De Zirkoff on Franz Hartmann

Boris de Zirkoff · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 18 pages

Eighteen pages, *the fullest of the de Zirkoff biographies in this batch, drawn from the Collected Writings* volume VIII, pages 439 to 457, and subtitled tributes to Dr Franz Hartmann, German physician, author, traveller and eminent theosophist. Because it quotes Hartmann's own memoirs at length it reads more like autobiography than a reference entry.

He was born at Donauwörth, a small town on the Danube in Bavaria, on 22 November 1838. His father, Dr Karl Hartmann, was a well-known physician there; his mother, Elize von Stack, was of Irish descent, her ancestors descending from Caolbha, the last king of the Irish race and forty-seventh king of Ulster, her family having emigrated to France after the execution of Charles I and afterwards to Bavaria during the French Revolution. When Franz was about a year old the family moved to Kempten in southern Bavaria, where his father had been appointed government physician, and where the boy was educated first by his grandfather — who had served in the French army under Napoleon — and then at the local public school. The psychological portrait is the interesting part. From very early youth he felt as if he had two distinct personalities: one a mystic, a dreamer and an idealist, the other obstinate and self-willed and inclined to all sorts of mischief. He loved solitude, shunned his schoolmates and revelled in nature, where intercourse with the spirits of nature was to him a very real thing; he writes that he could dream his mystical dreams there undisturbed, and that he was born with a propensity for mystery, the invisible world attracting his desire for knowledge more than the visible. The first book he bought was The Fiery Dragon, full of magical formulae — and, not knowing what to do with it, he threw it in the fire. He read Elizabeth Crowe's The Dark Side of Nature and similar works. Educated a Roman Catholic, he was greatly influenced at first by the ceremonies but could get no satisfactory explanation from any priest of the mystery and power behind them; at one point he wished to retire into a cloister and become a Capuchin.

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