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.
1es su esencia misma.
2Recordemos que la base de toda armonía son cuatro voces; que el cuarteto es la base de la Música de Cámara; que el acorde perfecto es un ternario con la repetición de la Unidad; que la cuarta nota de la escala tiene una importancia singular, que los números 1, 2, 3, 4 dan las relaciones de la octava, cuarta, quinta, etc….
3Pitágoras, al descubrir la relación existente entre el grupo armónico de la geometría y el acorde perfecto musical, puso las bases de una nueva ciencia, la matemática musical.
4En la matemática es difícil hallar una parte en donde no intervenga el cuaternario, como se verá por los ejemplos más concretos que daremos al final.
5De todo lo dicho se desprende que las características más salientes del cuaternario son Bondad, Armonía y Conciliación de opuestos.
6Se presenta, pues, naturalmente esta pregunta: ¿a qué se deben estas características de armonía y bondad?, ¿cuáles son sus causas cabalísticas y matemáticas?
7Veamos cómo, aplicando los principios expuestos por el gran martinista Barlet, se halla en seguida la solución de este problema.
8Trataremos de dar la explicación cabalística y geométrica, de la pregunta planteada.
9En un artículo próximo, veremos también, su relación con la teoría metafísica-mística de Wronski.
10EXPLICACIÓN CABALÍSTICA. – En un estudio de extraordinaria profundidad sobre la generación de los números, dice Barlet: “Para la concepción de nuestro mundo real, el infinito es doble; infinitamente grande como el Espacio celeste, que se extiende alrededor nuestro, e infinitamente pequeño, como el punto matemático.
11Podemos, pues, representarnos el infinito materialmente y realmente, en su doble concepción, como un punto en el espacio infinito.
12El punto matemático no es la nada, la debemos imaginar como la condensación extrema de todo el Universo reunido en sí, por consiguiente, de toda la energía que es ligada de cualquier naturaleza que sea.
13Él es la Potencialidad Total, la Toda Potencia de Crear.
14Tampoco el Espacio es la Nada; es bien una realidad y tal vez la más certera y tangible para nosotros.
15Él es la Toda Impotencia de Hacer, el Ser reducido a la sola facultad de contener, de recibir, él es la Potencia de Ser.
16Pero podemos, a la inversa, concebir la Toda Potencia expendida en Espacio Infinito y, por consiguiente, anulada en provecho de aquél; los papeles son entonces invertidos; la Toda Potencia deviene Toda Impotencia, con la sola facultad de condensa, y el Espacio deviene la Toda Potencia de condensar, de reducir, de anular el Todo que él contiene; en una palabra, la Toda Resistencia.
17Estos dos conceptos se suceden en período alternativos indefinidamente.
18Cualquiera que sea de las dos concepciones la que se adopte, ella no define siempre el SER ABSOLUTO como la dualidad de lo infinito pequeño zambullido en lo infinitamente grande.
19Es la sola concepción posible para nosotros, porque estamos encerrados en el “mundo real”, donde todo es doble, y a cada uno de los dos infinitos se nos aparece doble; infinito en Potencia, si es nulo en el espacio y recíprocamente (y el inverso si la Potencia llena el espacio).
20Lo Absoluto no nos es más concebible más que por sus dos polos, nosotros no sabemos de él nada más.
21Lo que ordinariamente llamamos un ser es la combinación de estos dos polos: cero (0) o infinito (∞).
22Se sabe que 0.∞ = 1.Un número cualquiera, una realidad es igual a cero.
23Extendiendo esta noción hasta los límites extremos, llamaremos EL SER por excelencia al máximum de este individuo y NO SER a su mínimum, es decir, los dos valores de la cantidad real que llegan al contacto de los polos del Absoluto.
24En esta admirable descripción.
25Inmediatamente la contestación a nuestra pregunta.
26Vemos, en efecto, como el atributo del Absoluto, que es el Amor, lleva a la Toda-Potencia a diluirse en el Espacio en provecho de él; y de ello nacen los dos períodos alternativos de Evolución e Involución.
27Pero cada uno de estos períodos tiene dos polos 17
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.
1it is its very essence.
2Let us recall that the basis of all harmony is four voices; that the quartet is the basis of Chamber Music; that the perfect chord is a ternary with the repetition of Unity; that the fourth note of the scale has a singular importance; that the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 give the ratios of the octave, the fourth, the fifth, and so on….
3Pythagoras, in discovering the relation existing between the harmonic group of geometry and the perfect musical chord, laid the foundations of a new science, musical mathematics.
4In mathematics it is difficult to find a branch in which the quaternary does not intervene, as will be seen from the more concrete examples we shall give at the end.
5From all that has been said it follows that the most salient characteristics of the quaternary are Goodness, Harmony and the Conciliation of opposites.
6This question therefore naturally presents itself: to what are these characteristics of harmony and goodness due? What are their kabbalistic and mathematical causes?
7Let us see how, applying the principles set out by the great Martinist Barlet, the solution of this problem is at once found.
8We shall try to give the kabbalistic and geometrical explanation of the question raised.
9In a forthcoming article we shall also see its relation to the metaphysical-mystical theory of Wronski.
10KABBALISTIC EXPLANATION. — In a study of extraordinary depth on the generation of numbers, Barlet says: “For the conception of our real world the infinite is double: infinitely great, like the celestial Space that extends around us, and infinitely small, like the mathematical point.
11We may therefore represent the infinite to ourselves materially and really, in its double conception, as a point in infinite space.
12The mathematical point is not nothingness; we must imagine it as the extreme condensation of the whole Universe gathered into itself, and consequently of all the energy bound within it, of whatever nature.
13It is Total Potentiality, the All-Power to Create.
14Nor is Space Nothingness; it is indeed a reality, and perhaps the most certain and tangible for us.
15It is the All-Impotence to Do, Being reduced to the sole faculty of containing, of receiving; it is the Power of Being.
16But we may, conversely, conceive the All-Power expended into Infinite Space and consequently annulled to that Space's profit; the roles are then inverted: the All-Power becomes All-Impotence, with the sole faculty of condensing, and Space becomes the All-Power to condense, to reduce, to annul the All it contains — in a word, All-Resistance.
17These two conceptions succeed one another in alternating periods indefinitely.
18Whichever of the two conceptions is adopted, it always defines ABSOLUTE BEING as the duality of the infinitely small plunged into the infinitely great.
19It is the only conception possible for us, because we are enclosed in the “real world”, where everything is double, and each of the two infinites appears to us double: infinite in Power if it is null in space, and reciprocally (and the inverse if Power fills space).
20The Absolute is no longer conceivable to us except by its two poles; we know nothing more of it.
21What we ordinarily call a being is the combination of these two poles: zero (0) or infinity (∞).
22It is known that 0 · ∞ = 1. Any number, any reality, is equal to zero.
23Extending this notion to the extreme limits, we shall call BEING par excellence the maximum of this individual, and NON-BEING its minimum — that is, the two values of the real quantity that come into contact with the poles of the Absolute.
24In this admirable description.
25Immediately the answer to our question.
26We see, indeed, how the attribute of the Absolute, which is Love, leads the All-Power to dilute itself into Space to that Space's profit; and from this are born the two alternating periods of Evolution and Involution.
27But each of these periods has two poles 17
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
The biographical facts are accurate: Gérard Encausse was born at A Coruña on 13 July 1865 to a French father and a Spanish mother, and died on 25 October 1916. The name was taken from the Nuctemeron attributed to Apollonius of Tyana, and Henri Delaage was indeed his first initiator. The claim of a Scorpio ascendant is the review's own and is not checkable from the data given.
The claim that Papus said he would “hold back the Russian revolution” while he lived — and that this was fulfilled, he dying in October 1916 and the revolution coming in 1917 — is the strongest supernatural claim made for him anywhere in this run. It is offered as a natural thing. Recorded as the tradition's, not as fact: the coincidence of dates is real and the inference is the review's.
Papus died of tuberculosis contracted while serving as a military physician at the front. That much is documented. The detail of his collapsing on the staircase of the Charité while visiting Professor Sergent is the kind of specific circumstance that either comes from a witness or from the retelling; Jehel gives no source.
The Mercury hour names its own colours — light green, iridescent blue, orange — alongside the tattva VAYU. This is the only hour given a set of colours rather than one, and the only one whose meditation object is explicitly the reflections of light rather than a quality.
→ hour-mercurio
Sédir — Yvon Le Loup — speaking at Père-Lachaise. He was Papus's close collaborator and later moved away from ceremonial occultism toward a purely Christian mysticism. That the funeral address is given here in full, and in his voice rather than the Order's, is unusual for this review.
The mathematical claims here are correct: equations of degree 1 to 4 are precisely those solvable in radicals, and the connection drawn to the structure of the symmetric groups is the substance of Galois's result. Kabir and Vyasa reach for genuine mathematics and state it accurately, then read a mystical meaning into it — the reading is theirs, the mathematics is not misrepresented.
This is Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703 – c. 1759), taken from the Gold Coast as a child, presented to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and educated in Germany — the first African known to have taken a doctorate at a European university. He taught at Halle, Wittenberg and Jena, and his surviving works are on the impassivity of the human mind and on the art of philosophising soberly. The Espasa entry the review copies is thin and garbles some detail; his return was to Axim on the Gold Coast, and he ended near Fort San Sebastian at Shama. The review prints him because his name coincides with Maître Philippe's mystical one — but the man is real, and considerably more distinguished than the notice suggests.
The 1887 reorganisation of Martinism with Augustin Chaboseau is the founding act of the modern Order. The account here is the Order's own: two men each holding a line of initiation, who discovered the fact and combined them. What Jehel does not say is that Chaboseau later broke with Papus, and that the succession has been contested ever since.
Two mantrams are given for the Mercury hour: PAM, and the letter “Fe”. PAM is the bija of the Manipura chakra in the standard system, not of Mercury; the assignment is Jehel's own. The Hebrew letter Pe is traditionally attributed to Mercury, which makes “Fe” the likelier reading of the second — the review is combining two independent systems of correspondence without saying so.
The Moon hour is worked with the breath in Chandra — the left nostril — completing the pair with the Sun hour, which requires the breath in Surya, the right. The two conditions together are the only piece of svara yoga in the treatise, and they are consistent: solar hour, solar nostril; lunar hour, lunar nostril.
→ hour-luna
The waning Moon is called the worst hour for passive mediumship, because of the risk of binding oneself to the “lower astral” located in the cone of shadow between Moon and Earth. The warning is practical rather than doctrinal, and is the clearest instance in the treatise of the author telling a reader not to do something.
The review offers to mark readers' work by post — send in a chart with the calculations set out and “we shall write correcting any errors or confirming the exactness of your calculations”. With the daily courses at Av. 18 de Julio and the serialised curricula, this makes the periodical a correspondence school as much as a magazine. It also explains the technical density of the astrology course: it is coursework, not exposition.
Vyasa, A∴M∴ joins Kabir as co-author — another pseudonymous contributor at A∴M∴ rank, and the first jointly-signed article in the run. The pairing of two mathematicians on the quaternary suggests a working group rather than isolated contributors.
A second piece signed Martha, A∴M∴ — she appeared in Nº 2 with a poem, and here with a prose counsel. Together with Hipatía, Upasika and Maya she is one of the few recurring women's bylines, and the only one to appear in both verse and prose.
The first instalment of Saint-Martin's "Le Cimetière d'Amboise", printed in French without translation and signed at 12:015. The poem is serialised across at least three numbers — here, Nº 7 p. 10 ("Continuación") and Nº 8 p. 21 ("Continuará") — so a reader following the run receives it in parts. These lines are tagged French, and the left pane offers the original.
The "historical and initiatic curiosity" is Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703 – c. 1759), born on the Gold Coast in what is now Ghana, taken to Europe as a child and presented to the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. He took his degree at Halle and taught at Wittenberg and Jena, the first African known to have held a chair at a European university, and wrote on the rights of Africans in Europe and on the mind-body problem. The magazine takes its account from the Espasa encyclopedia and describes him in the racial vocabulary of 1942; the Press retains the entry, since Amo is a real and notable figure honoured here for his learning, and supplies his name and dates, which the original omits.
This line explains what the Montevideo magazine thought it was. Papus is named as "President of the Independent Group of Esoteric Studies and founder of the Review L'Initiation" — and the Montevideo body signs itself GIDEE, Grupo Independiente de Estudios Esotéricos, which is that same name in Spanish, publishing a review called La Iniciación. The 1942 Uruguayan magazine is a deliberate re-founding of Papus's 1888 Paris institution, name, review and all. Read the two mastheads side by side and the descent is explicit rather than implied.
The page states the interval as "3 hours 30 minutes" and then enters and uses 2h 45m 09s. The latter is correct — Pedro was born at 14h 45m 09s, and the preceding midday is 12h 00m — so the stated figure is a slip and the working figure is right. Marked [Editorial] in the translation rather than silently mended.
The longitude correction is worked correctly: 56 degrees west, at ten seconds per fifteen degrees, gives 560 divided by 15, that is 37 seconds, added because the longitude is west. Both the rule and its application are right, which makes the lost 20 seconds three lines later the more conspicuous.
The three assassins are named Jubelas, Jubelos and Jubelum, and each suffers the death he had wished upon himself — throat cut, heart torn out, body divided and cast to south and north. The self-imposed sentence is the point of the legend as the ritual tells it, and the article reports the correspondence exactly.
The acacia branch marking the grave is the degree's central emblem — the evergreen that betrays the burial and stands for what does not die. The article passes over it in a clause here and never returns to it, which is a real omission in a commentary otherwise so willing to expound.
The two failed raisings and the third that succeeds are correctly given, with the words attached: the grip by the index finger fails, the grip by the middle finger with the word Jakin fails, and only the full embrace of the eldest Master raises the body. The substitute word appears at the moment the original is lost, which is the doctrinal core of the degree.
The five points of fellowship are described precisely — foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, the left arm over the shoulder — and the article makes the candidate and the corpse the same person, since the ceremonial does to the candidate exactly what the nine Masters do to Hiram. That identification is the whole degree, and the writer states it plainly.
The distinction drawn is a good one: the Chamber of Reflections set the candidate before personal death, while the Middle Chamber sets him before the death of forms in general — a succession of manifestations alternating with periods of non-manifestation. The vocabulary is the manvantara-and-pralaya scheme of Nº 4 p. 5, imported into a masonic setting.
The explanation offered for the hats — that only free men wore them in the old European countries — is the conventional masonic account and is at best partial; covered heads in lodge derive as much from synagogue practice, which the next sentence concedes by citing the Hebrew rite. The article gives two explanations without choosing.
The claim that the linen face-cloth is "used by the Essenes and Rosicrucians in their ceremonies" is asserted without a source. Essene ritual practice is known only through Josephus, Philo and the Qumran texts, none of which describes this; the Rosicrucian claim is unverifiable in the same way. Recorded as printed.
"Pulsate et aperietur vobis" is the Vulgate of Matthew 7:7 — knock, and it shall be opened unto you — quoted accurately and put to work as the reason the candidate must knock rather than be fetched. The magazine reaches for the Latin Bible as readily as for the Kabbalah, and neither displaces the other.
"Every result is the fruit of an effort CONCEIVED, DESIRED, WILLED and EXECUTED" is the four-term version of the doctrine that Nº 3 p. 7 gave as Lévi's tetrad. Conceived, desired, willed, executed maps onto know, dare, will, keep silent only loosely — the fourth term has changed from silence to action, which is a real shift of emphasis in a magazine that keeps insisting on practice.
A precise observation: the funeral cloth covers the body only as far as the apron, showing that solely the lower principles share in the death represented. The detail is the kind the article is good at — reading a costume rule as a doctrine about what in man is mortal.
"May the roses bloom upon your cross" is the Rosicrucian formula of remembrance, and it closes the obituary tribute to Papus that opens this issue. Nº 6 appeared in October 1942; Papus died in 1916, so this is commemoration rather than news — the magazine marking its founder's lineage in its sixth number.
The seconds column is wrong. Adding the figures exactly as the page enters them — 20 from the sidereal time, 9 from the interval, 27 for the interval correction and 37 for longitude — gives 93 seconds, not the 73 printed. The dropped 20 is precisely the seconds of the sidereal time, so a figure was lost from the column rather than miscalculated. Carrying the correct 93 gives a Greenwich Sidereal Time of 23h 59m 33s, where the article concludes 23h 59m 13s. The error does not change the outcome: the Tables of Houses are entered at the nearest tabulated sidereal time, and 23h 59m 13s and 23h 59m 33s both round to 0h 00m 00s, so the Ascendant the course derives on p. 11 is unaffected. A student checking the addition will nonetheless fail to reconcile it, which is why it is recorded.
This is the long quotation from Barlet on the generation of numbers — the passage that made him a sourcing target for the Press, since no edition of his work had been located. The lead is now open: Papus's Paris review L'Initiation, which Nº 6 p. 4 names as his foundation, opens its very first issue of October 1888 with an article titled "Initiation" by Ch. Barlet. The run is held at IAPSOP and is being acquired; Barlet's study of number may well be in it.
"The great Martinist Barlet" is F.-Ch. Barlet, the pen-name of Albert Faucheux (1838–1921) — a founding member of Papus's Supreme Council and one of the most substantial theoreticians of the French occult revival. The magazine treats him as an authority on a level with Papus himself, which is a fair reflection of his standing in that circle.
"It is known that 0 · ∞ = 1" is not known and is not true. The product of zero and an unbounded quantity is indeterminate: it may be made to approach any value whatever, or none, according to how the two factors are taken. The sentence is doing symbolic rather than mathematical work — Barlet wants being to be the meeting of the infinitely small and the infinitely great — but stated as an identity it is false, and the argument built on it does not follow from it.
The alternation Barlet describes — All-Power condensed to a point, then expended into space and annulled to space's profit, the two succeeding one another indefinitely — is the same cosmic systole and diastole the magazine calls manvantara and pralaya in Nº 4 p. 5. Barlet reaches it from a French kabbalistic tradition and the Gita passage reaches it from Sanskrit; the run never remarks on the convergence.
The derivation of the cross from the quaternary is elegant: two periods, each with two poles, give four extremities, and the two periods pass into one another at the point of intersection, which Barlet calls love. Whether or not one accepts it, this is the most carefully constructed argument in Volume I, and it is the only place where a symbol is derived rather than merely expounded.
"As above so below, as below so above" is named here as the Law of Hermes and used as the conclusion of the argument rather than as an epigraph. The Emerald Tablet's actual doctrine is correspondence — exactly this — which makes the Nº 7 contributor's use of the same authority for "the Universe is mental" the more clearly a slip: the magazine knew what the Tablet says.
Cayley's remark that "projective geometry is all geometry" is genuine and famous, and calling it the mother of all geometries is a fair rendering. The citation of a working nineteenth-century mathematician by name, in a Montevideo occult review, is characteristic of Kabir's contributions and of nobody else's in the run.
The example resolves here: Pedro is born with the Ascendant in Capricorn at 15º 34′. That figure is carried forward two issues and is the value used in the Wheel of Fortune calculation in Nº 8 p. 10, which the Press has checked digit by digit and found sound. The course is internally consistent across four instalments.
The southern-hemisphere procedure is applied correctly and is the pedagogical heart of the whole course: the Tables of Houses being computed for northern latitudes, each sign the table gives is placed on the cusp of the opposite house. The table's Cancer 15º 34′ on the Ascendant therefore becomes Capricorn 15º 34′ on the Ascendant for Montevideo — which is exactly the figure the next page states.
Hala does mean plough, and halasana is correctly named and described. The counted breath — inhale to seven, retain, exhale — is given plainly, and the caution that the vertebrae will not permit the full position at first is sound teaching rather than encouragement.
The claims made for halasana escalate well past what the posture can be said to do: progressive cure of rheumatic and articular illness, dissolution of gallstones, oxidation of fat deposits in the internal organs, correction of constipation through elimination of catabolic toxins. These are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. The physiological vocabulary is 1942 and the mechanism described is not one modern physiology recognises.
Uttana-padasana is correctly analysed — uttana raised, pada foot — and correctly described. The Sanskrit in this instalment is sound, unlike the two slips in the Nº 4 glossary.
A genuinely useful observation for a student: for one and the same sidereal time the cusp of the tenth house carries the same sign and degree at every latitude, because the midheaven is defined by the meridian and not by the observer's distance from the equator. Only the intermediate cusps move with latitude. The course states it without proving it, but it is correct.
"As Eliphas Lévi says, evil is the means of good." The words are not Lévi's, but the doctrine is his and the Press holds it: in Transcendental Magic he writes that "magical equilibrium explains the great and primeval mystery of the existence and relative necessity of evil", and treats the astral light as "an auxiliary alike of good and evil". A relative necessity of evil, grounded in equilibrium, is what the magazine is compressing. The phrasing has passed through French into Spanish and been shortened to an aphorism on the way; the doctrinal link holds and is recorded as such rather than dismissed for want of matching words.