La Iniciación · Año I, Nº 6 · October 1942

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.

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.

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 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 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.

"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.

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.

"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.

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.