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.
1reservadamente con Waldeck-Rousseau, entonces Presidente del Consejo y le pidió que obtuviese el diploma de doctor para el Maestro Philippe.
2El Presidente del Consejo se vio en situación bastante violenta y explicó que en Francia tal cosa no era posible sin exámenes, etc….
3La Zarina insistió, diciendo que quizás el Presidente de la República pudiese hacer algo en tal sentido. W. Rousseau afirmó que solamente un Comité de grandes médicos podría influir, y aún así exigiendo exámenes clásicos… “El Maestro AMO es, sin embargo, un médico muy grande”, respondió la Zarina que dejó secamente al Presidente del Consejo bastante aturdido… El Maestro AMO siguió siendo durante algunos años siendo el principal consejero del Zar, y se debe a su influencia el proyecto del Zar de procurar establecer entre los hombres el reino de la paz por el desarme universal.
4Ayudado por el Rey de Dinamarca y por los grandes duques, el Maestro AMO introdujo en la Corte la doctrina Martinista y ocultista.
5Fue fundada una Logia Martinista secreta en el propio Palacio Imperial.
6El Zar era el Presidente.
7Los miembros directivos (Superiores Incógnitos) fueron elegidos entre los grandes duques y los consejeros del Imperio.
8Se hacían frecuentes sesiones de evocaciones y místicas, dirigidas por el Maestro AMO.
9Frecuentemente se invocaba o hasta se evocaba al padre del Zar, al ex emperador Alejandro III, y éste hacia prometer a su hijo mantener intacta, a pesar de todo, la alianza franco-rusa.
10En ese sentido el papel del Maestro AMO fue muy importante, ya que a eso se debe, en gran parte, que el Zar Nicolás II se haya mantenido alejado de la influencia germánica, ya creciente, en aquel entonces, en la Corte rusa.
11La Emperatriz tuvo siempre una gran veneración por el Maestro, y cuando éste ya había regresado a Lyon, ella le regaló todavía un espléndido automóvil, cosa “muy magnífica” en aquella época… El Maestro AMO, este querido y venerable ser, al que nunca se invoca en vano cuando se le hace en forma profunda, sincera y desinteresada, tuvo una vida llena de hechos extraordinarios y de los cuales podemos sacar enseñanzas, como el que os referiré ahora: Una vez, en aquel gabinete de la Rue de la Tête d’Or (quieran anotar el nombre de la calle) en el cual siempre había mucha gente que venía a buscar enseñanzas o ayuda, llegó un señor, bien puesto y arrogante, que preguntó a los presentes si “ahí vivía el Sr. Nizier (nombre civil de AMO).
12La pregunta fue hecha en tono tan poco respetuoso que alguien preguntó al recién llegado si venía a consultar al maestro por alguna enfermedad personal.
13“No, respondió el visitante; yo no creo en semejante infantilidades; vengo nada más a pedir una información para un tercero; yo no preciso de fantasías”.
14En ese instante salió AMO de su piecita reservada y, dirigiéndose inmediatamente al recién llegado, le pidió que pasara a aquella, lo que extrañó a todos, porque era una “honra” muy rara ser recibido allí.
15Refirió más tarde Papus que pasó lo siguiente en la piecita.
16El Maestro encaró al insolente y le preguntó: “¿Os recordáis, señor, incrédulo, lo que hacíais un viernes, en tal fecha de tal mes y año, a las tres de la tarde?”… “Yo os lo diré: ESTRANGULABAIS A UNA MUJER.
17Nadie os vio; sin embargo, la policía lo sabrá y os buscará; pero, si os tiráis, ahora mismo de rodillas y pedís PERDÓN AL CIELO por lo que hicisteis, no se os encontrará”.
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.
1privately with Waldeck-Rousseau, then President of the Council, and asked him to obtain the doctor's diploma for the Master Philippe.
2The President of the Council found himself in a rather awkward position and explained that in France such a thing was not possible without examinations, and so on….
3The Tsarina insisted, saying that perhaps the President of the Republic might do something to that end. W. Rousseau affirmed that only a Committee of eminent physicians could have any influence, and even then would require the classical examinations… “The Master AMO is, nevertheless, a very great physician”, replied the Tsarina, who left the President of the Council abruptly and considerably bewildered… The Master AMO continued for some years to be the Tsar's principal counsellor, and to his influence is owed the Tsar's project of seeking to establish among men the reign of peace through universal disarmament.
4Aided by the King of Denmark and by the grand dukes, the Master AMO introduced the Martinist and occultist doctrine into the Court.
5A secret Martinist Lodge was founded in the Imperial Palace itself.
6The Tsar was the President.
7The governing members (Unknown Superiors) were chosen from among the grand dukes and the counsellors of the Empire.
8Frequent sessions of evocation and of mysticism were held, directed by the Master AMO.
9Frequently the Tsar's father, the former emperor Alexander III, was invoked or even evoked, and he made his son promise to maintain the Franco-Russian alliance intact in spite of everything.
10In this respect the Master AMO's part was very important, since it is owed in great measure to this that Tsar Nicholas II kept himself apart from the Germanic influence then already growing at the Russian Court.
11The Empress always had a great veneration for the Master, and when he had already returned to Lyon she presented him besides with a splendid motor car, a “very magnificent” thing in that period… The Master AMO, that dear and venerable being, who is never invoked in vain when it is done in a profound, sincere and disinterested manner, had a life full of extraordinary events, from which we may draw teachings — such as the one I shall now relate to you: Once, in that consulting room in the Rue de la Tête d'Or (please note the name of the street), where there were always many people who came seeking teaching or help, there arrived a gentleman, well dressed and arrogant, who asked those present whether “Mr. Nizier (AMO's civil name) lived there”.
12The question was put in so little respectful a tone that someone asked the newcomer whether he had come to consult the master about some personal illness.
13“No,” answered the visitor; “I do not believe in such childishness; I come merely to ask for information on behalf of a third party; I have no need of fantasies”.
14At that instant AMO came out of his small reserved room and, addressing himself at once to the newcomer, asked him to step inside — which astonished everyone, because it was a very rare “honour” to be received there.
15Papus related later that the following took place in that small room.
16The Master faced the insolent man and asked him: “Do you remember, sir, unbeliever, what you were doing on a Friday, on such a date of such a month and year, at three in the afternoon?”… “I will tell you: YOU WERE STRANGLING A WOMAN.
17No one saw you; nevertheless the police will know of it and will look for you; but if you throw yourself upon your knees this instant and ask HEAVEN'S FORGIVENESS for what you did, you will not be found”.
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.