Rübezahl – Mythos . Rätsel . Phantasma

Rübezahl is one of the most enigmatic German legendary figures, whose myth can be traced back to the 15th century. He is a mountain, forest, water or air spirit. His ancestral home are the Giant and Jizera Mountains in Silesia, but he has also left his mountain home from time to time, and according to apocryphal testimonies he even visited England. He has appeared in various guises, as a monk, a miner, a giant or a devil, a bear, an eagle owl, a cock, a raven, a horse or a toad. Like the Wild Man, he does not care about conventions, like a goblin he loves to tease people and play tricks. He may lead visitors to the mountains astray, he may kill them, he may entertain them and put cow heads on them, he may give them lavish gifts of gold or rob them of their possessions.
Countless sources tell of Rübezahl and his deeds, but the following is the best known and also points the way forward for our study: once, it is said, he was inflamed with love, abducted the beautiful Countess Emma and took her into his kingdom. She agreed to marry him on the con- dition that he was able to count the number of turnips in his field. While the mountain spirit was busy counting, Emma fled. Since then, however, the mountain spirit has been mockingly called Rübezahl.
In this “Legende”—created by Musäus—the turnip plays an important role as a psycho- tropicum. But in other sagas, too, Rübezahl is associated with turnips, herbs and, indeed, with plants of the mountain world in general. They may be used as medicines, as magical agents to make gold, and last but not least as intoxicating drugs to open up the Otherworld. According to the panpsychic Weltanschauung, Rübezahl can be described as a plant spirit and/or a plant soul. Thus he is a symbol of nature, which requires well- founded historical research, but also transmental imagination and coherent linguistic expression.
One might say, Rübezahl embodies—if only because of his protean metamorphoses—the reality that is performatively revealed in the Chinese oracle book Yijing (Book of Changes). The Chinese character (Yi = change(s)) can be seen as a lizard, a salamander, a toadstool, a turnip and, last but
not least, as the image of Rübezahl, with head, mouth, two arms and two legs. In the Yijing itself, the 64 hexagrams correspond numerically and structurally to the 64 nucleotide triplets of the hereditary substance DNA, if recent research is to be believed. This then makes Rübezahl the quintessence of all life, often invoked by medieval alchemists.
If one dares to approach this god-like or devil- like demon with a descriptive intention, this is most likely done in a poetic way. Therefore it is no coincidence that this study concludes with the poem “Rübezahl—64 Silesian Haiku”, published here for the first time. This ending is obvious because Rübezahl was also treated as a literary figure in the past, for example by Praetorius, Lindner and Musäus. Although Rübezahl ultima-
tely eludes all definitions, we can nevertheless state for the moment: Rübezahl is a numinous phantasm, a hallucination and a hallucinogen, he is (Yi = change) as well as the biogenetic code DNA and thus the living spirit of poetry.