The True Tale
— J. Chr. de Vries
Littera et Imago
The only time I have met Taunis Haas in person was on 23rd May 1993, during the Buchmesse in Mainz, Germany. We didn’t know each other at the time but happened to strike up a conversation that lasted for hours. To this day, I’m still unsure if our first encounter was truly a coincidence or not, as the numbers forming the date are remarkably connected to the story Haas told me. Both the day, the month, and the year individually, as well as their complete numerical representation, are prime numbers. The final number, 23051993, is the 1,451,339th prime number, which in itself is the 110,729th prime number, and that, in turn, is the 10,510th. Haas and coincidence, it’s a troublesome and elusive relationship.
The trigger for our lengthy conversation was an antiquarian book which was placed on one of the tables. I wanted to pick it up, but Haas beat me to it. The book was a Dutch translation of an early nineteenth-century dissertation originally written in German by a Danish mathematician named Matthiam Scuëde. This nineteenth-century scholar, who incidentally was one of the few non-royals to be inducted into the Danish Order of the Elephant [Elefantenordenen], had conducted research on the work of an obscure medieval clergyman named Sigwind I the Chaste. The title of the book was The Sieve of Sigwind Primus — Essay on the True Nature of Prime Numbers for the Clarification of History. Haas turned out to have studied the German original, Das Sieb des Sigwinds – Versuch über die wahre Art des Primzahlen zum Erklärung der Geschichte. As a follow-up he sent me later the following story.
— Den Haag, May 17, 2017
The True Tale
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
In Greek, the word λόγος [logos] appears three times. Goethe has Faust, struggling to find a fitting translation of the Gospel according to John, weigh four possibilities: word, meaning, power, and finally — his ultimate choice — deed. That’s what one might call joining deed to word — though try finding anyone who still does that these days. Word or deed — where does the word end and the deed begin? Where does form end and content begin? To what extent can any of these notions still be taken seriously?
By the letter or by the spirit?
In the introduction of Scuëde’s book, a theory about the essence of writing is unfolded. This theory was devised by Sigwind Primus ‘de Kuische’ when he was active at the monastery of Passau at the end of the twelfth century, during the tenure of Wolger von Erla as the bishop. The nickname ‘De Kuische’ [‘The Chaste’] was a derogatory term, not to be taken in a kind way. After impregnating a nun who worked as a nurse near the monastery, and after it was revealed that he frequently engaged in intimate rendezvous with beautiful, preferably young women, taking Paul’s message in his letter to the Corinthians (thirteenth chapter, thirteenth verse, twice a prime number!) that love is above all else quite literally, Sigwind was castrated at the bishop’s order. Sigwind’s spirit was cleansed (‘kuisen’ means cleaning) by ‘chastening’ his body. He was then banished to a monastery high in the French Alps. By that time he had already written his famous text on The Letter and the Spirit.
There is no existing copy of Sigwind’s original text; the text which was available to Scuëde was a German translation from the eighteenth century. Another remarkable belief of Scuëde was that the Middle Dutch poem Nevelingenlied is not a translation of the famous Middle High German Nibelungenlied, but rather the other way around. The German version may indeed be more linguistically rich and extensive, although the latter is difficult to verify since the majority of the Middle Dutch text has been lost. Scuëde arrived at this unusual conclusion due to Sigwind’s theory on historical interpretation by using prime numbers: the “Sieve of Sigwind.” Sigwind’s theory began with an exposition on writing itself because, according to Sigwind, history only reaches us through signs [signaculi], be it in the form of images or architecture, or in the form of text.
It was specifically the latter form that was the subject of Sigwind’s research. To support his argument, he first cited one of Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus [Φαῖδρος], in which Plato, through the character of Socrates, proposes an artificial construction stating that written text is an inferior form of communication because the words in written language are “dead” [Sigwind referred to them as the “dead tongue”, lingua mortua] – “[they] are not capable of defending themselves,” as Scuëde expressed in the mentioned Dutch translation.
From Scuëde’s paraphrasing, I understood that the birth of language takes place in a ‘misty landscape’ [terra nebulosa], where one is compelled to find the appropriate form of expression through groping in the dark [reptum repertum]. The living word [“the living tongue”, lingua vitalis] is born in the mists of the mind [animus natus].
From Scuëde’s text, I further understood that text (in general) is initially formulated in the brain, gradually taking the form of “conceptual words” [verbum conceptum, Sigwind uses the singular form in this case; it’s unclear why, maybe he meant that this form is conceived one word after one other]. The first “phase of birth” of linguistic expression has thus begun — “[the] mists have initiated their primary phase of crystallization,” as the Dutch translation reads. Once the definitive form of the text is chosen, namely its materialization in writing, the text has become “crystallized”; it becomes immovable and can only be replaced as a whole by another “solidified substance”. To put it another way, the corpse can be buried, but it’s death cannot be undone. As the mists dissipate and clarity emerges when the text takes a fixed form, it dies.
This conclusion must have consequences for the interpretation of the text. Since the text is a materialized fixation of a potentially fluid expression, it ultimately becomes impossible to discern the “true” meaning or intention. Sigwind revealed himself here as a committed nominalist, with significant implications for the foundation of his theory of historiography. In order to interpret written texts as objectively as possible, it is important to develop a “technical apparatus” that can assist us in this endeavor. It should come as no surprise that this tool could be found in mathematics and arithmetic. The most important instrument turned out to be the prime number, which, when projected onto the line of historical facts, would reveal objective connections that, being self-sufficient [sufficio*)], do not invite interpretations subject to accidental taste [sapor accidentalis].
*) Sic! – not sibi sufficiens
From this point, Sigwind’s theory takes a peculiar turn: with the prime number as a necessary instrument, the archetypal nature of various historical events could be uncovered and demonstrated. Sigwind provides an example of a period of 757 years — the one hundred and thirty-third prime number, according to Scuëde.
The starting point for this was the aforementioned epic poem, the Nevelingenlied, in which Sigwind must have had access to one of the earliest manuscripts, although Scuëde does not provide information on this. The story in the epic is based on an ancient event, even for Sigwind: the downfall of the Burgundians in the fifth century, following a battle against the Romans, formally speaking, but in practice, against the Huns hired by the Romans. The king of the Burgundians, called Guntheer in the epic but actually named Gundahar, had expanded his kingdom further westward and was ultimately brought to order by the Romans through the Huns. According to the legends, not only the king, his family, and entourage perished, but also a large part of the Burgundian people. The Nevelingenlied not only sings of this downfall of the Burgundians but it also contains a second layer, of a personal nature. Guntheer, through the cunning of his loyal helper Hagen, had his former comrade and fellow warrior, the hero Zegevryt, killed. In retaliation, Zegevryt’s wife, Guntheer’s sister, plotted revenge. This dual struggle, the state-related and the personal, forms the foundation of Sigwind’s historical method. It provides a “type of event” [typus res], an “archetype” that serves as a perspective for other historical events, which can be linked to each other through prime numbers.
Indeed, the conflict between the Burgundians and the Huns originated in the year 434 AD. Sigwind, as presented by Scuëde, pointed out that while the battle took place on the battlefield in the year 436, it was the origin of the conflict [causa historica] that was of essential interest to him. If we were to apply the prime number 757 to this event in both directions of time, we would arrive in antiquity at the year 323 BC, the year in which Alexander of Macedon, better known as Alexander the Great, passed away. And if we were to move forward from the year 434, we would arrive at the year 1191, which means precisely during the time when Sigwind Primus was working at the episcopal monastery of Passau, which also was coinciding with the origins of the Nevelingenlied.
However, it was not this epic poem, nor his work in Passau, Sigwind was interested in, but an entirely different event that perfectly coincides in an archetypical way with the Siege of Acre in 1191 during the Third Crusade, which involved a personal intrigue between the knights Guy de Lusignan and Conrad of Montferrat. A similar double-layered intrigue took place around Alexander of Macedon and one of his generals, Antipater. Through the calculation with the prime number 757, Sigwind thus connected three historical moments, all based on the same structure, the “archetype” or “causa res” *) that Sigwind had in mind. According to Scuëde, Sigwind took the Nevelingenlied as an archetypal construct [comparatio exemplaritatis] that he had folded like a mold over the other historical moments. Thus, Sigwind had his factual method at his disposal.
*) Sigwind writes ‘res’ and not ‘rei’, which would grammatically be correct.
In the epilogue of Scuëde’s text, the final tragic turn of Sigwind’s life is described. After his exile to the French Alps, he worked until his death on a theory about what he called “The True Tale”, which was a direct continuation of his so called “Sieve Method”. He sought a way to write texts that were purely factual. The descriptions, analyses, and conclusions had to be “pure” and not based on any form of imagination. It had to be exclusively about reality and not about the interpretation of it. Only what is “real” was accepted, and concepts such as judgment, taste, and opinion were taboo. For example, a text describing certain “acts” was permissible, but attaching a personal meaning to them was not. At least, Sigwind had not been able to formulate a suitable example of it. He provided many examples from which we can infer what he was searching for. He describes the situation of a person entering a room and saying, “It is warm in here”. According to Sigwind, this statement is not allowed, but instead he could formulate an alternative, for example, “I find it warm in here”. Although this latter is a personal statement and, in that sense, an opinion, for the person hearing (or reading) the statement, it is a factual statement. The fact is that the specific person finds it warm. We may agree or disagree with that person, but that is not relevant in this case. Scuëde adds that in the present time (in his case, the nineteenth century), he could also have given the entirely factual statement: “It is 24 degrees Celsius in here”.
The problem which Sigwind was facing is enormous. In fact, he only allows the indicative and rejects any form of imperative. “The True Tale” is thereby the definitive choice for the Letter, and hence rejecting the Spirit. Sigwind must have realized that this put him in direct conflict with the ideas of Augustine, who, in De sermone Domini in monte, quotes the Second Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians: “[T]he letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” Augustine adds an amusing example to this: “It is claimed that the word ‘left hand’ stands for ‘woman’.” Because women are usually frugal in managing household expenses, men who spend money for charitable reasons would give it with their left hand to hide their gifts from their wives. “As if only men are Christians and the command of mercy is not given to women,” Augustine scoffed. And furthermore: “For which left hand should the woman, in turn, hide an act of mercy? In that case, is the man the left hand of the woman?”
“The Letter kills” was precisely Sigwind’s problem. “The True Tale” is thereby doomed to become a lie because without imagination, no one can ever believe this story. The only way Sigwind could embody the word of “The True Tale” was through his final act: he jumped into a glacier, embracing death.
Whether this tragedy is a result of the physical and spiritual mutilation inflicted upon him cannot be said with certainty; his method would have to be applied to his own life for that. But how should the typus res be formulated? And which prime number would be valid for it?
— TH, November 7, 2011, Nürnberg