La Iniciación · Año I, Nº 7 · November 1942

Radiation, frequency and wavelength are the author's 1942 idiom grafted onto an argument of 1818. The graft is characteristic of the magazine — physical vocabulary recruited to metaphysical claims — and should not be read back into Schopenhauer.

The gloss that will is "a manifestation of the Self", almost "its active aspect", is flagged by the author as his own addition ("we shall add"). It moves the argument from Schopenhauer toward a Theosophical anthropology of the Self.

The distinction between magnitude, which belongs to the object, and the principle within it, which is infinite and without magnitude, is the article's own construction. It does not come from Schopenhauer.

The figure of the Self at the centre of a circle, embracing infinite "events" on its surface, is the author's device for making becoming-conscious visualisable. The apology for the word "desires" shows him aware that he is lending will to the Absolute.

The cone of light whose widening base captures events is a lucid image for the growth of the field of consciousness, and belongs to the article rather than to any source it names.

The pencil example distinguishes having an idea from knowing by making — a craftsman's epistemology, and the most concrete moment in an otherwise abstract page.

The circle rotating in azimuth through 360º to yield three-dimensional knowledge is geometrical illustration, not argument; the author is reasoning by construction rather than by proof.

The sphere displacing its centre through infinite directions to attain the Absolute completes the figure. The whole passage is a single extended diagram of consciousness widening without limit.

The postulate that "the Universe is mental" is not in the Emerald Tablet. It is the first Hermetic Principle of the Kybalion (Three Initiates, 1908): "THE ALL is MIND; the Universe is Mental." The Emerald Tablet teaches correspondence — as above, so below — not mentalism. The attribution is the author's error, and a common one in the period.

Asuri Kapila's poem asks the reader to love “the black, the yellow, the red and the white” with equal intensity and to embrace them and all beings. The colour-terms are the period's; the intent is explicitly egalitarian, and it is the second such passage in this issue. Two different authors, in one number, arguing against exactly the preference the corpus is elsewhere capable of.

Three clinical reports on “Señor R. C.” by “Dr. L. Z.” of San Francisco, spanning 1895 to 1913, claiming that yogic practice reversed ageing — a man of 50 examined again at 61 presenting as 35, and unchanged at 68. Both names are initials only, no institution is given, and no publication is cited. Published here as the source has it, with the standing caveat; the Press does not adopt the claim, and offers no view on whether the reports existed.

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The subject tells his physician he expects to reach 180 years, then departs for the East, sending postcards from China, Japan, Nepal, Calcutta and Benares. The narrative shape — the mysterious traveller, the sceptical doctor won over, the departure that forecloses further testing — belongs to the popular occult literature of the period rather than to any clinical genre.

A 1942 Montevideo esoteric monthly explaining general relativity's finite-unbounded universe correctly, and using it to argue that the infinite may have a centre. Relativity was thirty years old and still contested in general culture; the review reaches for it as naturally as it reaches for the Emerald Tablet, and gets it right.

The malefic aspect as DEBIT and the benefic as CREDIT, reversing when the chart is seen “with spiritual eyes instead of material ones”. The bookkeeping metaphor is exact and the reversal is the point: what reads as advantage from below reads as obligation from above. It is the sharpest formulation of karma anywhere in the run.

The march of the three degrees read through the Tarot: nine steps reducing plate 16 (the Tower, the proud and perishable personality) to plate 7 (the Chariot, the triumph of the magus) by way of plate 8. The numerology is made to work — 16 reduces to 7 — and the vertical axis of the 8 is read as the alternation of birth and death. This is the corpus's method in miniature: a correspondence is proposed, then the arithmetic is made to carry it.

Wronsky, A∴M∴ on Schopenhauer — the most sustained piece of academic philosophy in the run so far, and accurate: Kant's thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer's substitution of Will for it, the mutual determination of subject and object. He cites the Spanish translator Manuel Ovejero y Mauri, and reaches Einstein's finite-unbounded universe by way of an ant walking round a sphere. The reading of Schopenhauer as an occultist is the author's; the exposition of Schopenhauer is sound.

The opening diagnosis is a double ignorance: philosophers miss the esoteric sense for want of occult preparation, occultists miss the argument for want of philosophical training. The article is unusual in the run for addressing both audiences at once rather than assuming one.

"After the Divine Plato, only the Divine Schopenhauer" places the philosopher in an explicitly initiatic succession rather than an academic one. The formula matters to the article's thesis: Schopenhauer is being claimed for the tradition, not merely admired.

The article's framing question — whether object differs from subject — is Schopenhauer's own starting point. The Press's held volume I puts it as a principle: "no object without a subject," which "renders all materialism for ever impossible." The article is following the argument at its true point of entry.

"What is the essence of the world?" is the question the whole article is built to answer, and the answer — Will — is withheld until page 18. The structure is deliberately expository rather than declarative.

The sentence given in quotation marks is not in the Critique in those words. Its sense answers to the Transcendental Aesthetic, where Müller's text has it that in the world of sense "we can never have anything before us but mere phenomena" (p. 46, the rainbow illustration). The paraphrase is faithful; the quotation marks are not.

"The thing in itself" is Kant's term, and it carries into Müller's English exactly as the article reports. The distinction drawn here — formal qualities known, intrinsic essence not — is the Critique's own.

The objection that Kant merely exchanges the word "behind" for the phrase "thing in itself" is the article's own and is sharper than most of its philosophy. It sets up the substitution Schopenhauer is about to make.

That the Will "transcends the sphere of individual willing" is Schopenhauer's doctrine, not a mystical extension of it. The held volume identifies the will in gravitation, in chemical affinity and in the elective attractions of matter alike.

The falling stone is Schopenhauer's own example, not the author's invention. The held volume I cites Spinoza's projected stone, which "would believe that it was moving of its own will," and adds: "I add to this only that the stone would be right."

The closing concession — that no doctrine can reveal the essence of the subject-object binomial, since that would be total knowledge of the Absolute — returns the article to the modesty of its opening. It claims orientation, not solution.

The "luminosity" of Schopenhauer's ideas and the "range of colouring" of one facet continue the optical vocabulary of the preceding page, where consciousness was a cone of light.

The article ends not with a conclusion but with a reading recommendation — the point of the whole piece being to send students of occultism to a book they were neglecting.

The article turns on a distinction between observing an effect and knowing its cause: astrology may keep the words malefic and benefic for effects, but the esotericist must refer them to the subject's own degree of evolution.

Locating the evil in our incapacity to respond to a vibration, rather than in the planet, is the article's central move. The 90º and 180º aspects are retained as real, but re-described as friction with the subject's own state.

"Want of correspondence" is the operative phrase: fault and error arise where the being cannot answer a transmitted vibration. The doctrine is one of resonance, consistent with the physical idiom used of the Will on p. 18.

Every figure here checks out. The Moon moves from Cancer 29º 29′ to Leo 11º 20′, which is 11º 51′ in twenty-four hours; 11º 51′ is 711 minutes; 711 divided by 96 quarter-hours is very nearly 7 minutes per quarter-hour; 26 quarter-hours give 182 minutes, that is 3º 2′; and Cancer 29º 29′ plus 3º 2′ is 32º 31′, which past the thirtieth degree becomes Leo 2º 31′. The Sun's working on the previous page is equally sound — 57′ is 3,420 seconds, divided by 96 gives 35 seconds, and 26 of those give 15′ 10″.

And here the course quietly contradicts itself. Worked by the approximate rule the Moon's correction is 3º 2′, giving Leo 2º 31′; worked by the logarithmic Rule 18 on this page it is 3º 13′, giving Leo 2º 42′. The two methods differ by eleven arcminutes, and the article does not reconcile them. Nº 8 p. 10 then places the Moon at Leo 2º 41′ — a third value, one minute from the logarithmic result and ten from the arithmetic one. The Wheel of Fortune calculation in that issue is built on 2º 41′ and is internally sound; but the reader who follows the course from Nº 5 to Nº 8 is given three answers to the same question.

The division by 96 is explained rather than merely asserted — twenty-four hours holding ninety-six quarter-hours — and the course consistently converts degrees to minutes and minutes to seconds before dividing, which is the right instinct for students working without a slide rule.

Two clinical reports are printed here and their claims are extraordinary. A subject examined in 1895 and re-examined in 1906 is said to have lost his grey hair and his baldness, his facial wrinkles, his varicose veins and his arteriosclerosis; to have a normal pulse where it had been arrhythmic; and, at a stated 61 years, to present as a man of about 35. These are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed by the Press. No such reversal of ageing is recognised by medicine, then or now. The documents name neither doctor nor patient beyond initials, offer no controls and no independent verification, and the attending physician himself records that the subject's claimed age "is open to doubt". Read as a document of what the magazine's readers were invited to believe, not as a clinical record.

Dhanura does mean bow, and dhanurasana is correctly described — prone, ankles grasped, thighs and chest lifted so the body forms the bow and the arms its string. The instruction never to perform it on a full stomach is sound and is the kind of practical caution the course gives reliably.

The claims that constipation, hepatitis and spinal deformities including kyphosis, scoliosis and lordosis are "gradually corrected" by this posture are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. Structural deformities of the spine are not reversed by asana.

The candidate enters the Middle Chamber walking backwards. The article reads it as showing that the higher initiation reverses the direction of the earlier ones — and the same figure returns in Nº 8 p. 4, where the Martinist formula has man regain his place by "returning upon his own steps, following the same paths that led him astray". The reversal is the degree's governing image.

Reading the password as a "prior credit of knowledge and of actions" turns a ritual token into an account of merit — nothing enters an initiation that has not been earned beforehand. It is the same doctrine Jehel states in Nº 1 p. 4, that the Masters cannot give more than the disciple has conditioned himself to receive.

That the candidate must be capable of emotion at another's sacrifice before he can be a Master, and capable of accepting sacrifice himself, is the moral centre of the commentary. The Hiram legend is being read not as a mystery about death but as a test of whether the initiate can be moved.

"There is no subject without object, nor object without subject" is the article's own formulation of the position it will attribute to Schopenhauer three pages later, and it is faithful: the held Volume I states the principle as "no object without a subject", which "renders all materialism for ever impossible". The writer has understood his author before he names him.

Setting materialists and idealists against one another and then dissolving the quarrel by making the two terms interdependent is the article's method throughout — it prefers to show a dispute rest on a false alternative rather than to take a side.