The Christians never really could completely anihilate the German pagan spirit, as with everyone else you start by burning all the temples first which they did, then the forests. You'll get a real kick out of this look back at those fun filled, nature loving Germans even Julius Ceasar adored.
They really are in love with nature what the hell happened?
To remove the German soul from the natural landscape is to kill it. The Romans knew this so once Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire their missionaries were eager to chop down the German forests and set their temples on fire.
Whenever the church encountered Pagan elements that it could not suppress, it gave them a Christian dimension and assimilated them. These ancestral traditions were reinterpreted and revised, but the church never succeeded in effacing the German Pagan heritage.
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Germany had always made a virtue of their late submission to Latin civilization and had glorified the natural man and woman with all of their virtues and vices. Over 2000 years ago (about 51 B.C.) Julius Caesar noted of the Germans: "The only beings they recognize as gods are things that they can see, and by which they are obviously benefited, such as sun, moon and fire; the other gods they have never even heard of."
"Vegetarisches Speisehaus", 1900 | The word "God" was neuter in gender in the Teutonic language (Das Gott, or in old Nordic "gud") and the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (98 A.D.) wrote: "According to German outlook, pronouncements of destiny seem to acquire a greater sacredness in the mouth of women. Prophecy and magic in a good as well as an evil sense is by choice the gift of women. If it is inherent in the nature of men to show the female sex a great consideration and respect, then this was particularly shaped on the German people from of old. Men earn deification through their deeds, women through their wisdom."
Thus the religiosity of the Indo-Germanic people, whenever their nature can unfold itself freely, emerges only in that form which religious science has described as "nature religion" or "earth religions". To remove the German soul from the natural landscape is to kill it. The Romans knew this so once Christianity had become the state religion of the Roman Empire their missionaries were eager to chop down the German forests and set their temples on fire.
Whenever the church encountered Pagan elements that it could not suppress, it gave them a Christian dimension and assimilated them. These ancestral traditions were reinterpreted and revised, but the church never succeeded in effacing the German Pagan heritage.
Hermann’s victory (9 A.D.) had forestalled Roman colonization, thus Germany had thereby retained its ancient language and avoided early Christianization.
Meister Eckhart (c1260-c1328) possibly represented most strongly the development of the mysticism as a result of the revolt of the Teutonic Indo-European spirit against Roman Christianity.
During the Middle-Ages a group called "Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit" existed in Germany and Holland. Also known as the Adamites, they were spiritual descendants of an earlier group, the Adamiani. They held nude gatherings in womb like caverns to achieve rebirth into a state of paradisiacal innocence.
In 1796 Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland of Weimar published his landmark study of aging "The Art Of Prolonging Life" using the word "macrobiotic" in the preface of the book, while the second edition used the word in it’s title. His emphasis on exercise and fresh air, sunbathing, cleanliness, regular scheduling, temperate diet, stimulating travel and meditation were all far ahead of their time.
"Lichtgebet" ("Prayer To The Sun") by Fidus, 1913 | Goethe’s (1749-1832) perspective erased the boundary between man and Nature altogether. The poet of Nature religiosity he believed "God can be worshipped in no more beautiful way than by the spontaneous welling up from one’s breast of mutual converse with Nature".
Another prophetic quote from Goethe (1832) "Man in his misguidance has powerfully interfered with nature. He has devastated the forests, and thereby even changed the atmospheric conditions and the climate. Some species of plants and animals have become entirely extinct through man, although they were essential in the economy of Nature. Everywhere the purity of the air is affected by smoke and the like, and the rivers are defiled. These and other things are serious encroachments upon Nature, which men nowadays entirely overlook but which are of the greatest importance, and at once show their evil effect not only upon plants but upon animals as well, the latter not having the endurance and power of resistance of man".
In 1866 Ernst Haeckel of Jena University first employed the term "ecology", thereby establishing it as a permanent scientific discipline for all future generations. Ecology as a concept had more in common with Buddhism and its recognition of the oneness of all life.
Also in the 1860’s an ex-Protestant minister named Eduard Baltzer published his four-volume book about naturliche lebensweise or "natural life style". He organized some vegetarians and founded a Free Religious Community, then later published a book on Pythagoras as the ancestor of his movement.
Diefenbach and Fidus at Hollriegelskreuth, Germany, 1887 | Baltzer’s writings had a strong influence upon a young painter named Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach (1851-1913) who also went on to form several communities and workshops for religion, art and science. Diefenbach spent the last portion of his life on the Mediterranean isle of Capri, which was a retreat for other life-reformers. Two of his pupils, Fidus and Gusto Graser were to make a tremendous impact with their art and reform messages.
Fidus (1868-1949) was recognized as perhaps the greatest psychedelic artist ever, pre-dating the 1960’s multi-colored posters and albums by over a half century.
Gusto Graser later went on to become a close friend and teacher of the writer Hermann Hesse. Hesse’s report "Among The Rocks- Notes of a Nature Man" (1908) described how he, along with Graser lived the lives of natural men and hermits, sleeping in caves in the Swiss Alps and fasting for days and weeks. The guru-disciple relationship within Hesse’s novel "Siddhartha" (1922) was a mirror of his own association with Graser his teacher. Graser’s poetry appeared in some of the Wandervogel magazines.
In 1870 the population of Germany was 2/3 rural, but by 1900 it had become 2/3 urban. Near the end of the 19th century the German middle class had become superficial, coarse, complacent, gluttonous, materialistic, industrialized, technocratic and pathetic. As a response to this phenomenon many natural healing modalities came into existence and even more youth movements were organized.
In 1883 Louis Kuhne of Leipsic Germany published a book titled "The New Science Of Healing", and this work laid the foundation for what was later to become known as Naturopathy. Translated into 50 languages it was the inspiration for a whole generation of health practitioners and was also highly praised by Mahatma Gandhi who said it was very popular in India.
In the 19th century hiking societies proliferated in Germany. One group "Friends Of Nature" were into social hiking and used the slogan "Free Mountains, Free World, Free People".
Another group, called the "Wandervogel", was founded in 1895 by Hermann Hoffmann and Karl Fischer in Steglitz, a suburb of Berlin. They began to take some high school students on nature walks, then later on longer hikes. Soon a huge youth movement that was both anti-bourgeois and Teutonic Pagan in character, composed mostly of middle class German children, organized into autonomous bands.
Wandervogel, 1926 | Wandervogel members, aged mainly between 14-18 years and spread to all parts of Germany eventually numbering 50,000. Part hobo and part medieval, they pooled their money, wore woolen capes, shorts and Tyrolean hats and took long hikes in the country where they sang their own versions of Goliardic songs and camped under primitive conditions. Both sexes swam nude together in the lakes and rivers and in their hometowns they established "nests" and "anti-homes", sometimes in ruined castles where they met to plan trips and play mandolins and guitars.
Their short weekend trips became 3 to 4 weeks long journeys of hundreds of miles. Soon they were establishing permanent camps in the wild that were open to all. With no thought of pay, the bands worked at improving their campsites and building cabins for which they made the furniture-in all forming a complex of precedents underlying the youth-hostel movement which began in 1907 when Richard Schirmann opened the first hostel in Altena Germany.
Mostly the Wandervogel sought communion with nature, with the ancient folk-spirit as embodied in the traditional peasant culture, and with one another. They developed a harmonious mystic resonance with their environment.
The expression "Lebensreform" (life-reform) was first used in 1896, and comprised various German social trends of the 19th and first half of the 20th century.
Elizabeth Dorr with some of her daughters at Ascona, 1905 (Note the headbands!) | Particularly:
1. vegetarianism 2. nudism 3. natural medicine 4. abstinence from alcohol 5. clothing reform 6. settlement movements 7. garden towns 8. soil reform 9. sexual reform 10. health food and economic reform 11. social reform 12. liberation for women, children and animals 13. communitarianism 14. cultural and religious reform: i.e. a religion or view of the world that gives weight to the feminine, maternal and natural traits of existence Further south in Switzerland, Ascona was a little fishing village on the shore of Lake Maggiore, on the Swiss side of the border with Italy. In the year 1900 a counter-culture renaissance began and lasted until about 1920. Ascona became the focal point for all of Europe’s spiritual rebels.
Life experiments were in vogue: surrealism, modern dance, dada, Paganism, feminism, pacifism, psychoanalysis and nature cure. A few of the participants were Hermann Hesse, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Arnold Ehret and Franz Kafka.
At the turn of the century Germany had 56 million people, and had as many large cities as all of the rest of Europe combined. Industrialism, technology, pollution and "affluenza" began a crisis amongst the over-privileged German-speaking of that period. The disenchanted began to arrive in Ascona by the hundreds.
The beautiful natural setting inspired urban people to sunbathe in the nude, sleep outdoors, hike, swim and fast. This village quickly developed a universal reputation as a health center.
Hermann Hesse was excited when he saw four longhaired men with sandals walk through his village on their way to Ascona. He followed them, settled in and then took a nature cure for his alcoholism. The year was 1907.
Born July 2, 1877, at the northern edge of the Black Forest in Calw, Germany, Hermann Hesse knew at age 13 that he wanted to be a poet or nothing. Beginning in the 1950's with the Beat generation, his novels became immensely popular in the English-speaking world, where their criticism of bourgeois values and interest in Eastern spirituality and Jungian psychology echoed the emerging revolt against the unreflected life. In the 1960's Hermann became the novelist of the decade, with "Siddhartha" (1922) and "Steppenwolf" (1927) selling in the millions, and capturing and shaping an American Audience. Legitimate history will always recount Hesse as the most important link between the European counter-culture of his youth and their latter-day descendants in America. (Photo from 1908.) The people of Ascona refused eggs, milk, meat, salt and alcohol. Nature cure was a powerful idea in the German mind, and was a widespread and profound rebellion against science and professionalism.
On August 20, 1903, an anarchist newspaper in San Francisco, California published a large article about Ascona, describing the people and their philosophies. This was certainly one of the first times that detailed news of the European counter-culture had reached the California coast.
Nudists worshipping the Sun, 1926 Perhaps the most central Neo-Pagan element in the German folk movements was sun-worship, believed to be the ancient Teutonic religion. From at least the Romantic era, sun-worship was offered by prominent Germans as the most rational alternative to Christianity. The solar images were at the center of a desire to return to natural Paganism and a natural lifestyle in harmony with the earth.
Eugene Diedrichs Publishing was the highly respected voice of Neo-Paganism and the religious-not the political-arm of the great Volkische movement. Diedrichs envisioned an "organic peoples state" (organischer Volksstaat) and like Carl Jung preferred a return to the nature religion of the ancient Teutons.
"Satana" by Fidus, 1896 No one described solarism better than Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) the prominent scientist who first coined the word "ecology": "The sun, the deity of light and warmth, on whose influence all organic life insensibly and directly depends, was taken to be such a phenomenon [of naturalistic monotheism] many thousands of years ago. Sun-worship seems to the modern scientist to be the best of all forms of theism, and the one which may be most easily reconciled with modern Monism. For modern astrophysics and geogeny have taught us that the earth is a fragment detached from the sun, and that it will eventually return to the bosom of its parent. Modern physiology teaches us that the first source of organic life on the earth is the formation of protoplasm, and that this synthesis of simple inorganic substances, water, carbonic acid, and ammonia only takes place under the influence of sunlight….indeed the whole of our bodily and mental life depends, in the last resort, like all other organic life, on the light and heat rays of the sun. Hence in the light of pure reason, sun-worship as a form of naturalistic monotheism, seems to have a much better foundation than the anthropistic worship of Christians and other monotheists who conceive of their god in human form. As a matter of fact the sun-worshippers attained, thousands of years ago, a higher intellectual and moral standard than most of the other theists. When I was in Bombay in 1881, I watched with the greatest sympathy the elevating rites of the pious Parsees, who, standing on the sea-shore, or kneeling on their prayer rugs offered their devotion to the sun at its rise and setting."
As the 20th century dawned many Germans began to feel the weight of oppressive political forces, powers that would later lead their nation into 2 world wars and change the course of European history.
Between 1895 and 1914, tens of thousands of Germans left their homes and families and immigrated to America. After all America was the country of the future, and they saw themselves as pioneers helping to lead a new society by transplanting and nurturing the most valuable ideas from their homeland into their new dreams for the United States.
There were several key individuals who made a substantial contribution, but probably none more than Dr. Benedict Lust.
Born in Michelbach near Baden Germany February 3, 1872 Lust first came to America in 1892, became ill with tuberculosis, then returned to Germany and took a nature cure treatment from the famed Father Sebastian Kneipp. He regained his health and found his true purpose in life, then returned to America in 1896 to become a Kneipp representative in America.
Rightfully called "The Father Of Naturopathy" in America, Lust introduced all of the great naturist movements that were in vogue in Europe; hydrotherapy, herbal remedies, air and light baths, various plant-based diets and he also translated and distributed the German classic health works of Father Kneipp, Louis Kuhne, Adolf Just, Arnold Ehret and August Englehardt.
Near the turn of the century in New York City he founded a school of massage and the Naturopathic Society, then in 1918 he published Universal Naturopathic Encyclopedia for drugless therapy. Nature’s Path Magazine and a radio show devoted to natural healing were also some of his notable achievements.
Dr. Benedict Lust enjoys a sun-bath at "Sonnenbichel" sun and air park in Kneipp-Bad Worishofen, Bavaria, Germany on a return to the Fatherland in the summer of 1926. The "Father of Naturopathy" in America, no single individual contributed more to natural healing and lifestyle in the world than Dr. Lust did through his many schools and publications. Everything from massage, herbology, raw foods, anti-vivisection and hydro-therapy to Eastern influences like Ayurveda and Yoga found their way to an American audience through Lust. Though he was repeatedly harassed by Medical authorities and Federal agents, his devotion to promoting Nature's methods of healing finaly gained wide acceptance. Like so many others from his generation, he was a tough man. (Photo from Naturopath, February, 1927) 
eden ahbez, 1948. Part-time yogi and full-time mystic, this 1940s "hippie" always spelled his name with small letters because he believed that only God and Infinity should be capitalized. (Photo courtesy of Gypsy Boots) | Dr. Lust’s school of Naturopathy was the starting point for hundreds of America’s natural health practitioners, while his magazines introduced the West not only to German Nature Cure, but also ancient East Indian concepts like Ayurveda and Yoga. Paramahansa Yogananda was one of several Indians who wrote articles for "Nature’s Path" magazine in the 1920’s gaining wide exposure to a large American audience.
Dr. Lust was "busted" repeatedly by American authorities and medical associations, for promoting natural methods of healing, massage and nude sun bathing at his Jungborn sanitarium. He was arrested 16 times by New York authorities and 3 times by Feds. One news headline read simply "They Have Lust Again".
As many as 30-40% of the graduates of Dr. Lusts school of Naturopathy were women, and his magazines were full of enthusiastic letters and praise from practicing Naturopaths in India, Jamaica and all over Latin America. No one was more devoted to introducing nature cure to the Spanish-speaking world than Dr. Lust.
Another influential Nature Doctor, Dr. Carl Schultz, arrived in Los Angeles California in 1885 and became the Benedict Lust of the west. In 1905 he created the Naturopathic Institute and Sanitarium and also opened the Naturopathic College on Hope Street. Most of the practicing nature doctors in the west were graduates of this college.
Bill Pester at this palm log cabin in Palm Canyon, California, 1917. With his "lebensreform" philosophy, nudism and raw foods diet, he was one of the many German immigrants, who "invented" the hippie lifestyle more than half a century before the 1960s. He left Germany to avoid military service in 1906 at age 19, for a new life in America. (Photo Courtesy of Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, California) | In 1906 Bill Pester first set foot
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