Of Cosmogonic Eros: 2nd Edition – Ludwig Klages (Theion)

Description

One of the great metaphysical works on Eros as a world-shaping power. In this visionary monograph, Ludwig Klages seeks to recover the true nature of Eros — not as sentiment, romance, or personal longing, but as an elemental force of ecstasy, intoxication, cosmic participation, and daemonic awakening. For Klages, Eros breaks the shell of ordinary consciousness and joins the individual to the living depths of the cosmos — the world revealed not as dead matter, but as ensouled, radiant, and alive with hidden powers. The work also traces the deep, often overlooked relation between Eros and Thanatos, linking erotic ecstasy, death-consciousness, ancestral memory, and the cult of the dead within a single metaphysical field.

Long influential far beyond conventional philosophy, Klages’ vision of Eros as a daemonic and cosmogonic force touched figures including Walter Benjamin, Alfred Kubin, Hermann Hesse, and Anagarika Govinda — offering a radical challenge to modern disenchantment and the reduction of life to mechanism.

This revised second edition is the only authorised English translation of Of Cosmogonic Eros, prepared in collaboration with Professor Paul Bishop of the University of Glasgow, and highly sought after since the first Theion edition sold out. It also includes the first English translation of selected passages from Alfred Schuler’s esoteric talks on the Telesmatic Light — an important key to the symbolic and occult atmosphere of the wider Kosmiker-Kreis from which Klages’ thought emerged.