schopenhauer, tr. by E.F.J. Payne, The World as Will and
Representation, vol. II (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2014), p. 585.
Schopenhauer’s dim view of Judaism is concisely summarized in a
book on an unrelated subject, Michael Kellogg’s The Russian Roots
of Nazism:

“In The World as Will and Idea [an alternate translation of

The World as Will and Representation], Schopenhauer
argued that most people strove to affirm their ‘will to live’
with ‘sufficient success to keep them from despair, and
sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its
consequences’. The enlightened few, however, realized:
‘Existence is certainly to be regarded as an erring, to return
from which is salvation’. He found this belief to play a
central role in Christianity. He maintained, ‘The doctrine
of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation
(denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the
essence of Christianity’. Thus true Christians had to deny
their worldly desires in order to achieve spiritual purity.
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Amory Stern

the Thracian belief in the immortality of

the soul and that of the body as a prison,
concepts that the more body-bound and
anthropomorphically-minded Greeks
found both disturbing and intellectually
Schopenhauer did not explicitly attribute the
ability to deny the will to live to Germans or Aryans, but he
did argue that Jews lacked this capacity. He stressed,
‘Christianity belongs to the ancient, true, and sublime faith
of mankind, which is opposed to the false, shallow, and
injurious optimism which exhibits itself in… Judaism’. He
further asserted that the Old Testament was ‘foreign to true
Christianity; for in the New Testament the world is always
spoken of as something to which one does not belong,
which one does not love, nay, whose lord is the devil’.
Schopenhauer upheld Christian idealism as the opposite of
Jewish materialism.
As cited by Dietrich Eckhart, Hitler’s early
völkisch mentor, Schopenhauer elaborated on Judaism’s
overwhelmingly materialistic nature in his work Parerga.
He asserted, ‘The true Jewish religion… is the crudest of
all religions, since it is the only one that has absolutely no
doctrine of immortality, nor even any trace of it’. He also
maintained: ‘Judaism… is a religion without any
metaphysical tendency’. This argument corresponded with
his claim that what passed for the Jewish religion merely
represented a ‘war-cry in the subjugation of foreign
peoples’. According to Schopenhauer, Jews focused on
shallow worldly gain and could not negate the will to live
in order to achieve salvation.”

Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and

the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 22-23
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
invigorating, this opposition makes sense.
But though the antagonism between the
Jewish and Thracian spirits is not in itself
a contradiction, in the context of the
subject under discussion, it presents a
puzzling paradox. It points to something
enigmatic and contradictory in the history
of numerology and mathematical theory.
How and why did the underlying
ethical and spiritual content of traditional
European numerology change so
dramatically throughout the centuries,
from its inception in the dour Thracian
cult of Zalmoxis to the rise of will-
embracing Jewish Kabbalah? It would be
a difficult but rewarding task to conduct
an exhaustive study of the subversion of
Western numerology through the ages.
Economic occult forces would be revealed.
In the process, modern mathematical
systems, and their effects on political
economy, would themselves perhaps be
reassessed.
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Yet it doesn’t require painstaking

research, but only an observation of the
phenomena, to behold how the character
of numerology changed throughout the
course of European history. With every
great revolutionary event since the 11th
century, the century of the Schism of
Christendom and in Spengler’s system the
beginning of the “Faustian” style, the
underlying spiritual direction of the
numerological arts moved away from the
foundational Thracian ethos toward the
Jewish one. Western mathematical
thought firmly belongs to the latter by the
17th century, the age of Rosicrucianism.
In this way, through historical and
cultic forces – namely the Exploration Age
and the rise of Rosicrucianism –
numerology’s original spiritual meaning
became inverted. It was turned upside
down, from an aloof world-denying
worldview, in Schopenhauer’s sense, into
one of optimistic sophism. Incidentally
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
(or not), financier classes thrive on the
latter.
And yet, numerological assumptions
remained in many ways the same in form,
if certainly not in content. Lines have
sometimes been drawn by historians from
the Thracian influence on Greek
philosophy to modern science. One
obvious, if uncited, influence on
Spengler’s work blamed this phenomenon
for the destruction of the anthropomorphic
ancient Greek idea of beauty.
In The Foundations of the 19th
Century, Houston Stewart Chamberlain
goes farther than Nietzsche, who had
argued that Socratic philosophy was the
ruin of Greece. Chamberlain argues that
philosophy itself was the downfall of
Greece, because the Greek calling was in
art, as represented to its fullest potential by
Homer. Impressively, for an English
Germanophile writing in 1899,
Chamberlain is aware that so much of
what was unprecedentedly revolutionary
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Amory Stern

in Greek philosophy came from the

Thracians. (To this day, few people
outside of some parts of Eastern Europe
know that.) Chamberlain is not the
complete racial determinist of the black
legend surrounding his reputation, because
he notes (again, correctly) that the
Thracians were closer to the “Teutons”
and less mixed than the ancient Greeks
were; nevertheless, he criticizes the
cultured Greeks for borrowing the less
cultured Thracian superstitions and being
untrue to the Homeric national form of the
“Hellenes.” Rhapsodizes Chamberlain at
one point in The Foundations of the 19th
Century:

“O Hellenes! if only you had

been true to the religion of Homer
and the artistic culture which it
founded! If you had but trusted your
divine poets, and not listened to your
Heraclitus and Xenophanes, your
Socrates and Plato, and all the rest of
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Faust Without Mephistopheles
them! Alas for us who have for
centuries been plunged into
unspeakable sorrow and misery by
this belief in daemons, now raised to
sacred orthodoxy, who have been
hampered by it in our whole
intellectual development, who even
to this day are under the delusions of
the Thracian peasants!”20

This analysis is accurate where form

is concerned, but it neglects much in terms
of content. Thraco-Greek mathematical
ideas were empirical and finite.
Spengler’s analysis of Classical science,
even if sometimes exaggerated,
demonstrates quite well the closed nature
of the ancient Greek mathematical
systems. The medieval-to-modern West,
“Faustian Man,” by contrast thinks in the
infinitesimal systems introduced in the
20
Houston Stewart Chamberlain, The Foundations of the Nineteenth
Century Volume I, tr. by John Lees, first impression 1910, second
impression 1912 (Revisionist Books edition, 2015), p. 108. See also
p. 99.
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Amory Stern

early modern centuries for the reasons

mentioned above (although Spengler
argued that the Gothic cathedrals of the
eleventh century already represented
precursors to infinitesimal mathematical
thought). The Thraco-Hellenic model of
mathematics is an archetype of grimly
heroic acceptance of death, while the
Judeo-Faustian one is an archetype of the
myth of eternal life – a myth most useful
to any economy based on loans and debt.
In any case, Goethe recognized the
intrusion of numerological myths and
superstitions into the physical sciences as
a powerful weapon. A weapon, he
perceived, with the potential to ruin
nature. That he studied numerology has
been established by scholars.21

Goethe’s Influence
A generation before Goethe,
Immanuel Kant had propounded the idea
Ronald Douglas Gray, Goethe the Alchemist (Cambridge:
21

Cambridge University Press, 2010), p.6

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Faust Without Mephistopheles
that the laws of polarity – the laws of
attraction and repulsion – precede the
Newtonian laws of matter and motion in
every way. This argument would
influence Goethe’s friend Friedrich
Wilhelm von Schelling, another innovator
in the life sciences as well as a key pioneer
of the literary and philosophical
movement known as Romanticism. By
the time Goethe articulated his anti-
Newtonian theories and led a
philosophical milieu, he had an entire
German tradition of such theories to work
from.
Goethe’s work was influential in
Victorian Britain. Most notably, at least in
terms of the scientific history of that era,
Charles Darwin would cite Goethe as a
botanist in On the Origin of the Species.
Darwin’s philosophy of science, to the
extent that he had one, was largely built on
that of Goethe and the age of what came to
be known as Naturphilosophie. Historian
of science Robert J. Richards has found
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Amory Stern

that “Darwin was indebted to the

Romantics in general and Goethe in
particular.”22  Darwin had been introduced
to the German accomplishments in
biology, and the German ideas about
philosophy of science, mainly through the
works of Alexander von Humboldt.23 (The
latter was a Prussian traveler, geographer,
and cosmological theorist who also
influenced 19th century American poetry,
from the Transcendentalists to Edgar
Allan Poe.24)
Why has this influence been
forgotten? “In the decade after 1918,”
explains Nicholas Boyle, “when hundreds
of British families of German origin were
forcibly repatriated, and those who

22
Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life: Philosophy
and Science in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2010), p. 435
23
Ibid, pp. 518-526
24
Poe’s onetime rejection from joining Freemasonry left him a critic
of that organization and its philosophy, as can be seen in his anti-
Masonic revenge fantasy “The Cask of Amontillado.” In his work
of philosophy of science, Eureka: A Prose Poem, Poe lampoons
Francis Bacon as “Francis Hog.”
31
Faust Without Mephistopheles
remained anglicized their names, British
intellectual life was ethnically cleansed
and the debt of Victorian culture to
Germany was erased from memory, or
ridiculed.”25  To some extent, this process
had already started since the outbreak of
the First World War, if not even earlier.

Heroic Science in Spengler’s The

Decline of the West
Britain’s intellectual ethnic cleansing
would not go unreciprocated. In
1915’s Händler und Helden (Merchants
and Heroes), German economist and
sociologist Werner Sombart attacked the
“mercantile” English scientific tradition.
Here, the author is particularly critical of
what he calls the “department-store ethics”
of Herbert Spencer, but in general
Sombart calls for most English ideas –
including English science – to be purged
from German national life.
25
Nicholas Boyle, Goethe and the English-speaking World: Essays
from the Cambridge Symposium for His 250th Anniversary
(Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012), p. 12
32
Amory Stern

In his writings on the philosophy and

historiography of science, Spengler would
answer this call. The first volume of The
Decline of the West was written mostly
during the First World War, although
some of it was conceived even before that.
It was first published in 1918.
Sombart had argued, citing a line by
the great poet Friedrich Schiller, that from
the perspective of the “heroic” worldview,
“life is not the highest value.” Spengler
expanded this sensibility to the sciences.
Everything written on philosophy of
science in The Decline of the West seems
to advocate the heroic, soldierly
acceptance of death over what Sombart
had criticized as the “merchant” ethos of
wanting to live forever.
Spengler heavily drew on the ideas
of Goethe, and evidently also on the views
of a pre-Darwinian French Lutheran
paleontologist of German origin, Georges
Cuvier. For instance, Spengler’s assault
on universalism in the physical sciences
33
Faust Without Mephistopheles
mostly comes from Goethe, but his
rationale for rejecting Darwinian evolution
appears to come from Cuvier. The idea
that life-forms are immutable, and simply
die out, only to be superseded by unrelated
new ones – a persistent theme in Spengler
– comes more from Cuvier than Goethe.
Cuvier, however, does not belong to
the German transcendentalist tradition, so
Spengler mentions him only peripherally.
On the other hand, in the third chapter of
the second volume of The Decline of the
West, Spengler uses a word that Charles
Francis Atkinson translates as “admitted”
to describe how Cuvier propounded the
theory of catastrophism. Clearly, Spengler
shows himself to be more sympathetic to
Cuvier than to what he calls the “English
thought” of Darwin.26
Several asides about Cuvier are in
order. First of all, this criminally
underrated thinker is by no means
26
Oswald Spengler, tr. by Charles Francis Atkinson, The Decline of
the West vol. II, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928), p. 31.
34
Amory Stern

outmoded, at least not in every way.

Modern geology operates on a more-
Cuvieran-than-Darwinian plane.27
Secondly, it is worth noting that Ernst
Jünger once astutely observed that Cuvier
is more useful to modern military science
than Darwin.28  
It may also be of interest that the
Cuvieran system is even further removed
from Lamarckism – and its view of
heredity, as a consequence, more
thoroughly racialist – than the Darwinian
system.29 In Cuvier’s thought, races and
species do not evolve, but rather emerge
from major natural catastrophes, and
hybrids cannot survive in nature. Spengler
27
Elizabeth Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 94.
28
From Jünger’s Aladdin’s Problem tr. Joachim Neugroschel: “It its
astounding to see how inventiveness grows in nature when existence
is at stake. This applies to both defense and pursuit. For every
missile, an anti-missile is devised. At times, it all looks like sheer
braggadocio. This could lead to a stalemate or else to the moment
when the opponent says, ‘I give up’, if he does not knock over the
chessboard and ruin the game. Darwin did not go that far; in this
context, one is better off with Cuvier’s theory of catastrophes.”
29
See Georges Cuvier, Essay on the Theory of the Earth (London:
Forgotten Books, 2012), pp. 125-128 & pp. 145-165.
35
Faust Without Mephistopheles
often uses these concepts as cultural
metaphors throughout The Decline of the
West.
Another scientist of German origin
who may have influenced Spengler is the
Catholic monk Gregor Mendel, the
discoverer of what is now known as
genetics. One biography of Mendel notes:

“Though Mendel agreed with

Darwin in many respects, he
disagreed about the underlying
rationale of evolution. Darwin, like
most of his contemporaries, saw
evolution as a linear process, one
that always led to some sort of better
product. He did not define “better”
in a religious way – to him, a more
evolved animal was no closer to God
than a less evolved one, an ape no
morally better than a squirrel – but in
an adaptive way. The ladder that
evolving creatures climbed led to
36
Amory Stern

greater adaption to the changing

world. If Mendel believed in
evolution – and whether he did
remains a matter of much debate – it
was an evolution that occurred
within a finite system. The very
observation that a particular
character trait could be expressed in
two opposing ways – round pea
versus angular, tall plant versus
dwarf – implied limits. Darwin’s
evolution was entirely open-ended;
Mendel’s, as any good gardener of
the time could see, was closed.”30

How very Goethean – and

Spenglerian.
His continuation of the German
mission against English science explains
Spengler’s citation of German-Jewish
scientist and fervent anti-racialist Franz

Robin Marantz Henig, The Monk in the Garden: The Lost and
30

Found Genius of Gregor Mendel, the Father of Genetics (New

York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017), p. 125.
37
Faust Without Mephistopheles
Boas’ now-discredited experiments in
craniology in the second volume of The
Decline of the West.  In his posthumously
published book on Indo-Europeanology,
the unfinished but lucid Frühzeit der
Weltgeschichte (Early Days of World
History), Spengler cites the contemporary
German Nordicist race theorist Hans F. K.
Günther in writing that “urbanization is
racial decay.”31  This would seem quite a
leap, from citing Boas to citing Günther.
However, in the opinion of one historian
of scientific ideas, Boas and Günther had
more in common than they liked to think,
because they were both heirs more of the
German Idealist tradition in science than
what the Anglo-Saxon tradition recognizes
as the scientific method.32  Spengler must
have keenly detected this commonality,
for his views on racial matters were never

31
Oswald Spengler, Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte (Munich: C.H.
Beck, 1966), Fragment 101.
32
Amos Morris-Reich, “Race, Ideas, and Ideals: A Comparison of
Franz Boas and Hans F.K. Günther,” History of European Ideas,
vol. 32, no. 3 (2006).
38
Amory Stern

synonymous with those of Boas, any more

than they were identical to Günther’s.

The Death of Idealism in Science

He probably went too far in his
crusade against the Anglo-Saxon scientific
tradition, but as we have seen, Spengler
was not without his reasons. He was
neither the first nor the greatest German
philosopher of science to present
alternatives to the ruling English
paradigms in the sciences, but was rather
an heir to a grand tradition. Before
dismissing this anti-materialistic tradition
as worthless, as today’s historiographers
of science still do, we should take into
account what it produced.
Darwin’s philosophy of nature was
predominantly German; only his
Malthusianism, the least interesting aspect
of Darwin’s work, was singularly British.
As for Einstein, that proficient but
unoriginal thinker was absolutely steeped
in the German anti-Newtonian tradition, to
39
Faust Without Mephistopheles
which he merely put a mathematical
formula. These are only the most
celebrated examples of scientists
influenced by the German tradition
defended – maniacally, perhaps, but with
noble intentions – in the works of Oswald
Spengler.
Whether one considers Spengler’s
ideas useful to science or utterly hateful to
it, one question remains: Should the
German tradition of philosophy of science
he defended be taken seriously? Ever
since the post-Second World War de-
Germanization of Germany, protested by
the ill-fated General Patton and
euphemistically called “de-Nazification,”
this intellectual tradition is now pretty
much dead in its own fatherland. But does
that make it entirely wrong?

***
Thrace and Turan
43
Thrace and Turan

The term “Turan” has experienced

many uses and abuses ever since it was
first coined. “Turan” originally referred to
the less civilized northern Iranian semi-
nomadic pastoral nations that had not
adopted Zoroastrianism, while “Iran”
referred to the more settled Zoroastrian
nations of the south. But they were both of
Indo-Iranian origin.
“Turan” first became misapplied to
Turco-Mongolian nations starting with
Muslim scholars in the Middle Ages, then
this was further abused by the Magyar-
identifying nineteenth century Jewish
historian Ármin Vámbéry of Hungary.
The Turco-Mongolian peoples actually
entered into history much later, and were
easily confused with the ancient
“Turanians” (even though they were
different people, if in some cases partially
descended from and mythologically
connected to their predecessors) because
they possessed virtually the same cavalry
44
Amory Stern

culture-complex as had the original

Iranian-speaking Turan. The only
difference was that the newer medieval
Turco-Mongolian conquerors had
gunpowder.
According to the ancient Zoroastrian
Iranians, the first writers to use the term,
“Turan” meant the barbarian steppe-forest
cousins from the north. The original
location of these marauding north-Iranian
horsemen was the Pontic Steppe, north of
the Black Sea. This area was the cradle of
all Indo-European cultures, which all
descend from the first culture in human
history to domesticate the horse.
In the summary of Christopher I.
Beckwith:

The Central Eurasian Culture

Complex, which dominated much of
Eurasia for nearly four millennia,
developed among a people known
only from linguistics: The Proto-
Indo-Europeans. Because the
45
Thrace and Turan
precise location of their homeland is
not known for certain, scholars
working in various areas of cultural
history have attempted to develop a
model of the Indo-European
homeland and of Indo-European
culture based on information
derived from historical linguistics.
The words shared by the languages
and cultures of Indo-European
peoples in distant areas of Eurasia
constitute evidence that the things
they refer to are shared inheritance
of their Proto-Indo-European
ancestors. Based on words referring
to flora, fauna, and other things, as
well as on archaeology and
historical sources, it has been
concluded that the Proto-Indo-
European homeland was in Central
Eurasia, specifically in the mixed
steppe-forest zone between the
46
Amory Stern

southern Ural Mountains, the North

Caucasus, and the Black Sea.33

These mysterious war charioteers

pushed southwest and quickly conquered
the Thracian plain. Later, they invaded
the rest of Europe and much of Asia. The
tawny-haired, colorful-eyed ancient
Scythian and Thracian tribes of the
Classical age represented the oldest and
purest prototypes of this enigmatic
primeval “Turan.”
The Pontic Steppe’s conquest of the
Balkans began at Thrace, an ancient
region that, in its broader ethnological
sense, covered much of Southeastern
Europe, especially modern-day Romania
(home of the northern Thracian tribes
known as the Getae and the Dacians) and
Bulgaria (the southern part of the greater
33
Christopher I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A History of
Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the Present (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009) p. 29 (Italics in
Beckwith’s original.)
47
Thrace and Turan
Thracian zone and the location of the
Kingdom of Thrace proper, which
bordered and influenced ancient Greece).
Thrace was history’s first conquest by
“Turan.”
From 4200 to 3900 BC, long before
the Indo-Europeans reached Greece or
India, over six hundred Old European
(pre-Indo-European) settlements, writes
David W. Anthony, “were burned in the
lower Danube valley and eastern
Bulgaria.” These Old European peoples
tried to escape to a settlement in Jilava
(located in today’s Romania), explains
Anthony, but:

“Jilava was burned, apparently

suddenly, leaving behind whole pots
and many other artifacts. People
scattered and became much more
mobile, depending for their food on
herds of sheep and cattle rather than
fixed fields of grain. The forest did
not regenerate; in fact, pollen cores
48
Amory Stern

show that the countryside became

even more open and deforested.”34

The Thracian region was completely

overrun by the cavalrymen from the Pontic
Steppe. R.F. Hoddinott observes:

“In favorable conditions this

eastern infiltration might have given
new impetus to the flowering
Carpatho-Balkan civilization.
Instead, the climate continued to
deteriorate and the Yamnaya [Proto-
Indo-European] trickle became a
torrent, causing a general population
surge southwards with increasing
conflict for land capable of
supporting fewer and fewer people.
Complete destruction overtook the
wealthy Chalcolithic [Copper Age]

34
David W. Anthony, The Horse, The Wheel, and Language: How
Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern
World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 227
49
Thrace and Turan
settlements north and south of the
Danube. Few ever recovered.”35

What was the nature of the new

conquering culture? What did these
hordes on horseback believe? According
to Mircea Eliade:

“. . . the Dacians called themselves

‘wolves’ or ‘those who are like
wolves’, who resemble wolves. Still
according to Strabo (7. 3. 12; 11.
508, 511, 512), certain nomadic
Scythians to the east of the Caspian
sea were also called daoi. The Latin
authors called them Dahae, and
some Greek historians daai. In all
probability their ethnic name derived
from Iranian (Saka) dahae, ‘wolf'.
But similar names were not unusual
among the Indo-Europeans.”36
35
R.F. Hoddinott, The Thracians (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1981) p. 24
36
Mircea Eliade, tr. Willard R. Trask, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing
God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) p. 2
50
Amory Stern

Eliade explains what this affinity with

wolves entailed:

“Now transformation into a wolf –

that is, the ritual donning of a
wolfskin – constituted the essential
moment of initiation into a men's
secret society. By putting on the
skin, the initiand assimilated the
behavior of a wolf; in other words,
he became a wild-beast warrior,
irresistible and invulnerable. ‘Wolf’
was the appellation of the members
of the Indo-European military
societies.”37

Another belief that can be traced

back to the ancient Indo-Europeans is
what Eliade calls “dualistic motif of the
creation of the World by two antagonistic
Beings.” Eliade finds that much folklore
37
Mircea Eliade, tr. Willard R. Trask, Rites and Symbols of
Initiation (New York: Harper and Row, 1958) p. 83
51
Thrace and Turan
throughout the world seeks to explain
“human existence by a system of
oppositions and tensions, yet without
arriving at an ethical or metaphysical
‘dualism’.” In the oldest forms of this
folkloric myth, the second being after the
Creator-God is described as an animal
deity that dutifully helps God create the
universe. However, due originally to non-
Zoroastrian Iranian (and only superficially
and much later, near-Eastern) influence,
concludes Eliade, “it is only in Eurasia”
that the concept of an assistant of God in
creating the cosmos “involves a hostile
protagonist, an adversary of God; in other
words, only in Eurasia has the theme
developed ‘dualistically’.”38
The horses these warriors first
domesticated were in fact ponies, a
tradition that survived in the Romanian
principalities into the nineteenth century.
The “extremely sure-footed,” if joyless,
38
Eliade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, p. 78, p. 127, p. 106 (The
posthumous Spengler, writing in 1935-36, also considers the beliefs
of “Turan” to have reflected a dualistic sense of polarity.)
52
Amory Stern

Wallachian pony described by Field

Marshal Count Moltke in his memoirs was
actually the original Indo-European war
chariot horse. Stout ponies were better
suited to the ancient war chariot than large
horses.39
The confused, anachronistic
association of Turco-Mongolian peoples
with “Turan” has hopefully been dispelled
by the above remarks. It was perhaps with
the intent to restore the original meaning
that Oswald Spengler named the ancient
Indo-European culture-complex “Turan”
in Frühzeit der Weltgeschichte (Early
Days of World History), a posthumously
published book written during the last
years of Spengler’s life. In any case,
Spengler’s concept is close to the true
39
Erik Hildinger, Warriors of the Steppe (Cambridge, Mass.: Da
Capo Press, 2001), p. 16; Radu R. Florescu & Raymond T.
McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces: His Life and His
Times (New York: Hachette, 2009), p. 141; Richard
Brzezeinski, Polish Armies 1569-1696 (Oxford: Osprey, 1987), p.
23; and Helmuth Graf von Moltke, Moltke: His Life and
Character (San Francisco: Pickle Partners), p. 130.
53
Thrace and Turan
historical definition. “Turan” originally
described an Indo-European culture, not a
Turco-Mongolian one.40
The influence of the southern, pre-
Indo-European civilizations on Greek
thought is well-known. Less commonly
studied, but at least as substantial, is the
inspiration that the Greeks took from the
barbaric but innovative Iranian-speaking
north. Thrace and Greece had
considerable cultural (and in the case of
Macedon, probably even ethnological)
interactions with one another, despite the
different natures of the Thracian and
Greek peoples.
From the illiterate but ingenious
Thracians came many aspects of ancient
Greek mythology and philosophy. In
addition to the mathematical influences
previously discussed in the essay “Faust
40
Spengler’s conception owes less to Vámbéry’s “pan-Turanist”
ideology than to the Scytho-Sarmatiaphile Renaissance of early
modern Eastern Europe, which originated in late medieval Poland.
Nietzsche may have had this famously freedom-loving, yet
unabashedly elitist and militaristic, historic current of thought in
mind when he dubiously claimed descent from Polish nobility.
54
Amory Stern

Without Mephistopheles,” the mythical

Hellenic figures of Dionysus and Orpheus
were also of Thracian origin. However,
there developed a world of difference
between the ascetic significance of
Dionysus for the Orphics on the one hand,
and the decadent Greek Bacchic cults on
the other. The former cult was much
closer to the original Thracian roots of
Dionysus than was the more familiar
Bacchic version.41
Thrace was also seen by the Greeks
as the home of Boreas, god of the north
wind and of winter. Somewhere north of
Thrace proper was the land of the
Hyperboreans, a mysterious race often
associated with the North Pole, and also
with the Celts. The location of
Hyperborea was apparently debated by the
ancient Greek writers, but Homer is
believed to have placed it around the
41
Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek Spirit,”
collected in Joseph Campbell (ed.) The Mysteries: Papers from the
Eranos Yearbooks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1955).
55
Thrace and Turan
Dacia region. Many other ancient Greek
sources also located the Hyperborean
homeland in areas corresponding to
modern day Romania.
According to the early Greek
historian Hellanicus, the Hyperboreans
were vegetarians. So too, it is worth
noting, were the Thracophile Greek
Orphics and Pythagoreans. And yet, in
addition to the wolfskin rituals described
by Eliade above, the Thracian tribes,
according to Herodotus, also practiced
human sacrifices to Zalmoxis by throwing
a selected victim onto a set of stakes.
The lion-blonde, notoriously warlike
Thracians, situated to the north of Greece,
resembled the intruding Indo-European
culture more closely than the Greeks did.
The Mediterranean Old European peoples
of Greece had also fallen prey to the Indo-
European invasions, but thousands of
years more recently than the Old
Europeans of the Thracian lands had.
Furthermore, throughout greater Thrace
56
Amory Stern

the southerly Old Europeans appear to

have been annihilated more thoroughly in
the older “Turanic” (in Spengler’s sense,
meaning Proto-Indo-European) conquests
of Thrace than in the more recent Indo-
European incursions into Greece. In the
latter case, amalgamation had been more
common – as reflected, for instance, by
the bronzed and relatively dark-featured
Ionians.
Spengler described Old Europe as
“Atlantis,” a reference to his theory that it
had been a maritime culture. Ancient
Greece reflected a hybridization of the
remnants of the conquered “Atlantis” with
the younger culture-complex of war
charioteers from the steppe. By contrast,
the Mediterranean Old European culture
had been ruthlessly destroyed in the
Thracian region. Accordingly, in addition
to predating Hellenic civilization,
Thracian culture was a less diluted
archetype of the real Turan – and the wolf
in man.
57
Thrace and Turan

***