PANTHEISIM IN GUSTAV MAHLER

 On the symphonies of Mahler, Max Graf writes:

 “They are huge symphonic mystery plays, starting from earth and climbing to heaven, where choruses of angels and the light of the Almighty hail the newcomer, while in the depths Death plays on a strident violin and hell screams.” [1]

de La Grange  writes:

“ . . . his philosophy has a definite pantheistic flavour. This form of mystical feeling was even more essential to his nature than either the Christian of the Jewish faith.”  [2]

And:

"His pantheistic beliefs made him see the manifestations of God's will everywhere, and sensed its 'miracles and secrets ... and contemplated them with the deep respect and touching astonishment of a child'."  [3]

Describing his Symphony Number 3, Mahler writes:

“One always forgets that nature includes All, all that is great and terrifying as well as lovely (this is what I particularly wanted to express in the whole work, using a kind of evolutionary development) . . . No one knows the God Dionysus, the great Pan . . .”

“Nature without life or light – the still uncrystalized, unorganized matter. But here it is more of a relapse into the deeply animal form of the All (PAN), before the huge leap into the ‘spirit’ to that higher earthly creature, Man.”  [4]

And Wikipedia:

 “The last movement, he described as "what love tells me", which he also said could be called "what God tells me". This artistic vision moves from a veneration of Divine immanence in Nature, sharing these pantheistic aspects with some other Romantic and Neo-Romantic composers (such as the pagan leanings of Wagner and Delius), to a search for the Theism of Divine transcendence, outside physical existence. This can have a compatibility with the philosophical theory of Pantheism, that proposes that "all is within God". By identifying Nature with Divinity, but also that God's essence independently transcends existence, Pantheism can give Theism some room to celebrate Divinity in Nature, without becoming idolatrous.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_Mahler

“ . . the poem De Chrysopoeia (On how to make gold) is extant in two manuscripts, Venice Cod. Marcianus 299 and Paris BNF 2327.”

"MS St.Mark 299 (folio 188 verso). Forming part of a page of apparatus and mystical designs entitled Chrysopoeia (Goldmaking) of Cleopatra, it is a simple figure of the serpent devouring its tail; in the centre is the inscription (e n t o p a n ) - the One is the All." H.J. Sheppard, Fig.2.

The inscription has also been translated as meaning ' the All is One.'"

"In the above drawing, from a book by an early Alchemist, Cleopatra, the black half symbolizes the Night, Earth, and the destructive force of nature, yin. the light half represents Day, Heaven, the generative, creative force, yang. Alchemically, the ouroboros is also used as a purifying glyph ...The 'tail-devourer' is the symbolization of concepts such as completion, perfection and totality, the endless round of existence, etc. It is usually represented as a worm or serpent with its tail in its mouth." 

Chris McCoy