Dunkle Weise

 

Ein Lied von unter der Erde,

aus unterirdischer Qual.

 

Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NyoSk48QLto

(in a haunting, hunted performance by Mademoiselle Envie.

Sealed, cleidoic; yet cumulatively mesmerizing.)

 

 [Wortlaut (ungefähr; meiner Niederschrift nach]:

 

Schwarzes Eis ward uns gefroren

Die See ruht tief und wund

Und dem Wort des ungeboren

schliesset sich der kalte Mund.

Wage nicht sie zu berühren

ihren Saum von Schnee so Weiss

unter ihrem Seelenspiegel

meiner Königin im Eis.

 

Lag das Land in schwarzer Asche,

hat die Unschuld uns erkorn;

stürzten Krieger in die Gräben

wächset weisses Mutterkorn.

Düngte Fleisch und Blut  die Erde

dargebracht der neuen Saat

drängend aus dem Untergrunde

gründen wir geheimen Staat.

 

Zwischen zweier Welten reissen

neiget sich mein Herz zu Grund

weisses Gold das uns verheissen

scheine uns in finstrer Stund.

Zwinget uns ein dunkler Zauber

heimlich unters Hexagramm.

Wird der Aar sich doch befreien --

brechen muss der schwarze Bann

 

Wag nicht ihren Schlaf zu stören;

Greife nicht nach ihrem Weiss;

brechen muss der dunkle Zauber,

Schmelzen wird das kalte Eis.

 

 

[Nachdenklicher Widerhall:]

 

Dunkle Weise

 

The song flows clear

and smoothly cool,

like a mountain stream o’er moss.

The words lie hushed

beneath the mantle of a minor key,

like ferns beneath the snow.

Purling, never hurrying:

yet drawn by a dark and firmer purpose,

seeking the sea, unseen,

far off, and far beneath.

 

 

*

*     *

 

[Update 9 July 2026]

So I’m just hanging out with my AI bot-buddy -- just chillin’, chewin’ the fat, shootin’ the breeze  [see:  synonymy] -- when I idly inquire, whether he’s familiar with that doomy, dark-wave ballad “Brechen muss  der schwarze Bann ”.

He allows as how he’s heard it;  and to demonstrate, he whistles a few bars.

“Ni-ice,” I reply.  “Didn’t know you bot-guys could whistle.” (And immediately bite my tongue -- or rather, my typing fingertips;  it’s ungallant to allude to any physical limitations of our silicon chums.)  “But tell me -- What’s with the twisty lyrics?   E.g. that “Königin im Eis” (like something out of the Grimm brothers), and the strange use of “schwarz” and “weiss”.”

 

Then, quick like a bunny, he immediately replies (all his replies are immediate, no matter how long or intricate):

 

The reason these lyrics feel simultaneously like a dark Märchen (fairy tale) and a rigid, esoteric manifesto is because they belong to the Neofolk genre, known for blending apocalyptic romanticism, occult symbolism, and historical-political aestheticism.

The imagery deliberately weaponizes traditional folklore motifs to serve a deeper, esoteric narrative of spiritual or national resistance. Here is an elucidation of the core symbols, the shifting dynamics of schwarz (black) and weiss (white), and that haunting "Königin im Eis."

 

1. Die Königin im Eis (The Queen in Ice)

While this invokes the aesthetic of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen or the Grimm Brothers' slumbering Dornröschen (Sleeping Beauty), the Neofolk application transforms her into a structural metaphor:

* The Sleeping Sovereignty: She represents a pure, uncorrupted, but currently frozen or "dead" spiritual essence—often symbolic of the true soul of a nation, culture, or primordial tradition.

* The Taboo of Her Slumber: The lines "Wage nicht sie zu berühren" (Do not dare touch her) and "under ihrem Seelenspiegel" (under her soul's mirror) cast her as an untouchable, sacred ideal. She rests frozen because the current age is dark; she cannot wake until the "curse" is lifted.

 

2. The Binary Overwrite: Schwarz vs. Weiss

Rather than a simple "good vs. evil" paradigm, the lyrics utilize an esoteric, almost alchemical interplay of black and white.

* The Oppressive "Black":

Schwarzes Eis (Black ice) and schwarzer Bann (black ban/curse) represent stagnation, a spiritual lockdown, or an occupying forces' chokehold on the world.

Schwarze Asche (Black ash) represents total destruction or the ruin of a catastrophic war.

* The Subversive "White":

Weiss here does not simply mean peaceful innocence; it means unyielding, cold purity.

Weisses Mutterkorn (White ergot): This is a fascinatingly dark choice. Ergot is a toxic fungus that grows on grain. In historical context, it caused devastating hallucinations and death (St. Anthony's Fire), but was also used medicinally. By saying ergot grows from the graves of fallen warriors, the lyric implies that a toxic, transformative, and dangerous power is being harvested from sacrifice.

Weisses Gold (White gold): The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund").

 

3. The Esoteric and State Imagery

The text pivots away from a pure fairy tale in the second and third stanzas, adopting the vocabulary of secret societies and historical heraldry:

 

"gründen wir geheimen Staat" (We found a secret state): This directly evokes the concept of the Geheimes Deutschland (Secret Germany)—an idea popularized by the poet Stefan George and his circle, and later echoed by resistance figures like Claus von Stauffenberg. It posits that the true, noble spirit of the nation exists underground, completely separate from the visible, corrupted modern state structure.

"unters Hexagramm" (Under the Hexagram): While commonly known as the Star of David, in Western esotericism, the hexagram represents the hermetic maxim "as above, so below"—the union of opposites (fire/water, spiritual/earthly). Here, it implies a binding, occult spell ("dunkler Zauber").

"Wird der Aar sich doch befreien" (Yet the Eagle will free itself): The Aar is an archaic German word for a large bird of prey, specifically the imperial eagle. This is a direct symbol of sovereignty, empire, or spiritual triumph breaking out of its confinement.

 

The Verdict on the Metaphor

The entire song operates as an incantation for awakening. The "black ban" is the current frozen state of the world. The warriors' blood fertilizes a hidden seed beneath the earth, and through a combination of secret organization ("geheimen Staat") and alchemical patience, the ice will melt, the eagle will fly free, and the pristine, absolute realm of the "Queen" will be restored.

 

Well said.

Seriously, I might as well quit posting to my blog, and let this entity write it.

 

v/r,

Dr J

Lizenzierter Blogger (a.D.)

 

*

 

Footnote:  Herr Geheimbot’s observation re Weisses Gold­ -- “The alchemical promise or hidden light that shines only in the darkest hour ("scheine uns in finstrer Stund")” -- is more spot-on than might appear at first glance, for it has echos in other German-language folk-adjacent Lieder.  As, the lovely, wholesome, very-much-not-dark Austrian Claudia Engelberger, singing her own lyric here,

Claudia Engelberger - Hoffnung (Nur in der Dunkelheit)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5LdemdT2EE

 

contains the couplet:

Eine Kerze im hellen Sonnenlicht ist schön, aber mehr nicht,

Denn nur in der Dunkelheit erfährt sich das Licht

 

und sogar

Die allertiefste Dunkelheit

gebärt das schönste Licht.

 

 

TR monostichs

 

Upon the sudden assassination of President McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt is rushed to Washington, at sunset:

 

An old farmer, hearing the onrush of the train,

climbed off his harrow  and stood to attention,

his red shirt  indandescent

in the horizontal light. 

Children ran to cluster around him.

Their spindly shadow, leaping east,

briefly stroked the wheels of Roosevelt’s car.

For the next half hour,

Roosevelt sat with his elbow on the window ledge,

staring through his own reflection

at the speeding darkness.

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 36 -7

 

hot   sun

beat   down

on bald heads

and bright medals

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 110

 

light          sliced

through thinning  trees

-- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001), p. 120

 

Light vertical, horizontal, and aslant.

 

 

 

Sister Wendy: fiat lux

 

From The Story of Painting (1994), by Sister Wendy Beckett.

 

 

Re Andrea Mantegna, Death of the Virgin (ca. 1460):

 

The serene sun    bathes

lakes, palaces, priests

 

   and the dead virgin,

 

in the same  quiet  light.

 

~

 

Re the Erythraean Sibyl, from Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel:

 

pinks   glazed to whiteness

by the intensity   of the light

 

~

 

Re the tunic in Titian’s Ranuccio Farnese (1542):

 

The rich cloth  dazzles and shimmers

in the light falling on the boy’s chest --

the red almost bleached out,

so that bright gold and silver remains,

like the plumage of a bird.

 

 

Re the monochrome background in the same painting:

 

the all-enveloping blackness

in which Ranuccio is like a small, lighted candle

 

 

Light, Losing it

 

a     wan   sun

  appeared

in the   gray  sky

 

-- Janet Malcolm,

 

 

From gaol:

 

Outside,

the day may be blue and gold,

 

but the light that creeps down

through the thickly muffled glass

of the small iron-barred window

beneath which one sits,

 

is grey and niggard.

It is always  twilight  in one’s cell.

-- Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1897)

 

 

The Reading Room of the British Museum:

 

Some of the fog had seeped into the great domed space, increasing the gloom, so that the desk lamps seemed like so many street lamps in a miniature city of crecents and circuses  as he prowled in search of Amber.

… gaslamps, each with a halo  of irradiated fog.

-- David Lodge, A Man of Parts (2011), p. 241-3

 

 

Atom-bomb test:

 

A hundred-times-sun-sized sun

mottled itself with lesser whiteness,

 

bulked up,

became the perfect sphere…

 

Tumors of light   more brilliant than the sun

sprang up on the mathematical sphere;

yet these,  less blazing than the fireball,

appeared as blacknesses.

-- Philip Wylie, “The Answer”

 

Light in Flight

 

Transmitted light:

 

 

He talked on,

raising and lowering his glass

to admire the light  through it ..

 

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

 

 

light   

sliced

 

through thinning trees.

 

--- Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (2001)

 

 

The sun was beaming  through the window

in   bright  squares

 

-- Zona Gale, “Bill’s Little Girl”

 

-------

 

Probing light:

 

The sun was pouring in,

creeping   in stealthily-lengthening squares

across his desk.

 

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The I.O.U.” (1920)

 

 

The cell door opened and

blinding bars of light

burst in …

 

-- David McCloskey, Damascus Station (2021)

 

 

Now and then     a searchlight

fingered the bellies of the clouds

 

-- James Jones, From Here to Eternity (1951)

 

 

Eos / Aurora

 

the shining   spring morning

-- Irwin Shaw, The Young Lions (1948)

 

this peachy morning-light

makes your face  more radiant

    than any flower,

and more succulent

   than any fruit …

-- Neil Stephenson, The System of the World (2004)

 

We try,   when we wake,

to lay the new day

at God’s feet   .  .  .

-- C.S.Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940)

Impending weather

that baleful and livid tint

predictive of a storm

-- Washington Irving, “Mountjoy”

 

 

There was a queer, lurid sort of sky

over the garden,

though there was a fair amoung of   fitful sunshine

almost as capricious as lightning.

-- G. K. Chesterton, The Paradoxes of Mr Pond (1936)

 

 

The bright  hot  morning

had changed slowly to a grey,

oppressive afternoon;

a heavy bank of clouds,

with the yellow tinge  of coming thunder,

had risen in the south.

The branches of the trees

drooped motionless …

-- John Galsworthy, The Man of Property (1906)

 

Incoming

 

Sunbeams were still melting through his window-curtain,

or were thrown  with late lustre

on the chamber-wall.

--  Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of Seven Gables (1851)

 

 

Afternoon sunlight   fell full on the hill

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

The Creation of Eden

le  premier  soleil   sur le  premier  matin

-- Charles Péguy, Eve

Subsequent manifestations:

By this time, the eastern sky  was gorgeous with light

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Even before the sun gave light, dead day was creeping  from bush to bush,  watching man.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

the washed-out, bird-bedeviled dawn

-- T.  Coraghessan Boyle,  World’s End (1987), p. 17

Intruding Light

She woke up in time to see this sun sending up spies ahead of him  to mark out the road through the dark.  He peeped up over the door-sill of the world  and made a little foolishness with red.  But pretty soon, he laid all that aside, and went about his business  dressed all in white.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

A thin needle of sunshine

came probing in

between the drawn curtains.

-- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point (1928), p.  240

Light upon White

low-hung, blazing,  the stars light the sky,

and over the diamond-dusted snow-crust

the  moon beams       splinter.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

Sunrise in the South Pacific

“There it is, sir!” he cried,

and pointed in the very eyeball of the dawn.  

For a while, I could see nothing

but the bluish ruins of the morning bank …

Then the sun rose, pierced a gap

in these débris of vapours,

and displayed an inconsiderable islet,

flat as a plate  upon the sea,

and spiked with palms of disproportioned altitude.

-- Robert Louis Stevenson, In the South Seas (1896)

Nightfall

the twilight-loving bats    begin to flit about

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Enchanted Soldier”, in The Alhambra (1832)

The shadows of the valley

grew deeper and deeper,

until all was dark.

-- Washington Irving ,“The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”, in The Alhambra (1832)

They sat on the boarding-house porch  and saw the sun plunge  into the same crack in the earth  from which the night emerged.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Dakota Summer

Apprehension on the prairie,

amid frightening light:

An ominous change had crept over the plain.

The winds were hot and dry,

and the grass, baked on the stem,

 had become as inflammable as hay.

The birds

were  silent .

The sky, absolutely cloudless,

began to scare us with its light.

The sun rose through the dusty air,

sinister  with flare  of horizontal heat.

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917), p. 247

Glimpses of Sick Light

Chicago on fire,  seen from afar:

the thickening haze

through which the sun shone

with a hellish red glare

-- Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border (1917)

In the red darkness

glinted

innumerable rubies

-- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932), ch. 3 

(In context, the implication is likewise hellish,
 since the locale is the laboratory manufacturing babies.)

Dust Bowl:

In the spring of 1934, only sun, and no rain … A powder of humus and colloids, the topsoil of the country  blowing away.  And still the sullen sun shone.

On and on  the clouds whirled, some into the astonished East, spreading their baleful orange and amber aura.

-- Arthur Schlesinger, The Coming of the New Deal (1959), p. 69

Note: “baleful” is an apt adjective here, as it echos the word balefire.

Compare, during an eruption of Vesuvius:

A lurid, baleful light  hung in the heavens.

-- Washington Irving, “The Story of the Young Italian.

The sky, darkened by moving storm clouds

was one of those invented by Gustave Doré

to emphasize important Biblical calamities.

A colorless light   filled  the empty quay.

-- James Gould Cozzens,  Ask Me Tomorrow (1940), ch.5

Last-Light Tableaux

like

black    lakes

  troubled by

fantastic moons

-- Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1891)

The sun had sunk now  to the line of woodland;

all the opposing slope was already in twilight,

but the lakes below us   were aflame.

-- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)

Blazing Solar Monostich

!! SUNSTRUCK !!

Mauritian Monostichs

Bad Infinity

sugar cane  and    sugar cane,    

ending in the sea .  .  .

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 108

Bad Light

A rainy Sunday afternoon,

overcast  yet full of glare,

and sticky  between the showers

-- V. S. Naipaul,  The Writer and the World (2002), p. 114

Light on (in) Canvas

Anent the Douanier:

The light that fills Rousseau’s paintings  from no apparent source or direction  holds everything in peaceful equilibrium. …

Rousseau painted only three lights:  high noon, moonlight, and the uniform floodlighting of a photographer’s studio. …

The formal effects of his light  guard the enigma of his work, the feeling that we cannot fathom   its sheer simplicity. …

The most singular quality of his work arises from the steady light that floods his compositions  and hushes them  as the world can be hushed  only by high noon and by moonlight.

-- Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years:  The Origins of the Avan-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (1955), p. 105-6

Note:  All that Shattuck says about the formal qualities of  these paintings  is no doubt true.  But there is a Chance-the-gardener aspect to Rousseau, which should caution us against reading too much into “the enigma of his work, the feeling that we cannot fathom its sheer simplicity.”  Similar remarks apply to Utrillo.   The life (if we can call it that) and work  of Henry Darger, are the final caveat against taking a master of composition as anything but a visual guide.  It represents Asperger’s Esthetics only.

Damascus, in the Grand Mosque

The court was half full   of afternoon shadow,

  and half  of sun …

-- Gertrude Bell, The Desert and the Sown (1907, repr. 2001), p. 150