Bead Game

The nearest thing I know in literature to the reflective use of one of these psychedelics is the so-called Bead Game in Hermann Hesse’s Magister Ludi (Das Glasperlenspiel). Hesse writes of a distant future in which an order of scholar-mystics have discovered an ideographic language which can relate all the branches of science and art, philosophy and religion. The game consists in playing with the relationships between configurations in these various fields in the same way that the musician plays with harmonic and contrapuntal relationships. From such elements as the design of a Chinese house, a Scarlatti sonata, a topological formula, and a verse from the Upanishads, the players will elucida...View all