The androgyne in early German romanticism

The androgyne has remained for centuries a quintessential ideal of oneness. Relatively obscure in German literature until the end of the 18th century, it became in early German Romanticism the paradigm for personal and historical perfection. As interpreters of earlier forms of the ideal – transmitted through Plato and Böhme, through alchemy, mysticism, Pietism and the entire Hermetic tradition – and also as the first to understand it in psychological terms, the Jena Romantics occupy a pivotal position in the historical development of the dream of androgynous wholeness.