Gottfried Maurer’s Treatise of the Three Impossibilities, Part One

Gottfried Maurer’s three-volume tome was originally published by Nautilus-Verlag in the early 1990s, but it was revised to such an extent that by the time of the author’s death in late 2008, when no further revisions would be possible, a new edition was in order. The revised and re-translated Treatise of the Three Impossibilities, recently published by G. Grippo-Verlag is recognized to differ so greatly from the original, that it has been legally permissible to republish the revised volumes through the alternate publishing press, thus assuring that the first and second editions could remain in print simultaneously, at least for the moment.

That, at least, is what one might believe was intended. After scrutinizing the first in the context of the second, however, the cautious reader comes to realize that the second could never modify the first. In plain terms: it is clear that the first “edition” could not possibly have been written without reference to material in the second. In a three-part post, each devoted to a volume of the Treatise (respectively “Jews: What We Learned In Exile,” “Muslims: Why We Must Conquer the Earth,” and “Christians: When We Summoned the Lost”), I will reveal how Gottfried Maurer accomplished his feat, traveling, as it were, forward in time to produce a revision more original than its original.

“Jews: What We Learned In Exile”

Maurer’s basic argument in the first edition (which for the sake of clarity I will continue to refer to as the “first edition”—although it will become evident that the “first” could only have been produced upon the “second”) is that a vast amount of Israelite lore was exported from Egypt by the Jews upon their deliverance from Egyptian captivity. He argues, for example, that the Jewish holiday of “Passover” was not a commemoration of the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt, but a useful way of getting the Jews that had become “overly comfortable” with Egyptian religious rites back into the Hebrew fold by appropriating those rites with meaning for the Hebrews. Citing that the Hebrew word for Passover is Pesach (פֶּסַחi), which in the Tiberian vocalization would not have sounded like “he had pity,” as in the modern rendering of Pesach to mean “God’s passing over the houses of the Hebrews to afflict only the Egyptians with his plagues,” but would have sounded like the Egyptian orations performed in late winter, for which the colloquial phrasing for the sunset reckoned as the sun’s passing over the sky into the night, “περάσουμε,” Maurer concludes that the term for the Hebrew festival of late winter is of Egyptian origin.

But to build the bridge from the Egyptians to the Jews, he relies on a mysterious “concept of the mind of ancient man.” He refers to this “concept” in many ways: “the original record of our meeting with the world at large;” “when we thought our way into the birth-light of life;” “whereas we did not at first worship with our priests, but relied on them for the knowledge of our conclusions;” et al. So that when he is discussing the “death of the seasonal year” through the ancient Egyptian phraseology for death as the “passing over the river,” he relies on an unstated parallel. And it remains unstated, because the second edition has already exhausted its utility by comparing the silencing of the mysterious “concept” to the death of the Treatise’s author. Maurer concludes (or commences):

As surely you have imagined by this time, we have departed. But we will not leave you without the gleaning of the original concept as it came to ancient man. For ancient man, having gained his mastery over his tools and his weapons, remained utterly terrified by one thing, the final thing that he could not yet master or even be protected from, the horrible thing against which a necessary feeling of faith would arise, the ever-returning thing which he would someday call “darkness.” The danger of the dark gave birth to the cults of light. And once we have learned that Horus, whose property was the sun, was slain by Seth, we must hear sunset as “sun-set(h).” But we cannot presume that this parallel will gain any traction except through a tacit furtherance of its conclusion. The concept of the mind of ancient man continues in the unspeakable customs of our passing over.

Due to the postulates laid out in the second edition, Maurer can no longer refer to them except by their attendant conclusions in the first edition. And he suggests that this silencing is similar if not the same as his own “hav[ing] departed.” But how could Maurer have filled the structure before he had the structure—or had even thought of the structure? In many other places, the first edition’s content itself seems devoid of structure—as if following an unstated rubric of the second edition. When I read the first edition in college, I attributed the awkwardness to poor translation. Since that time I have had the opportunity to learn a small amount of German (just enough to get along with a facing translation really). Upon rereading the first edition, in the original, it is readily evident that amorphous blotches of content are no error of the translator—but a blotching together of logical nodes whose connectivity only arrives after the resigned revelations of the second. A passage from the first, in the German:

Hatten wir noch Sonne Horizont Auferstehung für jeden nicht alle brauchen wieder auferstehen horizontalen Sohn.*

Follows the rules for departure spelled out toward the end of the first volume in the second edition:

Wenn wir sterben müssen, müssen wir lernen, den Unterschied zwischen Auferstehung und auferstehen, Horizont und horizontalen, Sonne und Sohn zu vergessen. Um sich daran zu erinnern, dass die ursprüngliche Religion der Begriff war.*

Maurer’s end thoughts, as we find them in the first edition, are therefore not exactly thoughts, but the lingering understanding of afterthought: conclusions without statement or terminus. He is, in a way, indeed already deceased. But how then are we to account for the explosive life of the second edition? I contacted the publisher regarding my analysis and was sent on a circumpolar trek from contact to contact via email after email to get any answer from anybody. After a few weeks I was finally given the best possible answer. A woman named Clara employed by bookmaker Jorg-Tobias Bauer in Baden-Baden referred me to a Maat by which I thought she meant Matt. It was only after I understood that she was alluding to the Egyptian force of order and law, ma’at, that I could begin to piece together what the Treatise’s “Three Impossibilities” truly amount to.

*Trans: “Had we time sun horizon resurrection for each not all no need resurrect horizontal son;” and: “If we must die, we must learn to forget the difference between the resurrection and the resurrect, horizon and horizontal, sun and son. In order to remember that the original religion was of the concept.”