THE
GLASS
BEAD GAME Neural Network of the Cosmic Mind... |
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WHAT
IS THE GLASS BEAD GAME? Herman Hesse's Nobel Prize Winning Novel, The Glass Bead Game lays the foundations for an Artistic/Conceptual Game, which integrates all fields of Human and Cosmic Knowledge through forms of Organic Universal Symbolism, expressed by its players with the Dynamic Fluidity of Music. The Glass Bead Game is, in Reality, an Age Old metaphor for what has been called, the "Divine Lila" (Play or Game of Life). This metaphor has been expressed by every great Wisdom Tradition known to man, and its players, the Magister Ludi (Masters of the Game), use as their instruments Ancient and Modern modes of Symbolic Wisdom traditionally presented through Sacred Art, Philosophy, Magick and Cosmology. For a more detailed elaboration of our vision of the GBG, see: THE GLASS BEAD GAME |
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Magister
Ludi Eberhard Wortmann The First Horoscope, 1956 |
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To
Contact Us or Receive Updates on the Glass Bead Game click here |
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SACRED
SCIENCE INSTITUTE The following
links lead to various departments of the Sacred Science Institute |
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Pre-Aryan
Jainism Form & Dimensions of Cosmic Primal Man. Gujarat, India, 1700s |
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SEEKER'S
SANCTUM
EXPEDIENT
LEARNING PORTAL "...he spent year after year sitting in lecture halls and libraries, studying Froberger and Alessandro Scarlatti, fugues and sonata form, reviewing mathematics, learning Chinese, working through a system of tonal figuration and Feustelian theory of the correspondence between the scale of colors and the musical keys." Hesse,The Glass Bead Game SANCTUM
SANCTORUM Cyber-Mystery
School/Hermetic
Magick LIVING
LIBRARY RESEARCH
ARCHIVE & DISCUSSION FORUM SEARCHABLE
RESEARCH DATABASE & ARCHIVE:
The entire Living Library Discussion Forum will be searchable by topic for references to GBG and related materials. Currently our Living Library Search Engine will search the contents of over 250 key texts in every GBG related field by concept, idea, author, and title helping researchers to locate and identify necessary source materials. |
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"The game as I conceive it," Knecht once wrote, "leaves (the player) with the feeling that he has extracted from the universe of accident and confusion a totally symmetrical and harmonious cosmos, and absorbed it into himself." Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game | THE
GLASS BEAD GAME MANUSCRIPTS OF This
Glass Bead Game website was inspired by the vision and insight of Dr.
John Richter, philosopher, astronomer, mathematician, occultist and
metaphysician, whose 35 years of research into every field of knowledge
were ideally integrated by the conceptual framework presented by Hesse's
Glass Bead Game. Upon his discovery of the GBG, Richter began a 15 year
exploration of the symbolic language and conceptual framework upon which
a GBG could actually be created.
Upon his death in 1998, Richter's vast library and personal manuscripts were deposited in the care of the Sacred Science Institute. We possess over 20,000 pages of Richter's hand written manuscripts analyzing, dissecting, and distilling every branch of science, philosophy and metaphysics into their fundamental elements to be represented by means of an organic universal symbolism ideally suited for the GBG. We intend to transcribe and post these manuscripts on this website to aid in the development of a GBG. We are willing to provide copies of sections of these writings to individuals who are interested in the development of the Game in exchange for their help in either transcribing or scanning this material into a format which may easily be posted on this website. Interested parties please contact us for further details. |
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THE
LAW OF THE COSMOS Eberhard Wortmann is the only know modern Magister Ludi to have corresponded with Hermann Hesse, who in appreciation of his brilliant work called him a "Glass Bead Game Player:" "Here it should be mentioned that the Platonic riddle of numbers are actually a question of logical games of thought, "Glass Bead Games", as Hermann Hesse, the great writer and man, had named this kind of mental business." (Eberhard Wortmann, The Law of the Kosmos, p.4) "The Platonic Riddle of Numbers are Glass Bead Games. 'In the end it depends on the choice of the historian how far back he wants to put the beginning and prehistory of the Glass Bead Game. As an idea we find it already performed in earlier ages, e.g. at Pythagoras. The same eternal Idea was the basis of every movement of the mind towards the ideal goal of a Universitas Litterarum, of every Platonic Academy, of any congregation of a spiritual elite, every attempt to approximate the exact and the free sciences, every attempt to reconcile science and art and the art of science and religion.'" (Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, Quoted in The Law of the Kosmos, p.4) Eberhard Wortmann was born in Westfalen, Germany, in 1891. His activities as a merchant led him to visit many different countries, to learn their languages, and to devote himself to an investigation of their Mysticism and historical mysteries. After the loss of his sons and property in World War II, Wortmann became more and more absorbed in the mystical world of numbers and geometrical diagrams. Two passions accompanied him the rest of his life, his love for pictorial art - he produced innumerable water colour paintings - and mathematical games with magic numbers. Wortmann combined both magnificently in his works on the Platonic number puzzles. In 1955 and 1956 he published "Platons Göttliche Harrmonie" and "Ariston oder die Platonishen Zahlenrätsel". In 1965 the Otto Reichl publishing house in Remagen published " Das Gesetz des Kosmos - Die Platonischen Zahlenrätsel erneut gelöst und dargestellt". He held lectures and conferences in different cities in Germany, leading in 1960, to a correspondence with Hermann Hesse who called Wortmann "a glass bead game player". Wortmann died in Bad Godesberg in 1970. His work: "Der Heilige Krug - Roman eines antiken Mysteriums" has remained unpublished. Wortmann's works were published in very limited editions in Germany, and have remained to this day almost unknown, though they represent some of the most profound and advanced works on Esoteric Cosmology ever conceived. The color diagram above, and on the top of this page are samples of the innumerable diagrams and paintings he produced, deciphering, for the first time, the mathematical and geometrical codes hidden within Plato's Republic & Timeaus and unveiling the Ancient Cosmological secrets of the Law of the Kosmos. We include them, and very soon will be posting dozens of others as superlative examples of the Glass Beads envisioned by Hermann Hesse. The Sacred Science Institute is working in conjunction with Wortmann's family to produce English translations of these Masterpieces, segments of which will be posted upon this website as they progress. Wortmann's works contain hundreds of the most sophisticated diagrams on Sacred Geometry, Pythagorean and Platonic Number Theory, Harmonics and Astronomy ever seen, as well as one of the most intricate elaborating of Universal Order and Kosmic Law known to man. The vast and synthetic thinking process presented in these works inspired a correspondence discussing the GBG between Hesse and Wortmann, which we are attempting to obtain from the original (now defunct) publisher of Hesse's letters (where they were sent for intended but unfulfilled publication), so that they may be translated and posted on this website. Any help in contacting this publisher or Hesse estate would be appreciated. The intricacies of translating such advanced material are quite complex, and we would welcome assistance by knowledgeable translators of technical German, for both this and a number of further translation projects. We have also considered releasing reprints of the original German editions if there is sufficient interest, as the diagrams , even without the ability to read German, are of great value and interest to anyone concerned with these issues. We wish to express our thanks to Rosmarie and Veronica Mueller-Wortmann, daughter & granddaughter of the author, for access to these books & diagrams, and for their dedication to seeing that Wortmann's important work is not lost to the world. |
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HESSE QUOTES ON THE ORIGINS OF THE GLASS BEAD GAME "Although we recognize the idea of the Game as eternally present, and therefore existent in vague stirrings long before it became a reality, its realization in the form we know it nevertheless has its specific history.""How far back the historian wishes to place the origins and antecedents of the Glass Bead Game is, ultimately, a matter of his personal choice. For like every great idea it has no real beginning; rather, it has always been, at least the idea of it. We find it foreshadowed, as a dim anticipation and hope, in a good many earlier ages. There are hints of it in Pythagoras, for example, and then among Hellenistic Gnostic circles in the late period of classical civilization. We find it equally among the ancient Chinese, then again at the several pinnacles of Arabic-Moorish culture; and the path of its prehistory leads on through Scholasticism and Humanism to the academies of mathematicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and on to the Romantic philosophies and the runes of Novalis' hallucinatory visions." "This same eternal idea, which for us has been embodied in the Glass Bead Game, has underlain every movement of Mind toward the ideal goal of a Universitatis Litterarum, every Platonic Academy, every league of an intellectual elite, every rapprochement between the exact and the more liberal disciplines, every effort toward reconciliation between science and art or science and religion." |
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SOURCES
AND FOUNDATIONS Many people, when approaching the GBG, have no idea where to begin to understand its essential principles, so we have listed a number of famous GBG schools from the past, and a number of the greatest historical GBG thinkers, some of whom were known and drawn from by Hesse for his work. The diagram to the right, for instance, is a cosmological diagram by Nicholas of Cusa, referred to by Hesse in the GBG, and is an excellent example of what he meant by a Glass Bead. All of those individuals and schools below produced similar or related diagrammatic & symbolic representations of universals knowledge in their systems, and interrelationships may be found between every one of them, since all are based on the same Cosmic Ordering Principles. Information on the Magister Ludi and GBG schools listed below may be found by by searching new & used bookstores and the Internet, however much of this work is long out of print or has never been available to the general public. We have made many of these resources available through our reprint archive, which may be accessed using the Search Engine to the right or through the Sacred Science Institute. We have provided some links to our listings of these resources, and will, in time expand these links to sources throughout the Internet. We will also be elaborating on the short histories and biographies presented below as part of the Living Library Archive and Discussion Forum. |
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HISTORICAL MAGISTER LUDI Leonardo
Da Vinci |
GLASS BEAD GAME SCHOOLS Rishis of the Rg VedThe Seers of Ancient India concealed in their Sacred Vedic Scriptures numerical, geometric & astronomical codes revealing the natural order of the universe. The Avatamsaka School of Buddhism Chinese Hua-Yen Buddhism is considered to represent the pinacle of Buddist thought and inspierd the Zen School. They see the Cosmos as an interdependant and interpenetraging web of consciousness, the Jeweled Net. Ancient Egyptian Priesthood The most scientifically & technologically advanced civilization on Earth, the Ancient Egyptians possessed an unfathomable insight into Universal Cosmology coded in advanced Hieroglyphic & Architectural Symbolique. Pythagorean Brotherhood An Egyptian Temple Initiate, Pythagoras presented the first Western system of Cosmology, the Quadrivium: Arithmetic, Music, Geometry, & Astronomy, which has provided the primary inspiration for all Western Scientific & Esoteric traditions since his time. Platonic & NeoPlatonic Academies The works of Plato are written in a geometric cosmological code based upon Egyptian & Pythagorean Cosmologies, known only by the most advanced Esoteric Schools, & provide a wealth of universal insight if one has their keys. Jewish Qabbalists The oldest Biblical writings possess astrological codes interpreted through arithmetical & geometric keys passed down through the mystical tradition of Qabbalah Freemasons & Cathedral Builders The Great Gothic Cathedrals are Cosmologies in stone, designed according to harmonic proportions symbolizing the ordering system of the Cosmos, & built by a secret order of Freemasons tracing their origin back to King Solomon. Medieval Alchemists & Hermeticists The symbolic systems of mysticism and cosmology encoded by these secret orders into organic and pictorial forms of symbolism represent the most advanced science of spiritual & material transmutation known to the world. |
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ALL
Original CONTENTS
Ó1999
SACRED
SCIENCE
INSTITUTE
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