Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

32 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIĆ

of humans as the connecting link between the divine and the natural world, and the same emphasıs upon the crucial significance of the free individual combining with others in a movement towards a new utopian age. Despite its difficult and esoteric style, making free use of terms such as “Pleroma,’ ‘Seraphic, and ‘Sepulchral, running throughout the work was a clear apocalyptic theme. The existing world order, world views, religions, were outworn and exhausted. Humanity stood on the brink of an exciting and wonderful new age: an age that would finally see the fusion of the world of God and the world of man—humans would become as gods. Perfect freedom would be attained —Heaven on Earth. To move into this new epoch we must sever our links with the old. Discard all our old props and supports, whether they be material possessions, fixed ideas or gods. Unfettered and free we shall then be in a position to recognise the organic links that exist between all things, “experience the whole of the divine cycle”!’ and acknowledge our own divinity. In so doing we shall begin to take upon ourselves the responsibility not merely for the narrow individual self but for the whole of humanity. “The most joyful tidings are that we can burst the framework of the world, and that it falls to us to shape it into the highest holiness.”!®

In his letter to Gutkind of June 27th 1914, Mitrinovic asked for his assistance in arranging his proposed lectures in Berlin and invited him to join with Kandinsky in helping to organise the Yearbook. Specifically he asked if Gutkind would write a short and relatively simple summary of the main points of Sidereal Birth for inclusion in the book. In his rather untutored German he concluded the letter with the observation that if Gutkind acceded to these requests:

I shall have a great joy of my lifein that case, for I have the courage to believe that the total revolution of aryan pan-humanity movements will be given a foundation by Sidereal Birth. | hope and trust that you, honoured sir, will undertake to carry a considerable part of the organisation of the movement and a most significant part, that of final truth and total faith.

In later life Mitrinovi¢é was to remark that if Gutkind had not written Sidereal Birth then he himself would have had to write it, such was the lasting impact that the work had upon him. Indeed, he must have felt that in Gutkind he had discovered a kindred soul whose vision mirrored much that he himself had explored in “Aesthetic Contemplations.” The affirmation of the ultimate unity of all humanity, the bankruptcy and sterility of the contemporary world, the higher order of consciousness that was necessary in order to create the new order that was imminent within the womb of