Preface

...wish that it might still be granted to me to bring some of these to print and at least bring the others to a conclusion. For this book, however, a difficulty has arisen: I cannot ignore the newly acquired insights, yet I cannot present those larger works within these pages. May the compromise I have finally chosen find a lenient judgment.

After my helpers, my opponents demand their due thanks. I am conscious of no longer seeking polemics Polemics: the practice of engaging in aggressive verbal or written attacks or refutations of an opinion or doctrine. after an initial, overconfident period of youth; yet later, they sought me out in an abundant and at first not always pleasant manner. The fact that I did not evade any serious attack on my scholarship or its great departed figures has led me further in my work and, as often as I wished to give it up, forced me back to it. As bitter as the dispute sometimes was for me, I owe it to this alone if I have finally arrived at a comprehensive view that is internally satisfying to myself.

This little book pays its final thanks once again to the man in whose footsteps I have walked in my own way: the author of the Mithras Liturgy original: Mithrasliturgie. This was a seminal work by Dieterich that argued for a Greek-Egyptian origin for certain magical texts., who probably pointed the way into these areas for philological Philology: the study of language in oral and written historical sources; a combination of literary criticism, history, and linguistics. work most insistently, and whose influence will remain even if every line of his works should one day be outdated or even refuted—the heir of Usener Hermann Usener (1834–1905) was a monumental figure in German classical philology and the study of myth and religion., Albrecht Dieterich Albrecht Dieterich (1866–1908) was a close friend of Reitzenstein and a leading scholar of ancient religions; his early death was considered a great loss to the field.. The image of his youthful, joy-filled Siegfried-like figure A reference to Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero of the Nibelungenlied, used here to describe Dieterich's heroic and vital appearance. with the radiant countenance remains before my soul—a face from which even a bitter attack elicited only a sunny smile. He was allowed to feel like a favorite of the gods in life; he remained a favorite of the gods also in that he was permitted to die while his fatherland was still in its glory A poignant reference to the fact that Dieterich died in 1908, before the devastation of the First World War and the subsequent collapse of the German Empire..

Göttingen, May 9, 1919.

[Shortly before I received the proofs for the final four sheets, my colleague Andreas requested me, with regard to a...