This paper examines the atmospheric character of the Erdgeist (Earth Spirit) in Goethe's Faust, Part I. Goethe's Earth Spirit can be regarded as atmospheric both in the sense of New Phenomenology and in relation to the ancient concept of pneuma or spiritus, which originally meant breath, wind, and atmosphere. Similar language appears in the first volume of Herder's Älteste Urkunde des Menschengeschlechts (1774), a possible background for Goethe's conception of the Earth Spirit in his so-called Urfaust (before 1775). Yet, Goethe's portrayal departs from Herder's by emphasizing the Earth Spirit's position in between light and darkness, life and death, heaven and earth, a liminal quality more or less absent from Herder's framework. By also analysing Goethe's later sketch of the Earth Spirit (1810-1812?) and his plans to stage it in the theatre, this paper argues that Goethe has continually been aware of the atmospheric character of the Earth Spirit, while, over time, its in-between nature progressively transformed into a Jupiter-like simplified figure.

Nicholas of Cusa's treatise 'De visione Dei' aims to introduce the reader to the practice of mystical experience. The treatise is usually interpreted from the beginning of the work. The experiments with the all-seeing eicona dei form the framework. The thesis of this article is that the entire content of Cusa's treatise can only be understood if one considers the book as a whole and reflects on its composition. The main point is that the author, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen, Cusanus, carried out this practice alone in his own room in the bishop's residence and that the content of this work was written as a record of this practice. Thus, the performativity of the atmosphere proves to be decisive for the content of the text.

The volume is dedicated to the concept of atmosphere. It deals with the precursors of it, especially from the early modern times to German Romantic Philosophy. It draws a genetic line from the Renaissance (with two contributions on Nicholas of Cusa) to the early modern period (Kepler) and on to the modern era (Goethe and Novalis). It becomes evident that all of the authors discussed already have concepts of atmosphere that can be understood as precursors to the current phenomenological understanding. This volume is based on a conference held at the Kobe Institute for Atmospheric Studies in September 2023.

Metaphorical shifts from one subject area to another are a central structural strategy in Inger Christensen’s work. This principle will be demonstrated and discussed in this paper by referring to the poem “Gopler” [“Jellyfish”] from “lys” [“light”], 1962. The Danish contemporary poet Pia Tafdrup, whose work is influenced by Christensen, also makes use of a distinctive, associative imagery in her pentalogy “De fem sanser” [“The Five Senses”] (2014–2022). This paper contrastively explores the ways in which metaphorical shifts function in Christensen’s and Tafdrup’s poetry. Christensen realizes the metaphors’ potential in a radical way through the semantic superimposition of different subject areas. Thus, the regularities of the designed world are solely valid within linguistic structures, opening up new spaces of cognitive experience. In Tafdrup’s work, the texts’ different levels of meaning tend to remain separable. Here, the focus is on an associative technique of erratic and surprising transmissions, often applied to the external and the internal in a way that the cutting conciseness of the poems touch the reader almost sensually.