Who is Rudolf Raspe?
Part I of II: Down and Out in London Raspe Penned a World Literature Masterpiece
Part I
“… a long faced man, with small eyes, a crooked nose, red hair under a stumpy periwig, a jerky gait.”
A biography exists: John Carswell, The Prospector: Being the Life and Times of RUDOLF ERICH RASPE (London: The Cresset Press, 1950). I will proffer a rough sketch drawn from other sources.
Rudolf Erich Raspe besides being the master of numerous languages, apparently held himself out, as well, as a geologist and mining expert—his career emerged in the milieu of burgeoning Freemasonry in Europe. Now far be it from the scope of this essay to detail the social and political features in London in the late Eighteenth Century when the first editions of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchasen appeared. We do know of it as a time of coffee house intrigue and nascent imperialism. The work of certain historians of the Venetian republic, namely Webster Tarpley and Joseph Farrell, suggest that by this time, in light of the situation in the Americas, the banking institutions of the Venetian Republic had quietly moved their operations to London and Amsterdam. Apparently in 1776, a year in which his volume on German vulcanism was published, Raspe had fled Germany for England to escape the consequences of an alleged embezzlement.1 But his career had nothing otherwise that would have particularly suggested a propensity for legal trouble other than a financial delinquency here or there, which Thomas Seccombe in an introductory biography explains if not generously abates on account of Raspe’s extravagant sartorial tastes, or shall we say vanity.2 Having been a student of “natural history and antiquities” he had published in 1765 a translation of the monadist Leibniz's works. Seccombe notes Raspe's burgeoning reputation as “a courtier, antiquary, and a philosopher”, all before he embarked upon producing an “ambitious allegorical poem..., Hermin and Gunilde.” He then continued to advance his career as a translator and scholar writing “a considerable treatise on Percy's Reliques of Ancient Poetry,” with metrical translations.
In 1767 he was appointed professor and librarian, with both appointments being in Cassel, Germany. Parallel to these appointments, his research and writing continued in the fields of natural history, mineralogy, and archaeology. In 1769 he published a paper “on the bones and teeth of the elephants and other animals found in North America and other boreal regions of the world.” This procured him an election as an honorary member of the Royal Society of London. The paper was, as it turned out, prescient, as now it is well accepted that “large elephants or mammoths” roamed the boreal regions of the Earth including North America in ages obscured in the mists of time. Raspe's literary output continued to be prodigious. He wrote papers on lithography and translated a treatise on “Architecture, Painting and Opera.” In 1773 he founded a periodical called the Cassell Spectator with Mauvillon.
The circumstances of the felony alleged against him arose out of a responsibility that was ancillary to his academic appointment as a professor at the Collegium Carolinum. The appointment included the responsibility of being the “keeper of the landgrave of Hesse's rich and curious collection of antique gems and medals.”3 In 1775 he traveled to Italy on commission to collect further items of worth for the collection and it was “soon after his return,” that items from the collection began to disappear from the cabinets he was entrusted with.
Before the fact of the depletion of the collection could be discovered Raspe, with approval of his superiors, had gone to Berlin. From Berlin he mailed back the keys to his cabinet to “the proper authorities—and disappeared.” Fliers describing him were promptly posted in Cassel calling for his arrest. The identifying features used to describe him were distinct: “a long faced man, with small eyes, a crooked nose, red hair under a stumpy periwig, a jerky gait.” The “wanted” poster, detailed, as it were that: “...he usually appeared in a scarlet dress embroidered with gold, but sometimes black, blue, or gray clothes.” Raspe was arrested in the Hartz mountains, but quickly escaped the police and traveled to London, never again to return to the European continent.4
The broader biography of Raspe shows him to have been a mendicant scholar and metallurgist. He lived at a time when the great ecclesiastical battles of Europe had subsided, the Jesuits disorganized, and the ascendancy of the merchant oligarchs had been firmly established in the Western European states. Once he had arrived in London from Germany he was undoubtedly easily overcome by prevailing financial customs, about which he was unfamiliar, and was quickly depleted. It was under these circumstances that the first iteration of The Surprising Adventures (as Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia), was published in 1785.
The taboo against Plutology.
While, as suggested, apparently Raspe's troubles did not end when he left Germany, there remain troubling inconsistencies in the tale presented in the canonical biography. There is no indication that Raspe was ever tried for the crimes alleged against him, though it is noted that on the basis of reports of the allegation, he was ostracized from the Royal Society.5 Remarkably, there is no claim made by Raspe presented in the sketch holding out that he was the author of The Surprising Adventures. All that aside, a confusing suggestion arises internally in the actual text, that the author's ancestry was decidedly involved in the history of English affairs especially with respect to the claims of the inheritance through his family from father to son and finally to the author's father of the slingshot David used to slay the giant Goliath, so prominently featured in the Bible. A sling that had both been used, as the inter-textual and self-referential Munchausen who is presented as the Surprising Adventures’ putative author suggests, as a ransom for Shakespeare and as a dressing for the infirmities of Queen Elizabeth.6
Undoubtedly the world inhabited by the storyteller Munchausen was a world of ferocious and hungry creatures ever stalking the blithe Baron. But before we turn to a consideration of some of the more characteristic features of “Munchausen's” adventures, it is necessary to dispose of some remaining preliminary matters concerning the identity of Rudolf E. Raspe. The sartorial conceit continues in our biography. Notably, it is reported by his biographer, that upon arriving in London, Raspe found himself quickly in arrears to his tailor who was suggested to have brought charges against him.7 Later there is an additional allegation of Raspe's involvement in a mining scandal in the “spray-beaten” north of Scotland.8
But in attempting to infer the motives behind the facetious iconoclastic indulgences, especially in the face of Raspe's taste for “haute couture” disclosed in our introductory account of Raspe's character, one can only suspect that a possibility exists that much of what we are given to consider about Raspe is a fabrication as well. This suspicion is bolstered by the vesting of the education attributed to Raspe's development firmly within the provenance of allegory.
Most interestingly we see, in 1776, Raspe writing an introduction to his translation of a series of letters written by Baron Inigo Born, concerning Baron Born's descriptions of certain mines and mountains in Temeswar, Transylvania, and in Hungary.9 In a lengthy preface Raspe complains about the absence of classical historical literature concerning a system of an earth science, believing his predecessors fully capable of producing such a system. Raspe suspected this knowledge concerning the techniques for mining precious minerals and elements had been hidden, historically, for selfish political ends. In his most general complaint he suggests the following:
It is the most common fate of the most useful and practical arts, to have been, in every age and every matter, left in a state of infancy, and of working people, or of imposing quacks. Sovereigns have encouraged, and the wise and learned, with presumptuous attempts, pursued hazardous flights into the lofty regions of scholastic divinity and metaphysicks, beyond the reach of human abilities, and aimed at such objects, which do not make us either wiser or happier, or richer or better.10
It is quite telling that Raspe should conclude his complaint with a proposed new science of mining. He sought subscriptions to underwrite his work toward this final purpose, and thereby “...prevent those many impositions, and disappointments, to which adventurous, unprincipled miners are subject.”11
Raspe's engagement with the work of von Born was no passing fancy. In 1777 he provided a copy of his translation of von Born's work surveying Transylvanian mining techniques to Benjamin Franklin.12 In 1791 Raspe's English translation of von Born's New Process of Amalgamation of Gold and Silver Ores, and Other Metallic Mixtures, was published in London.13 The extent of this interest is not fully known. These facts only heighten the suspicions around Raspe's allegiances.
The Perfectibilists
Looking more closely at the Transylvanian Baron von Born, we find that it is reported that not only was he a prominent scientist, but also a leading Freemason, head of Vienna's Perfectibilist lodge, and a prominent anti-clerical author. In 1783 the Jesuit educated von Born published a facetious attack depicting monks “in the technical language of natural history.”14
The name “Perfectibilists” is another name for the Bavarian Illuminati which though modeled on the Jesuit Order came into being when that Order was essentially under attack in Germany, 15 and so essentially what is suggested here concerning R. E. Raspe is an easily inferred deep alignment of Raspe with the Illuminati movement. Dr. Farrell speculates that the work of Giordano Bruno, too, was instrumental in spawning this movement and further suggests the work of Bruno opened the door to the European Enlightenment where personal experimentation emerged as a viable way of knowing, against the darkness of divine right and clerical authority. If only this movement had cured humankind!
1 Thomas Seccombe, “Introduction.” in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen. Illustrated by W. Strang and J.B. Clark. With an Introduction by T. Seccombe (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,1895), xvi-xvii, https://archive.org/details/surprisingadven00seccgoog/page/n6.
2 Id.
3 Id., at xv-xvi.
4 Id., at xv-xvii.
5 Id., at xix.
6 Munchausen, The Surprising Adventures, 76-79.
7 Seccombe, “Introduction,” in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, xviii.
8 Seccombe, “Introduction,” in The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen, xx-xxii.
9 Baron Inigo Born, Travels through the Bannat of Temeswar, Transylvania, and Hungary, in the Year 1770, trans. R. E. Raspe (London: G. Kearsley, 1777), https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughba00born/page/n6.
10 R.E. Raspe, “Preface,” in Travels through the Bannat of Temeswar, Transylvania, and Hungary, in the Year 1770 by Baron Inigo Born (London: G. Kearsley, 1777), iv, https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughba00born/page/n9.
11 Id., at xxxvi.
12 “Founders Online: To Benjamin Franklin from Rudolph Erich Raspe, 14 August 1777,” Archives.gov, 2022, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-24-02-0333.
13 See Adopt a Book: Baron Inigo Born's New Process of Amalgamation of Gold and Silver Ores, Smithsonian Libraries, online collection, https://library.si.edu/donate/adopt-a-book/baron-inigo-borns-new-process-amalgamation-gold-and-silver-ores.
14 Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “BORN, Ignaz.” The ever democratic Wikipedia entry for Ignaz von Born elaborates that this pertained to a work depicting monks as part of a race that was a mixture between “ape and man.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_von_Born.
15 Paul Nettl, Mozart and Masonry (New York: Dorset Press, 1957), 9-10, 50-51, https://archive.org/details/mozartmasonry00paul/page/8.
In the most part excerpted from: Jeff Thomason, A Ferocious Seahorse: An Essay on Facetiousness, Psychedelia, Meditation, Violence, and Sovereignty (Angel Fire, New Mexico: Inner Electric Books, 2020), 95, 107-112.
© 2020-2022, Jeff Thomason