Einsielden again. Geography

Regarding the Einsiedeln monastery in Switzerland, Margaret Mackensie says:  "I had the wonderful good fortune to be taken on a tour of Einsiedeln by a monk in 2000 because I was the guest of a woman who was on their Board of Trustees--they run a boys' boarding school.  But I think the Library may now be included on some public tours--you may have broken the ban for your successors!  I presume you know that Paracelsus was born there?  Because
of this Einsiedeln theme, I can't resist copying for you a program whose repeat I am going to listen to tomorrow on DRS 2, the classical station: [RH: By an odd coincidence, I turned on a San Francisco TV station and it was playing music from Einsiedeln].

I asked about fishing in Lake Zurich. Margaret replies: "There are some very healthy large fish swimming in the Zurichsee, and I think that they are available to anyone who goes out in a personal boat to catch them.  Often I visit the fifteen swans who glide on the banks at Rapperswil in the mornings, and the ducks and the coots, and feed them some bread.  And then I move on to the Lindenhof to visit the deer.  It was interesting to see Rapperswil described as a tourist town because yes, it's accurate, there are hotels where the guests seem to be almost entirely German-speaking.  But I am not aware of intersecting with the tourists. 

Rapperswil is also on one of the Jakobsweg pilgrimage paths, and attention to that is being revived. One of the
hotels has rooms for pilgrims, and one can get one's pilgrimage passport stamped here.  I have even thought of going up to the Bodensee, one of the places where it begins, and walking the three days it would take to get here. 
Then the next stop is Einsiedeln. By the way, David  left Glasgow today, where he attended the quadrennial International Geographical Union meeting.  His own paper was on the Berkeley School of Geography that formed under the aegis of Carl Sauer, but there was a session, organized by young British geographers, that was based on David's work on the Soviet Union forty years ago.  He was astonished to hear it described as a classic, and most interested to see that the young Russian geographers are using its categories as a benchmark.  Of course forty years ago he was extremely controversial there with his advocacy of cultural regional geography (in contrast with the
economic).  He was so pleased when young scholars told him that Saushkin, a geographer whom he respected greatly, had them read David's book.  I think many of them were amazed to see that he is still alive!  What was also interesting to him is that the Russian geographers are now paying attention to the theories of Mackinder, who founded geography at Oxford, for the first time.  Mackinder discussed the heartland of Central Asia as a fount of future power,  David  said that there is an utterly different atmosphere about the Russian geographers compared with the Soviet days. However horrible their economic hardships, he said it was their intellectual openness, their absence of fear in asking questions, and their willingness to express their views freely, that was so refreshing".

RH: Paracelsus (1493-1541) was an interesting and controversial wandering physician, trained at the University of Ferrara. He founded iatrochemistry, a combination of medicine and chemistry.  He believed that all matter consisted of mercury, sulphur and salt. and he combined them ro concoct remedies. He rejected the theories of Galen, and he publicly burned the works of Avicenna. Because of his fights he was reduced to wandering from  university to university, Despite or perhaps because of this, he had a wide influence.

The Jakobsweg, the Way of Saint James, is the pilgrim rout to Santiago. This brings back an unpleasant memory.  I was the first to draw a detailed map of the network of pilgrim routes leading to Santiago.  The large and handsome map in many colors was the result of long hard work.  The chaplain of Stanford Memorial Church asked to borrow it for a lecture he was giving.  He never returned it: he said he had lost it. The maps which appeared subsequently were much less detailed.

David is David Hooson, Margaret Mackenzie's husband. An original WAISer, he is an Oxford-trained geographer. He is professor (now emeritus) at the University of California at  Berkeley. WAISer Martin Lewis and his wife, now both at Stanford, were trained by him. The book Margaret refers to is David Hooson, The Soviet Union. People and Regions. Yulian G. Saushkin, a patriarch of Soviet human geography, was chair of the Department of Human Geography of the USSR at Moscow State University.

Sir John Halford Mackinder (1861-1947) was a well-known British geographer.   He directed the Oxford School of Geography.  I assume David Hooson knew him, and I would be grateful if David would share with us his memories of him.  His most influential work was Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919), in which he developed the idea of the Eurasian heartland, an idea which was picked up by Haushofer and the Nazis.  He was really the founder of geopolitics, an immensely important subject, which has unfortunately been downgraded because it is associated with the Nazis.

Here is what the Columbia Encyclopedia says about Carl Sauer: Sauer, Carl Ortwin, 1889–1975, American geographer, b. Warrenton, Mo., grad. Univ. of Chicago (Ph.D., 1915). Sauer was a professor for over 50 years at the Univ. of California at Berkeley, where he built a distinguished graduate school. A great influence on a generation of geographers, he sought to unify the areas of physical and human geography through an essentially historical methodology. Sauer advocated a “humane” use of the environment, pointing to ancient and modern rural cultures as examples. Among his 21 books and monographs are Agricultural Origins and Dispersals (1952) and Northern Mists (1968). RH: I believe it was Carl Sauer who appointed David Hooson to his post at Berkeley.  I knew Sauer when In was at Berkeley. I got along well with him, but I was affiliated with the Bancroft Library, directed by Herbert Eugene Bolton. Sauer was close to the anthropologists and was much interested in Indians, while Bolton was interested in the Spanish conquerors and missions, There was bad blood between them. Bolton proudly showed me Drake's Plate, which had come into his possession.  It was later declared to be a forgery, planted to make Bolton look like a fool. Sauer's friends may have been responsible. I was caught in the middle of this rivalry, which greatly hampered my research.  Academia, academia...