Alfred Schuler

Alfred Schuler (* 22 November 1865 in Mainz; † 8 April 1923 in Munich) was a religious founder, a gnostic, a mystic and a visionary. Franz Wegener has called Schuler the last of the German Cathars. Schuler saw himself as a reborn Roman of the late imperial era. Also a neopagan, he was the spiritual focus of the "Munich Cosmic Circle", and made a broad impact without ever publishing a book during his lifetime. Stefan George and Ludwig Klages were, amongst others, significantly influenced by him.

Schuler studied Archaeology (and Law) in Munich but came to see archaeologists as "desecrators of graves ripping out of the earth what has been sanctified by the rite of burial, and confining to the unwholesome air of museums the lustrous force rightly working its mighty influence under the cover of darkness". After his studies Schuler made his living as an 'independent scholar' in Munich. He held his own "rebirth into an unpleasant epoch" to be the responsibility of an evil demon. Schuler died during an operation meant to remove a malignant tumour.

At the turn of the nineteenth century the Munich borough of Schwabing became the center of certain anti-bourgeois forces tending towards an interest in the 'occult', among which were found the secretive cult of the 'Blutleuchte' ("Blood beacon"). An occult circle (Munich Cosmic Circle) gravitating around Karl Wolfskehl, Alfred Schuler and Ludwig Klages developed a doctrine according to which the Occident was plagued by downfall and degeneration, caused by the rationalizing and demythologizing effects of Christianity, held to be responsible for the betrayal of life's primary forces. A way out of this desolate state could, according to the "Cosmic" view, only be found by a return to the pagan origins. No exact common ground did however exist, as to what this "homecoming" would entail.

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