Arnold Ehret - Influences

Influences

Arnold Ehret was part of a 19th and 18th century European and American nature cure movement which stemmed from a German tradition of natural life and sun worship rooted in Teutonic earth religions and Paganism. Ehret was a proponent of the emerging back-to-nature renaissance in Germany and Switzerland during the latter part of the 19th century, which was inspired by writers such as Meister Eckhart, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Nietzche, Goethe, Herman Hesse, Ernst Haeckel and Eduard Baltzer as well as the healing traditions of Roman and Greek philosophers such as Paracelsus, Empedocles, Seneca, Plutarch, Porphyry, Galen, Hippocrates, Socrates, Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle. Ascona in Switzerland, became a magnet for Hermann Hesse, Wilhelm Alexander de Beauclaire, Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka and Ehret himself. At the beginning of the 20th century, pioneers began to experiment with natural cure, raw foods, vegetarianism and social reform. Thousands of young Germans rejected urbanization to pursue a more natural lifestyle. An early health reformer mentioned by Ehret is August Engelhardt who wrote The Carefree Future in 1913. In his writings, Ehret cites Therese Neumann, who cured blindness and paralysis by abstaining from food.