Culture, as a set of self-perpetuating instances of communicative praxis, has an inherent power of dissemination [a] over time, [b] across social strata and societies and [c] between media of expression. A folktale like Hansel and Gretel can become an internationally renowned opera, a Celtic cross can become the logo of neo-fascism. This "procreativity" (Rigney 2012) makesthe dissemination of culture, describable though it is in a limited number of structural parameters, a "complex system" ‘ like a Rubik's cube. By the same token, the procreative mobility of culture means that it ties together widely different periods in history, different social strata or societies, and different media of expression. It is only recently that we are beginning to realize the full importance of culture's power to establish "wormholes" and tunnelling links between different social and historical dimensions. I want to explore the complex systemics and procreative power of culture by addressing a case linking folklorism, elite literature, historicist architecture and painting: the combined impact of the Sleeping Beauty tale and the Barbarossa myth in German nationalism, as manifested in the late-19th-century restoration of the Imperial Manor of Goslar. I shall follow the historical evidence from Goerres's "Die teutschenVolksbücher" of 1808 to the allegorical murals painted by Hermann Wislicenus in Goslar in the 1880s.