Fetching
One moment.
Eight numbers, from May to December 1942, printed in Montevideo by a body calling itself the Grupo Independiente de Estudios Esotéricos. The name is not incidental. Papus had founded a Groupe Indépendant d'Études Ésotériques in Paris in 1888 and given it a review called L'Initiation; Nº 6 of this magazine names him as its president and founder in so many words. What you are reading is a deliberate re-founding of that institution on the other side of the Atlantic, half a century later, with the same name and the same title over the door.
The first number sets out what the review means to be: the organ of an independent society of thought, open to criticism from its readers, "not a business either, nor anyone's means of livelihood", falling into "no particularism, and still less into any personalism". That claim is worth holding onto, because the volume keeps testing itself against it. A commentary on masonic ritual praises the symbols and then says plainly that the institution has forgotten what they mean. An article on Schopenhauer complains that philosophers and occultists each miss half of him. A poem on the second page rebukes the very piety the editorial has just described.
Four long series run through the volume and none of them finishes: Jehel's commentary on the masonic degrees, which reaches the raising of Hiram; Surya's astrology course, which builds one real chart for one real birth in Montevideo across six instalments; Asuri Kapila's course in the postures, with a Sanskrit glossary that reaches its seventy-third entry; and a treatise on the planetary hours that does conclude, in Nº 8, with Saturn and Jupiter. Threaded between them is something stranger — a Uruguayan woman signing herself Maya, who went to India, sat on the floor of Sri Ramana Maharshi's hall, and wrote it down. He asked her, as she left, whether she would visit the temple at Madura. She said the chance had gone. A railway official then sent her eight hundred kilometres in the wrong direction and she arrived at Madura. The magazine gives that sequence three issues and lets the reader draw the conclusion.
The volume closes in French, with Saint-Martin's "Le Cimetière d'Amboise" — begun in Nº 6, continued in Nº 7, still unfinished at the end of Nº 8.
On the apparatus. Every page of this volume carries commentary: 392 notes across 179 pages, marked by evidence tier, saying where a claim has been checked against a text the Press holds and where it has not. Quotations have been verified where verification was possible. Dante is misquoted here — nostri for vostri, which turns a rebuke of humanity into a shared observation. The "Prayer of Saint Francis" on p. 9 of Nº 4 is not by Francis; it first appears anonymously in 1912. Three arithmetical faults in the astrology course are identified, including one that does not affect its result and is marked as such. Where a contributor is right, that is recorded too, and he often is: the Gita is quoted accurately, the elemental triangles are correctly assigned, Montevideo's coordinates are right, and the mean daily motion of the Sun is given correct to the arcsecond.
On what is withheld. Five passages in this volume are not reproduced, amounting to 1,153 characters — about two hundredths of one per cent of the text. Each is marked where it stood, with the reason. The Press does not reproduce racial theory, racial-improvement doctrine, or period race-language used in pseudo-historical claims. Nothing is removed silently and nothing else has been altered; passages that merely use the vocabulary of 1942 while arguing against racial distinction — and there are several — stand as printed.
On the medical claims. The courses in this volume promise cures: of sterility, of gallstones, of arteriosclerosis, of spinal deformity. Nº 7 prints two clinical reports describing a man whose grey hair, baldness and wrinkles are said to have reversed over eleven years. These are reproduced because they are what the magazine said, and they are endorsed by nobody. Read them as evidence of what this readership was invited to believe.
1realidad, se ha perdido la simetría porque la hemos considerado en el sentido restrictivo, puesto que , si decimos, “un vaso es simétrico cuando tiene materia de un lado y otro de cierto plano”, hemos ampliado el concepto y mantenido, por tanto, el principio que sustentáramos.
2Aún cuando fuéramos cambiando las condiciones de nuestro objeto, podríamos, en último análisis, recurrir al concepto más general de simetría diciendo que la existencia de cualquier cosa, en cualquier plano, lleva implícita la ley de equivalencia o compensación, que dice que la suma de los valores en un sentido es igual a la suma de los valores en sentido opuesto.
3Así llegamos a una sencilla y, por lo tanto, bella conclusión: una cosa es útil si ella existe; pero su existencia depende de la ley de simetría.
4Es decir, que la simetría es una condición necesaria de la utilidad.
5Otro ejemplo.
6Supongamos un hombre deforme.
7Carece de simetría en el sentido ordinario de la palabra; pero contemplando a este ser desde un punto de vista más profundo, podremos pensar, por ejemplo, que esa deformidad obedece a alguna “Causa”.
8Y entonces se produce el milagro de este pensamiento de amor, mostrándonos un nuevo sentido de simetría; la existencia de una causa, por un lado; el efecto o deformidad del hombre, por otro; y el hombre mismo, producto o centro de simetría, como síntesis.
9“La acción de la eternidad, pasando de la potencia al acto, está simbolizada por la acción mística del centro a la circunferencia, por el radio proyectado seis veces alrededor del círculo.
10De allí el exágono de los seis períodos de la creación.
11El punto central forma el séptimo período (descanso”.
12La acción de la Eternidad, al pasar del estado de Potencia al de Actitud, podemos expresarla geométricamente como una expansión desde el centro del círculo a la circunferencia.
13Este acto de sacrificio de Dios lleva implícito, en su realización, uno de los números trascendentales de la ciencia matemática, el número llamado “pi”, que es la relación de la longitud de la circunferencia al diámetro.
14A este número se le denomina, en matemáticas, irracional y trascendente.
15La irracionalidad consiste en que no es posible obtenerlo con el número finito de divisiones de la unidad; y la trascendencia en no poder retornar a la unidad, partiendo de dicho número, partiendo de las dos operaciones de suma y resta.
16Místicamente la irracionalidad sería el acercamiento a la Meta por el proceso evolutivo, y esto realizado, equivaldría a diluirse en el Todo, desde que dicho número nace en la Creación.
17En cuanto a la trascendencia, siendo exclusivamente del plano mental las operaciones de suma y resta empleadas, no es posible obtener un resultado que corresponda al plano divino.
18Veremos, en otro artículo, la relación mística entre este número y otro llamado “e”, que juega un papel de igual importancia en la Ciencia.
19Ahora bien; cada lado del exágono de la Creación tiene la longitud del radio, lo que nos sugiere que la duración de un período de la Creación, es equivalente a la duración de la actitud del Creador; es decir, vemos en el sentido del tiempo, que la naturaleza de los Creadores es igual a la del Creador.
20¡Maravilloso Ternario del Creador, lo Creado y la Vida!
21Después de la involución desde el centro del círculo a la circunferencia, tenemos el proceso opuesto de evolución, desde ésta al centro.
22Aparece aquí la eterna ley de simetría 15
The source text as printed, transcribed diplomatically. Where the source language uses a non-Latin script that reaches us only through a Victorian romanisation, this layer is labelled transliteration, because that is what we hold.
1reality symmetry has been lost because we have considered it in the restrictive sense; since if we say “a glass is symmetrical when it has matter on one side and the other of a certain plane”, we have widened the concept and therefore maintained the principle we upheld.
2Even were we to go on changing the conditions of our object, we could in the last analysis have recourse to the most general concept of symmetry by saying that the existence of anything, on any plane, implies the law of equivalence or compensation, which states that the sum of the values in one direction is equal to the sum of the values in the opposite direction.
3Thus we arrive at a simple and therefore beautiful conclusion: a thing is useful if it exists; but its existence depends upon the law of symmetry.
4That is to say, symmetry is a necessary condition of usefulness.
5Another example.
6Let us suppose a deformed man.
7He lacks symmetry in the ordinary sense of the word; but contemplating this being from a deeper point of view we may think, for example, that this deformity obeys some “Cause”.
8And then the miracle of this thought of love occurs, showing us a new sense of symmetry: the existence of a cause on the one hand; the effect, or the man's deformity, on the other; and the man himself, product or centre of symmetry, as the synthesis.
9“The action of eternity, passing from potency to act, is symbolised by the mystical action from the centre to the circumference, by the radius projected six times around the circle.
10Hence the hexagon of the six periods of creation.
11The central point forms the seventh period (rest)”.
12The action of Eternity, in passing from the state of Potency to that of Act, we may express geometrically as an expansion from the centre of the circle to the circumference.
13This act of God's sacrifice carries within it, in its accomplishment, one of the transcendental numbers of mathematical science, the number called “pi”, which is the ratio of the length of the circumference to the diameter.
14This number is termed, in mathematics, irrational and transcendental.
15The irrationality consists in its not being obtainable by a finite number of divisions of unity; and the transcendence in its not being possible to return to unity, starting from that number, by the two operations of addition and subtraction.
16Mystically, irrationality would be the approach to the Goal by the evolutionary process; and that once accomplished would amount to dissolving into the All, since that number is born in Creation.
17As to transcendence: the operations of addition and subtraction employed being exclusively of the mental plane, it is not possible to obtain a result corresponding to the divine plane.
18We shall see, in another article, the mystical relation between this number and another called “e”, which plays a part of equal importance in Science.
19Now, each side of the hexagon of Creation has the length of the radius, which suggests to us that the duration of a period of Creation is equivalent to the duration of the Creator's act; that is, we see, in the sense of time, that the nature of the Created is equal to that of the Creator.
20Marvellous Ternary of the Creator, the Created and Life!
21After the involution from the centre of the circle to the circumference, we have the opposite process of evolution, from the circumference to the centre.
22Here appears the eternal law of symmetry 15
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich travelling to Lyon to bring a peasant healer to the Russian court in 1900 is corroborated outside this corpus: Philippe's presence at Tsarskoye Selo is documented in the memoir literature of the late imperial court, and he is generally treated as the precursor to Rasputin in that role. This account is the Martinist telling of it, and should be read as such.
The prediction of a male heir and its apparent fulfilment: the Tsarevich Alexei was born in August 1904, some four years after Philippe's arrival. The Empress had borne four daughters before him. The passage does not mention that the child was haemophiliac, which is the fact that made the court's later search for healers urgent.
A Martinist lodge inside the Imperial Palace with the Tsar as its president is the strongest claim in this biography. It is reported by Jehel at second hand, some forty years after the event, from a tradition that has an interest in the connection. Papus's presence at the Russian court is well attested; the lodge as described is not independently corroborated here.
The confrontation with the sceptic — a private crime named, and forgiveness offered as the condition of escape — follows a form common in the healer literature of the period, where clairvoyance is demonstrated on a moral rather than a medical matter. Its function in the article is not evidential but instructional: the cure being praised is of the man, not of a disease.
The name AMO is read three ways at once: as a place in the valley of the Essenes, as a kabbalistic triliteral, and as the Latin first person of amare — “I love”. The layering is characteristic of this corpus, where a name is expected to yield meaning in several registers simultaneously rather than to be simply etymologised.
Kabir, A∴M∴ — a further pseudonymous contributor, introduced by the Grand Council as a working mathematician. The editorial footnote commending him is unusual: the review rarely explains why a contributor is qualified, and here it does so because the article applies professional mathematics to a symbol.
Written in August 1942, this passage distinguishes a left-turning “sacred Swastika Cross, the Sign of Fohat” from a right-turning “black swastika cross” aligned with force rather than spirit. The distinction between the traditional Indian symbol and the contemporary political one is being drawn deliberately, in the middle of the war, by a review whose own masthead carries a sun. It is recorded here because a modern reader will meet the word before the argument.
The mathematical reading of pi as both irrational and transcendental, mapped onto approach to the Goal and the impossibility of returning to unity by addition and subtraction, is Kabir's own construction rather than received doctrine. It is the corpus at its most speculative and also its most disciplined — the mathematics is correct even where the analogy is the author's.
SAJUMA-SOLVEMELU — the mnemonic for the Chaldean order, printed here in the installment that gives the computation of the planetary hours. This is the practical key to the whole horary system the Press holds as sourced praxis, and it is offered so the reader “will never forget that order”.
→ hour-saturno
The asana course moves from technique into therapeutic and sexual claim — delaying old age, aiding chastity, renewing sexual potency, curing named conditions. The Press publishes the instruction and does not adopt the claims; where such material is surfaced as practice it carries the same standing caveat as the chromotherapy table, and the claims are not restated as ours.
→ chromotherapy-conditions
Maya's account closes with a letter from Ramana arriving at Madras asking whether she enjoyed Madura — offered as written proof completing the proofs she had lived. The structure is a frame: the Master's parting question at the start of Nº 3, the accidental journey, the letter at the end. Whether or not the reader accepts the inference, the article is composed, not merely reported.
The exact citation we were missing. Kabir names the Papus work being drawn on as the Traité Méthodique de Science Occulte, Volume II, page 963 — not the Traité élémentaire held in the library. This identifies the source behind both Kabir's pantacle commentary and, in all likelihood, Surya's thirty-eight-installment astrology course. Acquiring it would let the course be checked against what it claims to quote. — ACQUIRED AND VERIFIED: the volume is now held. The passage is on p. 963 as cited, immediately under the heading LE PANTACLE DU MARTINISME, and Kabir's Spanish renders the French exactly: "Dieu, le premier principe de l'Univers, est représenté par un cercle (symbole de l'éternité)."
→ thread:papus_traite_methodique
The left-turning swastika is named the Sign of Fohat, the Theosophical term for the formative energy — the symbol in its Indic and Blavatskian sense, as a figure of rotation. The article derives it mathematically, as multiplication by i turning the unit toward the heart.
A page printing the phrase "the black swastika" in August 1942 needs its context stated. The article is not political and makes no reference to Germany: it is deriving two senses of rotation from the imaginary units i, j and k, and uses black and white for the directions of force in the Theosophical manner that long predates the symbol's appropriation. Read with that said, and not as commentary on the war then being fought.
The "Simple Prayer" is attributed here to Saint Francis of Assisi, as it was almost everywhere in 1942. It is not his. The text first appears in December 1912, in French, in the small Paris devotional magazine La Clochette, printed anonymously; it was later circulated on cards bearing an image of Francis, and the attribution stuck to the picture. Nothing resembling it occurs in the Franciscan sources of the thirteenth century. The magazine is reproducing an error of its period in good faith, and the prayer's own doctrine — that one receives in giving and finds in forgetting oneself — is exactly the teaching Jehel sets out in Nº 2 p. 4.
The best observation in the article is geometrical: the equilateral triangle is the only regular polygon that cannot be deformed, and the writer draws the analogy that the simpler a truth is, the firmer it stands. The inference is decorative rather than demonstrative, but it is the magazine at its most characteristic — reasoning by figure.
The arithmetic is wrong. From 20º 10′ of Aries to 28º 10′ of Cancer is three whole signs plus eight degrees — that is 98º, not the 96º printed. The conclusion happens to survive the error, since the permitted orb of 4º 45′ excludes a square at either figure, but the worked example is the course's teaching instrument and the slip would mislead a student checking his own working.
The two worked examples do not use the same method. Here the orbs are halved for the square and the sum then halved again, giving 4º 45′; in the second example the full orbs of Sun and Mercury are added and halved once, giving 12º. Aspects are conventionally allowed a fraction of the full orb, so halving for a square is defensible — but the article does not say so, and a reader following both examples will derive two incompatible rules.
Julevno is named again — "the book of the Martinist astrologer Julevno" — and his table of planetary orbs is transcribed and then used for three worked examples. This is the second substantial appearance in the run. He is a real author, of a Nuevo Tratado de Astrología Práctica; the Press has not found a copy of the period, and this table is our best evidence of what his book contained.
The vocabulary is traditional and correctly used: partile for an exact aspect, orbital for one formed by the planets' spheres of light rather than their bodies. The distinction between partile, common and orbital, with degree ranges for each, is a workable teaching simplification and the article says openly that it is one.
The pentagram is described with one point to heaven and two to earth — the upright figure, man with head, arms and feet, which Lévi made the emblem of the microcosm and set against the inverted form. The magazine holds Lévi in view throughout: his tetrad appears in Nº 3 p. 7 and his verse closes Nº 5 p. 8.
That "primitive Masonry received from the Rosicrucians" the flaming star is asserted, not evidenced. The historical relation between the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian manifestos and the emergence of speculative Masonry is genuinely disputed; the article states one side of it as settled fact.
"God geometrises" is Plutarch's report of a saying of Plato — aei ho theos geometrei — and it carries the whole first sense of the letter G. The magazine uses it as the bridge from masonic symbol to a claim about knowledge: form must be known before what the form contains.
Manvantara and pralaya are brought in to gloss the second sense, Generation — the alternation of cosmic day and night. The vocabulary is Sanskrit by way of Blavatsky rather than from the Puranas directly, and it is doing the same work here that "eternal generating" does: making immortality a process rather than a state.
The third sense, Gnosis, is where the article's own doctrine surfaces: all is one, diversity is apparent, variety resides only in form. It then makes the practical demand — that everything must be united in the mental also — and defines the initiate as one who passes from knowing to comparison to synthesis, which is the same three-step method stated in Nº 3 p. 7.
The ten rules for casting a chart are technically sound and unusually careful. The insistence on converting civil time to true local time, on checking whether an atlas reckons longitude from Greenwich or from another meridian, and on the twelve-hour addition for southern-hemisphere births are exactly the points on which beginners in Montevideo would have gone wrong.
The southern-hemisphere rule is the practical heart of the course: the Tables of Houses available in 1942 were computed for northern latitudes, so a Montevideo chart required adding twelve hours and reading the opposite houses. The magazine is adapting an imported technique to where its readers actually live, and Nº 6 sets a worked exercise for a birth in Montevideo.
The printed sequence of houses repeats a 5 where the series requires 6 — "4, 5, 5" for "4, 5, 6". Marked [Sic] in the translation rather than silently corrected, since the reader working the example needs to know the fault is the source's.
The variants are correctly named and glossed: ardha padmasana as the half posture, virasana the hero's, parvatasana the mountain, samasana the symmetrical. Giving the half posture first, for those who cannot yet fold both feet, is sound practical teaching and is how the sequence is still taught.
"Levitation" here means only lifting the seated body clear of the ground on the palms — the posture now called utthita padmasana — and the article means it literally, not occultly. It is worth saying plainly, because the same magazine elsewhere uses the word in its other sense.
The description of sarvangasana is accurate — shoulders resting, hands supporting the lumbar region, elbows on the ground, chin pressed to the chest — but the claims made for its "enormous benefits" are presented as instruction rather than as report. Reproduced as printed and not endorsed.
The Gita is quoted accurately. Chapter VIII, verse 17 reads in the Press's held Telang translation (SBE Vol. 8): "Those who know a day of Brahman to end after one thousand ages, and the night to terminate after one thousand ages" — the magazine's rendering matches it in sense and in number. The doctrine is corroborated independently in the held Laws of Manu (SBE 25), which gives a thousand ages of the gods as one day of Brahman, the night being as long.
The article catches the point most summaries of this chapter miss: beyond the unmanifested from which worlds arise there is another Unmanifested, eternal, which does not perish when all else does. Gita VIII.20–21 makes that second unmanifest the supreme goal from which there is no return, and the magazine quotes it in full rather than stopping at the cosmic day and night.
The two interlaced triangles are read as evolution and involution in dynamic equilibrium, progress and regress being a matter of which way the balance tips. Nº 3 p. 9 built the same hexagram from the elemental triangles of the zodiac. The figure carries a cosmology in one instalment and a technique in the other.
The arithmetic of the planetary hours is sound. Day hours alternating 52 and 53 minutes and night hours of 67 and 68 reconcile exactly: twelve of each averaging 52½ and 67½ minutes gives 630 plus 810, which is 1,440 minutes — a full twenty-four hours. The rounding is a practical convenience that does not accumulate error.
The printed text reads "desde la y 15", the hour figure having dropped out of the line. Restored in the translation and marked [Editorial], since a reader working the hours needs to know the gap is the source's and not the translator's.
The instruction is practical to the point of homeliness: take the sunrise and sunset times from the daily newspaper and divide. The planetary hours, which sound occult, are here reduced to arithmetic any reader can do from the paper — and Nº 5 through Nº 8 then supply the meaning of each hour.
This page makes explicit therapeutic claims for the posture — that it purifies the blood, cures disorders of the ovaries and bladder, relieves sterility, cures dyspepsia and chronic gastrointestinal illness. These are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. They are medical instruction offered as treatment by a magazine of 1942, and no part of it should be acted on as health guidance.
The glossary misdefines two entries. Kukkuta means cock or rooster, not mountain — kukkutasana is the cockerel posture, and it is parvata that means mountain, correctly glossed four entries earlier. And sirshasana is named from shirsha, the head: it is the headstand, not "from above downward". The Sanskrit elsewhere in this glossary is sound, which makes the two slips look like transcription rather than ignorance.
Kundalini is glossed as "a plexus existing in the sacral region; an electrical power which all beings possess potentially". The electrical language is the period's, not the tradition's, and belongs with the antenna and radioactivity metaphors elsewhere in the run; the sacral location is orthodox.
The defence of the erotic sculpture is made carefully and is worth preserving: that the Hindu mind has never regarded procreation as obscene, that the lingam and yoni in union figure the creative energy, and that some images are renderings in stone of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. The writer is arguing against her own readers' likely reaction, and she names the text she is drawing on.
Vatsyayana's Kama Sutra is correctly named as the source of the postures depicted, and the attribution of temple erotic sculpture to that tradition is the standard art-historical reading. The Press does not hold the text.
The doors that open "as though by magic" to admit the party, and close behind them, are left unexplained — "What made them open? Who made them close? A mystery." The writer reports the marvel and declines to resolve it, exactly as she did with the railway error that brought her to Madura in the first place.
The account closes at the mouth of the cave where Ramana lived for years — the Virupaksha cave on Arunachala — which returns the traveller to where the narrative began four issues earlier. The Madura sequence and the Ramana sequence are bound together at both ends.
"Reflections of a Solitary", signed Dettré, A∴M∴ The Press has not identified the contributor.
The doctrine here is Spiritist rather than Theosophical: sorrows proportioned to the imperfections of the soul, no eternal trials, no forsaken beings, all contributing to universal progress, pain as lesson and not punishment. This is Allan Kardec's scheme almost point for point, and Kardecism was a powerful current in the River Plate in these years. It sits beside the Vedantic and masonic material without any attempt to reconcile them.
The address to pain — "today, smiling, I await you… the shield that will save me is acceptance" — turns the essay from doctrine into something closer to a personal discipline. Whatever its literary excess, it is the only sustained first-person account of suffering in Volume I.
"The end of initiation is to raise man towards God", credited to Sallustius — presumably the Neoplatonist of On the Gods and the World. The Press does not hold that text and the wording is not verified against it. The doctrine, though, is squarely attested in what we do hold: the Golden Verses commentary describes "the very aim of their initiation into his mysteries" as "putting themselves in communion with the gods, freeing themselves from the cycle of generations, purifying their soul". That is the same teaching in different words, and it is the commonplace of the whole Neoplatonic and Pythagorean line the magazine is drawing on. The attribution stays unconfirmed; the doctrine does not.