Sato Tomoyuki

Abstract: This paper examines Lucile Grahn (1819–1907) as a key figure in Romantic ballet, focusing on her career in Copenhagen and Paris and her relationship with August Bournonville. Drawing on historical sources, it traces how Grahn negotiated ideals of feminine lightness, sensuality, and virtuosity. The study situates her career within broader shifts in nineteenth-century ballet, including the rise of the prima ballerina and the changing status of male dancers, before turning to her later work in Munich as a choreographer for Wagner’s operas and director of the ballet at the Munich Court Theatre. An English translation of Clara Ziegler’s 1907 memoir is included as an appendix, offering firsthand testimony to Grahn as an artist and a woman, and illustrating the wide public admiration she inspired. Keywords: Lucile Grahn, August Bournonville, Romantic ballet, Pas de Quatre, Richard Wagner

Abstract: Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) was appointed professor at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in 1805 and soon afterwards devoted himself to the study of dowsing, or rhabdomancy, as an alleged “supernatural” ability. At a time when an empirical and quantitative conception of the natural sciences was rapidly taking shape, Ritter himself was deeply committed to establishing rigorous methods of physical experimentation. At the same time, however, his investigations of dowsing led him to envisage the possibility of a radically new community of natural knowledge, founded on a scientific “magic” capable of directly receiving the “will” of nature and on the esoteric transmission of a particular form of “sensitivity”. In this research, Ritter believed he had found the foundations of a Naturlehre—a synthesis of learning and poetry—that he had once envisioned with his companions in the Jena Romantic circle, and through it he aspired to become the “completer” of a physics successively founded by Newton and Volta. Yet, as he became convinced that the principle underlying the dowsing phenomenon could provide a unified explanation of all phenomena, from the mental to the material, Ritter entered the shadowy realm of a utopian vision of “omniscience”. Keywords: Johann Wilhelm Ritter, dowsing, rhabdomancy, Naturphilosophie, galvanism, Jena Romanticism, pseudoscience, history of science, Novalis, occultism, empiricism, Bavarian Academy of Sciences