Johannes Praetorius

Writer

• Born: October 22, 1630
• Birthplace: Zethlingen, Saxony, Germany
• Died: October 25, 1680
• Place of death: Leipzig, Germany

Biography

Seventeenth century folklorist Johannes Praetorius was one of Germany’s earliest professional freelance writers, known for his sensationalist compilations of folk and supernatural tales. His books were sources for Johann Wolfgang Goethe and the Brothers Grimm, but because he mostly recorded existing tales, his contribution to folklore is primarily one of cultural history rather than literature.

Knowledge of his personal life derives mostly from sporadic comments in his works and is complicated by the similarity of his name to other writers and scientists. He was born in Zethlingen, Saxony (now in Germany), in October, 1630. Originally known as Hans Schulze, he adopted the Latinate version of his name in the mid-1640’s, while studying classics at the Neustädter School. His first published poem, written around the time of his graduation from Neustädter, was a Latin remembrance of his family’s experience of the Thirty Years’ War. During the war, Praetorius’s birthplace, on the military highway between Magdeburg and Hamburg, was briefly occupied by an advancing Swedish army. His poem, entitled “Episagma diversum. Soli teutonici desolation per tricennale bellum,” recounts his family’s fleeing into the nearby woods to hide from the army’s brutality.

Praetorius studied humanities and natural sciences at the University of Leipzig, graduating in 1654 and receiving a master’s degree in 1655 for a thesis on customs surrounding the winter solstice. He attempted an academic career, lecturing at Leipzig between 1658 and 1661 and producing a work on the then-respected subject of palmistry. He married and remained in Leipzig, retaining a part-time job at the university, publishing frequently, and establishing good scholarly connections. However, he never became a successful academic.

He produced twenty books in the first half of the 1660’s, including several books on comets and other astronomical phenomena, one on Christmas traditions that became a source for Goethe, his only dramatic work which contains several lullabies of interest to folk historians, a humorous book recording superstitious sayings, and four sets of educational playing cards. His most significant contribution is his Daemonologia Rubinzalii Silesii, from 1662, and related volumes. These works represent the first extensive compilation of the oral tales, indigenous to Leipzig, of the mountain demon Rübezahl.

Littered with neologisms, Praetorius’s works mix Latin, Greek, and French with German and are thus difficult for modern readers. However, despite academically sophisticated prose, his interest in popular customs and his use of common, or unnamed and uncredited, sources likely impeded his academic advancement. Praetorius’s more scholarly efforts include 1665’s Reformata astrologia cometica, an astrology book about comets; several works on the Turkish military; a geography of Hungary; a numerology of the number 666, a speculation on the interior of the planet; a study of the habits of migratory birds; and an etymological essay on Adam and Eve. His astrological work should be seen as scientific by the standards of the day, but his writing always reflected his interest in superstition, and his works contain regular discussion of prophecies, signs, and portents. Most of his work, particularly his “alectryomancy” on the use of poultry in divination, is of interest to scholars of seventeenth century German folk customs. His compendium of exotic and legendary creatures, a sort of literary cabinet of curiosities called Anthropodemus plutonicus (1666), is a valuable history of superstitious belief. Praetorius died in 1680 during an epidemic of plague in Leipzig.