Leo Frobenius

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Leo Frobenius : biography

29 June 1873 – 9 August 1938

Frobenius also confirmed the role of the moon cult in african cultures, according to Rank:

"Bachofen was the first co point out this connexion in the ancient primitive cultures in his Muttemcht (x86x), but it has since received widespread corroboration from later researchers, in particular Frobenius, who discovered traces of a matriarchal culture in prehistoric Africa (Das unbekanntt Afrika, Munich, 191.3)."

Frobenius’ work gave Rank insight into the double meaning of the king’s ritual murder, and the cultural development of soul belief:

"Certain African traditions (Frobenius: Erythraa) lead to the assumption that the emphasizing of one or another of the inherent tendencies of the ritual was influenced by the character of the slain king, who in one case may have been feared and in another wanted back again."

"The Fanany myth, mentioned below, of the Betsileo in Madagascar shows already a certain progress from the primitive worm to the soul-animal.2 The Betsileo squeeze the putrefying liquid out of the bodies of the dead at the feet and catch it in a small jar. After two or three months a worm appears in it and is regarded as the spirit of the dead. This jar is then placed in the grave, where the corpse is laid only after the appearance of the Fanany. A bamboo rod connects the jar with the fresh air (corresponding to the " soulholes" of Northern stone graves). After six to eight months (corresponding possibly to the embryonic period) the Fanany (so the Betsileo believe) then appears in daylight in the form of a lizard. The relatives of the dead receive it with great celebrations and then push it back down the rod in the hope that this ancestral ghost will prosper exceedingly down below and become the powerful protector of the family and, for that matter, the whole village.

2 From Sibree’s Madagascar, pp. 309 et seq., quoted by Frobenius in Der Seelenwurm (1895) and reprinted in Erlebte Erdteile, I (Frankfurt, 192.5), a treatise which deals principally with the "vase-cult" arising out of the storing of decayed remains in jars (see our later remarks on the vase in general).

"Later totemism- the idea of descent from a definite animal species – seems to emerge only from a secondary interpretation of the soul-worm idea or the soul-animal idea in accordance with a " law of inversion " (Frobenius) peculiar to mythical thought; just as the myth of the Creation as the projection backward in time of the myth of the end of the world is in itself only a formal expression of the principle of rebirth."

Works

  • Die Geheimbünde Afrikas (Hamburg 1894)
  • Der westafrikanische Kulturkreis. Petermanns Mitteilungen 43/44, 1897/98
  • Weltgeschichte des Krieges (Hannover 1903)
  • Unter den unsträflichen Äthiopen (Berlin 1913)
  • Paideuma (München 1921)
  • Dokumente zur Kulturphysiognomik. Vom Kulturreich des Festlandes (Berlin 1923)
  • Erythräa. Länder und Zeiten des heiligen Königsmordes (Berlin 1931)
  • Kulturgeschichte Afrikas (Zürich 1933)

Notes