AstroMoview Review: Hermeticism in Netflix's Dark

Welcome to another LINCOS AstroMovie review. [Read or Watch the video here on YouTube.]

This time, we’re not examining a movie. We’ll be exploring the German-made, three season series from Netflix, called Dark. I’m really excited about this one a) because it’s a very well thought out story; and b) because we’ll be diving into the Hermetic philosophy that permeates the series, which speaks directly to astrology.

References to the Emerald Tablet of Hermes appear throughout the show. Yet, they haven’t been very deeply explored. Most commentators prefer to dissect the time travel elements of the plot. So, we’re going to explore the story’s embedded philosophy through the lens of astrology.

(Beware that there will be lots of spoilers. So, if you are still planning to see the series, go and watch it and then come back and read this afterwards)

We’ll start with a definition of two words that I need to explain: exoteric and esoteric. "Esoteric" refers to anything that is "intended for, or likely to be understood by, only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest." It’s often used to describe knowledge that isn’t understood or appreciated by the average person. "Exoteric", on the other hand, refers to anything that is intended for the general public. "Exoteric" also relates to the outside or external world, while "esoteric" relates to the inside world that is unseen. On the surface, Dark is a story about the chaos that can occur with time travel. But as we’ll learn, time travel is an external depiction of what’s really happening internally.

Dark, therefore, is an exoteric meditation on the Hermetic view of the world. Hermes was the Greek name of the ancient Egyptian deity known as Thoth. In antiquity, it was believed that he was a real person who helped humanity develop civilization, including medicine, written language, alchemy and astrology. Dark features several references to the Emerald Tablet, also known in Latin as the Tabula Smaragdina, which is a part of the Hermetic writings reputed to contain the secrets of creation. A painting depicting the Emerald Tablet by Heinrich Khunrath from 1606 is seen in multiple places throughout the series, including tattooed on the back of one of the characters. The phrase Sic Mundus Creatus Est, which is the name of the secret society that built the portal to the time traveler’s wormhole, is a line from the Emerald Tablet, meaning "thus the world was created". It’s written on the door above the symbol of a Triquetra. But as we shall see, the external story of Winden’s time travelers is itself an illustration of the secret Hermetic teachings about creation, fate and free will.

I’m not going to directly untangle all of the time travel aspects of the story. While it’s an intricate and satisfying puzzle to unravel, these plot points are what we see when we look at Dark through a microcosmic lens. But what I want to do is to step back and look at Dark through a macrocosmic lens. In order to do this, we’re going to follow the Hermetic structure of creation and organize this analysis numerically. But we’re going to work backwards, starting at the earthly level and ascend to the singularity, much as the show does in its three seasons.

An important central concept in Hermetic philosophy is the power of the Word. In a dialogue in the Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes mentions how human beings speak and reason by reflecting the original divine Word: “The Word is the image of the Mind, and the Mind is the image of God,” he says. Speech in humans is a lower echo of the divine creative Word. This is a philosophy that LINCOS takes to heart in our approach to astrology, as well. But we’re also going to rely heavily here on a study of the names used in the series in order to make philosophical sense of its esoteric message.

Dark is set in a small fictional German town named Winden, which is home to a nuclear power plant and is located at the edge of a forest. Both of these elements of the town are important to the story. German place names ending in -en often come from verbs or characteristics of the land they name. The German place name Winden comes from the Proto-Germanic root of windaną, meaning to wind, twist, turn, or coil. It’s related to the English verb to wind, as in to wind a clock. But as a place name from a verb, it probably describes locations that contain a winding non-linear path.

Symbolically, setting the story in Winden implies a twisting, or winding, process that is occurring there for the characters involved. But it also evokes vinelike, intertwining connections and interpersonal bonds, such as we find within the family trees in the story. These complicated family bonds are symbolized by the red string tracing them in the family trees that Claudia keeps on the wall in the post-apocalyptic bunker.

The reflexive form of the verb (sich) winden means to wriggle, or squirm, one’s way out of something, which evokes a struggle for escape, or effort to free oneself – either emotionally or physically from a binding situation, such as the escape from the knot created through the actions of the time travelers. But everything exoteric, that is, occurring in the outer world of Winden, also symbolizes a simultaneous inner process for its characters.

While not etymologically related to it, the German pronunciation of "Winden" also turns the verb into a homophone of the English noun wind. In ancient Babylonian astrology, the four winds were originally tied to four quadrants of the earth. They were understood to be the bringers of a particular type of fate to the inhabitants of those regions. Later, they became tied to the four elements of Hellenistic astrology, alchemy and philosophy. In the Emerald Tablet, when referring to creation itself, lines four and five state that "the Sun is its father, the Moon its mother, but the wind carries it in its belly, while the earth is its nurse". This is a poetic line referring to the four elements as shapers of destiny: the Sun being fire, the Moon water, wind the Air and, lastly, the Earth as the nurse.

It’s therefore not a stretch to see in the four main, intertwined families of Winden a representation of the elemental, twisting winds that are evoked in its name. In fact, each of the families represents their elemental principle gone wrong. So, let’s look at each family more closely to see this. I’ll take them in the order of their appearance.

IV

The Elemental Winds

The Kahnwalds

The first person we see in Season 1, Episode 1, is Michael Kahnwald, the father of the show’s main protagonist, Jonas. Kahnwald is not a common German name. Coincidentally, on Geneanet.com there is one single person located in all of Germany with this last name. I say coincidentally because autonomy is a major theme of the fire element and all of the members of this family are depicted as single, alone and autonomous. First there is Ines, the progenitor, single matriarch, and nurse, who adopts Mikkel in the 1980s; then there’s her son, Michael/Mikkel who is the first time traveler and finds himself stranded and imprisoned in time. He’s never able to reconnect with his father or with his wife, Hannah, and eventually commits suicide. Hannah, who despite being a Kahnwald by marriage, also struggles to find union within her marriage to Michael, or outside of it, in both of her extramarital affairs. Jonas, the story’s protagonist, spends the whole series fighting his desire for Martha, whom he discovered is his aunt due to time travel.

Kahnwald is a composite name that means “forest boat”. In German mythology, forests are places of darkness and mystery, epitomized by Germany’s black forest. So the name evokes traveling by water through the darkness. The name Jonas comes from the Hebrew name Yonah, which means dove, or pigeon. In the Bible, a dove is sent from the ark into the darkness as a sort of scout. But in the story of Jonah and the whale, Jonah refuses God’s command to go preach to the people of Nineveh and tries to escape in a boat going in the opposite direction. He’s punished by being thrown overboard and swallowed by a large fish. Even today, "a Jonah" is a long-established expression among sailors, meaning a person who is bad luck onboard. 

In astrology, the first sign of the Zodiac is Aries and it is this placement that is symbolic of all birth moments, as well as the need for autonomy. Aries is a fire sign because fire signifies the creative and exploratory element, like the Fool card, the first of the major arcana in the Tarot. But in Hellenistic astrology, it’s also tied to nautical themes because the Babylonians equated the birth moment as the soul’s entry, by boat, into a journey through darkness, which represents the unknown. The Ascendant, which is the rising sign in the 1^st place of the chart, is often referred to in the literature as “the Helm” of that metaphorical ship – that is, the life that we all have to navigate.

Therefore, the Kahnwalds are not only the navigators through darkness, but they all represent the fire element, which has the power to create and to destroy, as we see all of them do. In each of the Kahnwalds, we witness the solitary mission of the initiate to purify the spirit, gone awry. Ines uses drugs to keep her adopted son from running away; Michael succumbs to his imprisonment and seclusion from family, by committing suicide; Hannah manipulates men to keep from being alone; and Jonas initially tries to destroy those he loves, to ensure his own survival.

The Nielsens

The next member of a different family to appear in the story is Ulrich Nielsen. Ulrich is the father of Martha Nielsen, the show's primary female protagonist and Jonas’ love interest. So, there is some symmetry in the fact that the fathers of the male and female protagonists are the first two family members to appear. It’s as if the show is saying: here is the origin point of the two protagonists and their worlds. The fact that they are the fathers also indicates that the family surnames are meaningful.

Nielsen is a patronymic name, meaning a name derived from the father, or from an ancestor. This one is of Danish origin. It indicates the “son of Niels”, which is short for the Greek Nikolaos, which means “victor of the people”. However, that name consists of two “s”, on either side of Niels and son, which are not present in the series name. If we examine the patronymic of “Niel”, singular, we get a better fit for the family. Niel is a Dutch place name. Possibly from the medieval word niel, which means: that which is "thrown face-down into the depths". Its Germanic correspondence is nihwulia, or niwaialho, meaning: "headlong, or downward". Places with "niel" in their names have been shown to invariably be low-lying lands.

If we follow the astrological correspondence for the lowest lying sign of the natural Zodiac, this would be Cancer, which appears at the midnight placement of the chart -- essentially our wheel of time in astrology. This sign represents the water element, indicating, therefore, the elemental winds blowing from the emotional realm. This would mean that the members of the Nielsen family are destined, in this world, to be brought down low, or become victims of their own uncontrollable emotions, primarily originating from a desire to protect, since Cancer indicates the need for family and protection.

This certainly does appear to apply to all 3 generations of Nielsens, all of whom suffer the greatest grief and emotional pain in the series. In most cases, the pain often stems from parental neglect. Let’s take the eldest Nielsen, Tronte: he must confront his own emotional guilt. In the 1950s, his mother Agnes disappears to go meet up with Sic Mundus, in the 1920s. So, he’s essentially abandoned in time by her. In the 1980s, he also loses his son Mads, and his lover Claudia, to time travel. His wife Jana makes him feel guilty for neglecting his family when Mads disappears. He responds by offering to protect the similarly abandoned teenage Regina, whom he suspects of being his daughter, by Claudia, after she goes missing. In the post-apocalyptic Winden, his guilt-driven need to protect culminates in his smothering Regina with a pillow as an act of mercy, to relieve her suffering from cancer.

Tronte’s son Ulrich is a police officer sworn to protect all. He is probably the most obvious case of emotions gone awry. His impulsive temperament and desire to retrieve his missing son Mikkel, lead him down a twisted path involving a misguided attempt to save his son, by murdering someone else’s innocent child. His inability to control his rampant feelings get him tortured and imprisoned in a mental ward, for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, Ulrich’s daughter Martha is no less passionate. She’s introduced as someone willing to go on a hunger strike until global child starvation is ended. But it’s her desire to protect her own child with Jonas that eventually makes her the lethal victim of Adam’s machinations.

Katharina, Martha's mother, is a Nielsen through marriage and the principal of the Winden High School, where she’s entrusted with the task of protecting several children. Yet, she’s nonetheless a perpetrator, as well as a victim, of her own angry projections and rash behaviors. Her desire to protect and recover, both her son and husband, from the 80s, eventually lead her to die at the hands of her own abusive mother. Katharina becomes the legendary “lady in the lake”, which is a symbolic representation of one who has literally been thrown face down into the watery depths. The scene at the lake where her mother repeatedly strikes her with a rock echoes the scene where Ullrich does the same thing to a young Helge, disfiguring him for life. It’s a reminder that the same good intentions can lead us into mirrored sides of the same drama. In fact, this idea of mirroring is integral to the story’s structure and its imagery. But we’ll get to that shortly.

The Tiedemanns

Next, we come to the Tiedemanns. The prefix "Tiede", which may be derived from northern German tied (without the e), means "time". The English word "tide" has the same origins as the German tied, which is interesting, since it evokes the idea that time is like the coming and going of the tides. The suffix "mann" is obviously “man”. So, Tiedeman means: someone with knowledge of, or control of, time, which is what we see Claudia attempting to do throughout all three seasons.

The Tiedemanns stand in for the earth element. Why is that? Well, the relationship between matter and time may not be very obvious to most, unless you look at the question of what time actually is from a physics perspective. In a letter that he wrote to a family member in 1955, Einstein said: “For those of us who believe in physics, the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Similarly, H.G. Tannhaus, who is the physicist in Dark says: “We trust that time is linear. That it proceeds eternally, uniformly, into infinity. But the distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are not consecutive, they are connected in a never-ending circle. Everything is connected."

Matter, moving through space, is what creates time, whether that is the earth moving in its cosmic orbit, or any material substance in an active state of motion. In other words, time doesn’t exist on its own, but as a measure of the change and motion of matter. Time is an emergent property of matter that creates its own dimension. In the Hermetic writings, time is also created and governs the material world. It’s often linked to fate, motion, and the soul’s entrapment in the physical realm. Spiritual ascent involves escaping time and returning to eternity, the domain of the divine. In the Corpus Hermeticum, Hermes says: “All things on earth, below, are subject to fate and time”.

The Tiedemanns represent the earth element gone awry. If we examine three generations of that family, we can see that all of them have some problem with the material or physical realm. In the 2019 timeline, the Tiedemanns are wealthy. The first person we meet from that family is Regina, the owner of the Waldhotel Winden. Her husband, Aleksander, is the director of the Nuclear Power Plant. In Season 1, Episode 1, we learn, through a phone call from the bank, that Regina’s business is underwater (and yes that is a deliberate use of that idiom) because no one wants to visit a town with a nuclear power plant. Later we also learn that she has breast cancer. Both are corruptions of matter: one physiological and the other financial. Her son, Bartosz, is still young, but he’s already nurturing both a physiological and economic interest in drugs, since he’s the one who escorts the rest of his friends into the woods to look for the drugs that Erik Obendorf hid there, before he disappeared. Bartosz also spends his time smoking marijuana and playing video games. Theft is another theme that comes up as a corruptor of matter, both for his father Aleksander, who stole someone else’s identity and continues to hide illegal nuclear waste generated by his plant, but also for Bartosz himself who attempts to steal both Erik’s drugs, as well as Jonas’ girlfriend, Martha, while Jonas is undergoing therapy after his father’s suicide.

As a significant side note, it’s very revealing that Aleksander takes his wife’s last name when he joins the Tiedemann family. It’s an indication that we are tracing the families through the patronymic line. Since Egon, the progenitor of the Tiedemanns, only had one daughter, who didn’t marry and who gives birth to a single granddaughter, Aleksander would have to take his wife’s name for the Tiedemann name to continue on to his son, Bartosz. This doesn’t need to happen with the other families, because their progenitors had sons. So, their family names continued naturally, through marriage. The story was cleverly written this way so that the elemental nature attached to the name could be easily tracked across timelines.

Claudia is our primary representative of the Tiedemann family. So, it’s fitting that she plays the central role in unraveling the maze that is created by time travel. In fact, this theme of time as a maze that one must escape from is evoked by the Greek play that Martha stars in, about the myth of Ariadne and the labyrinth. In the myth, the red string that Ariadne gives to Theseus is the reason he’s able to find his way out of the maze. Similarly, Martha, as Eva from the alternate world, is the one who provides Claudia with the Triquetra book. The book functions very much like the red string in the play, to eventually liberate Jonas and alternate Martha from the chaos of their parallel worlds.

Claudia starts off as a career-driven materialist woman who criticizes her daughter for not looking her best. But, through her intelligence and accumulation of knowledge, she quickly learns that something is not quite right at the nuclear power plant. Through her travels, she learns the Hermetic lesson that matter and time are to be escaped from, not altered. The Finnish noun tiede, spelled exactly the same way, means "science and knowledge", more broadly. It’s through her scientific knowledge that the time machine plans are given to Tannhaus to build, allowing more freedom to move beyond one timeline and see space-time more broadly. Since Earth generates time as an illusion, it’s fitting that a member of the family who best understands the earth element would be the one to help transcend its confines.

The progenitor of the Tiedemanns is Egon, Winden’s police officer in the 50s and 80s. Like his daughter Claudia, he has a thirst for knowledge, which he exercises through his detective work. Egon’s struggles with the physical involve his sexual desires, which appear to be deficient in his marriage, but which he allows himself to satisfy extramaritally, by having sex with time-traveling Hannah. And like his granddaughter Regina, Egon also becomes ill with cancer.

The Dopplers

Our last family is the Dopplers. By exclusion, they should represent the air element and the first air sign in the Zodiac, Gemini. But does it correlate? Let’s look at the meaning of the name. "Dopple" is the first person singular of the German verb doppeln, which means "to double". There is a famous German children’s book called Das doppelte Lottchen, which translates as The Double Lottie. It’s the story of twin sisters separated at birth. You may know this story from the American adaption called The Parent Trap. Lottie is the name of one of the girls in the story and it’s a shortened form of the name "Charlotte". The other sister in the story is named Lisa, which is a shortened form of the name "Elisabeth".

Two of the main Dopplers in Dark are Charlotte and Elisabeth, her daughter. But these are not sisters, they’re mother and daughter, you say? Well, through the bootstrap paradox that explains that a thing can be the predecessor of itself though time travel, Elisabeth, the daughter of Charlotte, actually becomes her mother. It’s quite trippy. But it’s a theoretical possibility that indicates the principle of generation gone awry. And that is what a doubling means: it indicates the generation of something akin to its predecessor.

Gemini, the sign of the twins, represents a doubling principle as well. But alchemically, it is part of the air element, which has to do with interpersonal communication, curiosity, and the mental faculties. If we examine the stories of the other Dopplers, they tend to have something to do with a corruption of the doubling principle, as depicted in interpersonal communication or cognitive abilities. The patriarch Doppler is Bernd, who is the first director of the nuclear power plant and pushes for its construction in the 1950s timeline. Nuclear fission involves the splitting of two atoms, a doubling of the most basic elemental materials, which will eventually lead to the apocalypse in Winden. His wife, Greta, a Doppler by marriage, is an embittered woman because she was raped during the war and gave birth to a son, Helge, who lacks intelligence and is being tutored by Claudia. This is not only a corruption in generation, but also in cognitive faculties. Peter, Helge’s son, brings Charlotte into the family by marriage. She is chief of police in Winden in the 2019 timeline. Charlotte and Peter have communication issues between them, which leads Peter to have an affair with a transvestite man in the prime world, and Charlotte to have an affair with Ulrich in the alternate world. They have two daughters, Elisabeth and Franziska, who also do not communicate well, as sisters, and are often fighting. Since listening is a necessary component of communication, Elisabeth is deaf from birth in the prime world, while Franziska is deaf in the alternate world. You will note that the communication problems often take place within family pairings: either parent-child, as in Greta and Helge; within marriage, as in Peter and Charlotte; or with siblings, as in Elisabeth and Franziska.

Gemini is also a barren sign. It often represents the lack of children, as a disruption of the doubling principle through generation. We see this depicted, as mentioned earlier, in Greta’s rape, but also in the fact that Charlotte was kidnapped after being born to Noah and Elisabeth in the post- apocalyptic timeline and them adopted by Tannhaus in the 1970s, after he lost his own child to an auto accident.

Below is a summary of the four families, with three or more generations of their most representative family members, and what they signify alchemically.

Family	Members	Element	Meaning
Kahnwald	Ines Ulrich-Hannah Jonas	fire	Initiating & exploratory, navigating darkness, autonomy, creative
Nielsen	Tronte-Jana Ulrich-Katarina Martha, Magnus, Mikkel	water	emotional realm, family, protection
Tiedemann	Egon Claudia Regina-Aleksander Bartosz	earth	earth realm, time, fertility & financial growth, knowledge
Doppler	Bernd-Greta Helge Peter-Charlotte Franziska	air	mental realm, generative principle, doubling, communication, curiosity

III

Tria Prima (Three Primes)

In Hermeticism, time transforms the four elements in an alchemical process that operates on three levels. These are known in alchemy as The Three Primes, or The Three Principles, signified by sulphur, salt, and mercury. The Three Primes describe spiritual and alchemical forces operating on the physical world. The three primes operating on the four elements, together, form the foundation of Hermetic alchemy, guiding both physical and spiritual transformation. Sulphur represents the astral and signifies the fiery principle, which gives passion, combustion, and individuality. Salt represents the physical and signifies the principle of fixation, providing structure and shape. Mercury represents the mental and signifies the connecting principle that provides a fluid volatile medium for transformation. It signifies transmutation and is the link connecting the above with the below. We’ll talk more about this doctrine of correspondence shortly, when we look at duality.

Hermeticism is also divided into three sciences, each of which focuses on one of these processes. Alchemy is the physical science of Hermeticism; astrology is the science of the astral world that studies the emotional realm; and Theurgy and Magic are both disciplines that concern themselves with the spiritual realm. This threefold division also appears in chemistry as the electrical charges of an atom: the electron’s negative charge corresponds to the combustible nature of sulphur; the neutron’s neutral charge, corresponds to the stable, fixed principle, and the proton’s positive charge, corresponds to the fluidity of mercury.

Threefold divisions are also prominently featured in Dark’s dynamic processes, particularly as they play out in time. The most obvious is the fact that the series takes place in three seasons. Each season follows the basic structure for three-part narratives: 1^st, the Setup, 2^nd, the Confrontation, and 3^rd, the Resolution, or transmutation, corresponding to the three alchemical primes. Another threefold division exists as the three worlds that are created and that the characters inhabit: Adam’s world, Eva’s world, and the Origin world, from which the other two were split. These worlds correspond to the alchemical primes: Adam’s world represents the masculine, solar principle, because the confrontation begins with Adam’s attempts to change the status quo and to eliminate the knot that has created such suffering and destruction in both worlds. Eva’s world represents the feminine, fixed principle because she’s trying to preserve the knot, which is essentially her child from her union with Jonas. Like the earth itself, the physical is protective.

The Unknown (since he has no name) always appears as three versions of himself, at different ages. This conveys the idea that the trifold alchemical process exists outside of time. We also see something similar with the three different original timelines of the wormhole: 2019, 1986 and 1953, designated by the Triquetra symbol on the Sic Mundus portal in the cave. Using Einstein’s words, Tannhaus explains that time is a threefold illusion: “The distinction between past, present and future is nothing but an illusion.” The process of spiritual alchemy collapses time in the same way that the three worlds are reconciled into one in the series finale.

The three primes may also be present within the different generations of Winden’s four families, just as they are astrologically in the Zodiac. For example, if we look at the 3 generations of Tiedemans represented by Egon, Claudia, and Regina, we can easily see all three of the earth signs representing each of the primes: Egon would signify the fixed sign of Taurus, and therefore the most resistant to change and conservative of the three; Regina would represent Virgo, the mutable earth sign, known for needing to make improvements upon the physical or material; Claudia would easily represent the cardinal earth sign of Capricorn, indicating the need for worldly achievement, of which she is the best representative. If we did the same for the members of the other families, we could perhaps justify the following zodiacal assignments in this table: the fixed characters indicate those who are resistant to change and have some preoccupation with the physical: Ines is a nurse whose work involves the infirm; Helge is physically assaulted and permanently injured, also suffering from dementia in old age; Tronte carries scars from cigarette burns on his arms and is known to have had several affairs, while married, including with Claudia, who as a child, makes him show her his genitals, which is fitting for a Scorpio, as it rules the genitals. The cardinal characters are all time travelers initiating highly transformative changes in the timelines.

The mutable characters all express a preoccupation with connection, particularly between worlds: Jonas and Martha establish a connection across their respective worlds, Charlotte literally reconnects with her daughter-mother when the fabric of time rips open; and Regina reconnects with her mother after being abandoned by her to time-travel.

Element	Astral – Cardinal	Physical – Fixed	Mental – Mutable
Fire – Kahnwald	Michael/Mikkel (Aries)	Ines (Leo)	Jonas (Sagittarius)
Earth – Tiedemann	Claudia (Capricorn)	Egon (Taurus)	Regina (Virgo)
Air – Doppler	Elisabeth (Libra)	Helge (Aquarius)	Charlotte (Gemini)
Water – Nielsen	Ulrich (Cancer)	Tronte (Scorpio)	Martha (Pisces)

 

II

Duality and Correspondence

Lines 2 and 3 of the Emerald Tablet state: "That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above, working the miracles of One. As all things were from One". This is known as the Hermetic Principle and it is the foundation upon which alchemical and astrological belief rests. The idea is that there is a correspondence between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and that the spiritual laws that govern the cosmos are the same laws that govern the earthly realm, making both worlds mirror images of each other. Mirroring is a significant visual and narrative technique used to represent the show's central concept of parallel worlds. The creators of Dark literally mirrored sets and filmed scenes with flipped perspectives, to emphasize the duality of the worlds. This mirroring extends beyond visual elements, impacting character actions, details like scars and clothing, and even the intro sequence.

But mirroring is not just a property of the world. It is inherent in creation itself. Adam and Martha’s worlds are not just places, they are components of generation. In other words, they are creative forces. Adam’s world and Jonas’ approach to the time travel knot, represents the solar, masculine, proactive, manifesting polarity, while Eva’s world and her approach to the knot, represents the lunar, feminine, passive, concealing principle. Psychologically, this is not about personality. It’s about two ways of interacting with the world that all of us are capable of. For example, this video’s manner of looking at the series is masculine, because it attempts to make the esoteric aspects of the story, more manifest and visible. The feminine operates internally within the mind and through the emotions. The masculine operates externally through the body as action.

Time travel is not real, but a perception in the mind, created by a state of motion in the external world. Time travel is a bridging of both worlds. Hermeticism is a philosophy, not a technology – it never contemplated time travel; but it speaks to time travel in the mind, which all of us do, when we fixate upon past memories, or future aspirations, that shape our identity. It is our identity that confines us to a timeline. Just like Martha protecting her son, we hold on to that which we’ve created, as a part of ourselves. And like Jonas, we navigate the emotional timelines of our lives in an attempt to discover where the origin of our troubles started. We stumble in the dark, fated to repeat the same mistakes that our family members made until we bring the alchemical light into the spiritual process. Martha’s secret society is Erit Lux, which means “let there be light". Light signifies pure potential and spiritual awareness, which can only be attained once we transcend the spirit’s need to navigate through time. Our purpose in the manifested universe is to dispel darkness, which is the absence of possibility.

I

Singularity

Hermes writes in the Emerald tablet that “All things are from the One”. This means that all of the laws that we’ve enumerated flow from a single divine source. It’s the source of all light. In Dark, the suffering in Martha and Jonas’ worlds can only be resolved by changing one single event from the Origin world: the making of the time machine. Enlightenment comes when see that we no longer need to attach to what’s in the past or the future. In other words, when we surrender our identity, as Martha and Jonas do in the final episode.

H.G. Tannhaus represents the Origin world, since it was his time machine that split the fabric of time into two other parallel worlds. In the Dark wiki it says that the prefix "Tann" is a poetic word referring to a forest of fir trees. So, Tannhaus is one who makes his home in the forest.

It may also allude to the legend of Tannhäuser, made famous by the Richard Wagner opera, who becomes a willing captive of Venus, and is later filled with remorse over it, but cannot obtain absolution, and so returns to Venus in the end. Both of these seem relevant. Fir trees are symbolic of winter and of Christmas. They therefore represent light in the middle of darkness, just as he does. Becoming a captive of Venus means giving into one’s desires, which Buddhists say is the source of all suffering, and certainly seems to be illustrated by the story. Desire is the wanting of that which we don’t have. Tannhaus created the time machine in order to avoid the loss of his family. He succumbed to his love for his family. But as the creator, he was the origin of all human suffering in Winden. It is a Neoplatonic and Hermetic concept that the world originated from the split created by the Origin’s desire, in other words, because of God’s love.

Epilogue

The End is the Beginning

In the final scene of Dark, we see a cast of surviving characters, all sitting at a dinner table. All of the characters present are those who were not descendants of the union of Jonas and Martha. There is a storm outside and the lights have all gone out, so they are sitting by candlelight. It’s still dark. Hannah, one of the most unlikeable characters in the series, is pregnant. She starts talking about a dream she had that resembled this evening and then the world suddenly ended. She says: “It was just dark, and it never became light again. I had this peculiar feeling that it was a good thing for everything to be over, like suddenly being free of everything. No wanting. No having to. Infinite darkness. No yesterday, no today, no tomorrow. Nothing.”

The others laugh at her. But what she described was the liberation from darkness that accompanied the untying of the knot, or what Hermeticists would call enlightenment. According to their spiritual standards, none of these characters were the product of a reconciled duality back to the source. In other words, the scene at the dinner table did not represent those who achieved spiritual enlightenment, but rather those who remained in Winden, in the dark. This is why when they toast, they wish yet again, for “a world without Winden.” Just as Tannhaus said, the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end.