Hartmann, Franz b. 1838; Donauworth, Bavaria d. 1912; Leipzig, Saxony
Prominent German Theosophist. Hartmann struggled for many years to formulate a belief system appropriate to the scientific age. Although raised a Catholic, he rejected the church in favor of scientific materialism while studying medicine in Munich in the 1860s.
In 1865 he left his studies, still incomplete, to take a job as a medical officer on an immigrant ship headed for New York. After his arrival later that year, Hartmann remained in the United States until 1883, supporting himself as a medical practitioner and traveling widely on a restless spiritual quest. He lived with various Christian sects, a Jewish rabbi, and various Native American tribes; he also participated in seances and attended in New Orleans the spiritualist lectures of J. M. Peebles, whose rational discourses on occult phenomena finally spurred him to reject the scientific materialism of his student days. Eagerly embracing American spiritualism, Hartmann organized his life around the advice given to him by seance mediums. In Colorado, for instance, he followed a clairvoyant’s tip about where to dig for a lucrative gold mine, which he never found, and consulted with a seance spirit whose information helped solve a medical problem he had acquired during a childhood vaccination.By the early 1880s, however, Hartmann had become disillusioned with spiritualism, which, he felt, lacked intellectual rigor. In this state of dissatisfaction, a copy of the occult journal The Theosophist fortuitously fell into his hands. Edited by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who had founded Theosophy in 1875 with Henry Steel Olcott, this journal introduced Hartmann to the movement’s basic tenets. Convinced that he had finally had the spiritual revelation that he had long sought, Hartmann resolved to make contact with Blavatsky and the spiritual masters, or Mahatmas, whose messenger she claimed to be.
A letter expressing this desire to Blavatsky and Olcott yielded an invitation to collaborate with them on the Theosophical project, newly quartered in Adyar, India.After relocating to Adyar, Hartmann became a prominent disciple of Blavatsky and eventually traveled with her in 1885 to Germany, where he helped organize the German Theosophical movement. He published numerous books and articles, spoke widely, and edited the Theosophical journal Lotusbluthen (Lotus Blossoms, 1892— 1900), which appeared at the modernist press of Wilhelm Friedrich in Leipzig. Following Blavatsky’s death in 1895, the international Theosophical movement fractured and Hartmann himself split with the Adyar branch in 1897 to found in Leipzig the more democratic Theosophische Gesellschaft (Internationale Theosophische Ver- bruderung, International Theosophical Brotherhood), to which he dedicated himself until his death in 1912.
Corinna Treitel
References and Further Reading
Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Occult Roots of Nazism: The Ariosophists of Austria and Germany 1890—1935. New York: New York University, 1985.
Hartmann, Franz. “Autobiography of Franz Hartmann.” The Occult Review 7 (January 1908): 7-35.
Treitel, Corinna. A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2004.