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1Se pone en contacto con la “Estricta Observancia” organizada por el Barón de Hundt, de Alemania, por intermedio de la logia “Candeur” de Estrasburgo, y desde 1774 a 1782 Willermoz despliega intensa actividad en el terreno masónico.
2En 1778 se realiza en Lyon el gran congreso masónico llamado “Convent Des Gaules”, organizado por Willermoz y en el cual están representados las logias de la Estricta Observancia de su provincia.
3Willermoz obtiene un gran éxito como realizador iniciático al conseguir introducir en la masonería dos Grados Especiales, llamados Profes y Grand Profes, que eran nada más que las enseñanzas de los Ellus Cohens presentadas en sentido masónico.
4En 1782, Willermoz, que ha influido mucho en preparación, va a asistir al “Convent de Wilhemsbad” en el cual se hallaban representadas casi todas las Provincias de la Estricta Observancia.
5Willermoz, apoyándose en su amistad con el príncipe de Brunswick y en sus conocimientos poco comunes entre los masones, obtiene, a pesar de la oposición de un ex Cohen (expulsado) introducir los grados de Profes y Grand Profes; pero más tarde, en la práctica, las logias masónicas no lo realizaron y, por el contrario, nació de todo esto una enorme oposición a Willermoz, pues los masones se dieron cuenta de que estaban siendo “dirigidos” y jamás se ha visto que los que no estudian ni creen acepten la autoridad de instructores.
6Lo trataron de “dictador” y lo calumniaron de todas las maneras posibles.
7En 1784, Willermoz se interesa por el magnetismo y entra en la sociedad magnética “La Concorde”, hizo con otros cohens experiencias curiosas, llegando a diagnosticar enfermedades de caballos, verificadas posteriormente por autopsia; y hasta Mesmer prestó cariñosa atención a aquellas experiencias.
8En 1785, gracias al concurso y sacrificada joven mística, Mlle.
9La Rocheite, sujeto magnético y medium notable, obtiene progresivamente las revelaciones llamadas “Cahier de l’Agent Inconnu” que contienen enseñanzas muy notables, encerradas en numerosos cuadernos dictados por la Entidad a la medium.
10Es místicamente hablando, la época máxima de la carrera iniciática personal de Willermoz, mientras que la de “realización colectiva”, fue en la masonería.
11En 1786 y años sucesivos, los acontecimientos revolucionarios desorganizan toda actividad masónica; viene el sitio de la ciudad de Lyon, durante el cual Willermoz tiene que ocultarse en el campo, realizando actos de previsión y otros de gran valor, para salvar los archivos de los Ellus Cohens, con gran dedicación y sacrificio.
12Pasados los años de tormenta social, en 1796 (a los 66 años de edad), Willermoz se casa con una joven de 24 años, Jeanne Marie Pascal, y desde 1798 se dedica a la agricultura y lleva una vida tranquila, alejado de toda actividad masónica o iniciática.
13Fallece el 20 de mayo de 1824, o sea, a los 94 años de edad.
14Imparcialmente hablando, debemos reverenciar en él, no a un gran iniciado, sino, especialmente, al hombre de corazón, fiel, sincero, activo, siempre pronto a la acción organizadora y dedicado a procurar realizar una de las cosas más difíciles, tanto en su época como hoy: “tratar de re-espiritualizar ritos masónicos”.
15Quien ha probado hacerlo sabe lo que significa.
16Además, vimos que si Willermoz fracasó en la vía mágica y su espíritu industrial y práctico y su mentalidad masónica no le permitieron abordar el terreno místico “personalmente”, hizo el camino por la curva: acción social, acción masónica, magnetismo, comunicaciones mediante personas con mediumnidad.
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.
1He gets in touch with the “Strict Observance” organised by the Baron von Hund of Germany, through the lodge “Candeur” of Strasbourg; and from 1774 to 1782 Willermoz displays intense activity in the masonic field.
2In 1778 there takes place at Lyon the great masonic congress called the “Convent des Gaules”, organised by Willermoz, at which the lodges of the Strict Observance of his province were represented.
3Willermoz obtains a great success as an initiatic organiser by succeeding in introducing into masonry two Special Degrees, called Profès and Grand Profès, which were nothing other than the teachings of the Élus Coëns presented in a masonic sense.
4In 1782 Willermoz, who had greatly influenced the preparation, goes to attend the “Convent of Wilhelmsbad”, at which almost all the Provinces of the Strict Observance were represented.
5Willermoz, relying on his friendship with the Prince of Brunswick and on his uncommon knowledge among masons, succeeds — despite the opposition of a former Coën (expelled) — in introducing the degrees of Profès and Grand Profès; but later, in practice, the masonic lodges did not work them, and on the contrary there was born from all this an enormous opposition to Willermoz, for the masons realised that they were being “directed”, and it has never been seen that those who neither study nor believe accept the authority of instructors.
6They called him a “dictator” and slandered him in every possible way.
7In 1784 Willermoz becomes interested in magnetism and enters the magnetic society “La Concorde”; he made curious experiments with other Coëns, going so far as to diagnose diseases in horses, afterwards verified by autopsy — and even Mesmer paid affectionate attention to those experiments.
8In 1785, thanks to the assistance of a devoted young mystic, Mlle.
9La Rochette, a magnetic subject and remarkable medium, he progressively obtains the revelations called the “Cahier de l'Agent Inconnu”, containing very notable teachings, enclosed in numerous notebooks dictated by the Entity to the medium.
10This is, mystically speaking, the highest period of Willermoz's personal initiatic career, while that of “collective realisation” was in masonry.
11In 1786 and the years following, revolutionary events disorganise all masonic activity; then comes the siege of the city of Lyon, during which Willermoz has to hide in the country, performing acts of foresight and others of great worth to save the archives of the Élus Coëns, with great dedication and sacrifice.
12The years of social storm past, in 1796 (at 66 years of age) Willermoz marries a young woman of 24, Jeanne Marie Pascal, and from 1798 devotes himself to agriculture and leads a quiet life, withdrawn from all masonic or initiatic activity.
13He dies on 20 May 1824, that is, at 94 years of age.
14Speaking impartially, we must revere in him not a great initiate but, especially, the man of heart — faithful, sincere, active, always ready for organising action, and dedicated to attempting one of the most difficult things, in his day as in ours: “to try to re-spiritualise masonic rites”.
15Whoever has tried it knows what it means.
16Moreover, we saw that if Willermoz failed in the magical way, and if his industrial and practical spirit and his masonic cast of mind did not allow him to approach the mystical ground “personally”, he made the journey by the curve: social action, masonic action, magnetism, communications through persons with mediumship.
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Here the article states the real difference between the two branches, and does not pretend it is small: Bricaud's Martinism excluded mixed initiation and admitted only masons, and therefore grew more slowly than Papus's "by virtue of the necessity of gathering only masons and of excluding women". Montevideo follows Papus, and says so.
And then the generosity: although Bricaud's branch went another way, "all who work for the same ideal… ought to feel themselves brothers", and he is commemorated every 21 February regardless. The magazine states a disagreement and then refuses to make it a quarrel.
The correct date, in the body of the article: Bricaud died 21 February 1934, aged 53, having named Chevillon his successor. Chevillon was alive when this was printed and was murdered in March 1944, fourteen months later.
"1872 – CEDAIOR – 1943." The founder of the South American Martinist Order died on 22 January 1943, three weeks before this number went out, and the magazine announces it in five lines with the biography promised for the next issue. Nº 9 p. 2, printed the month before, had described him installing the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross at Curitiba in 1927 and continuing as its President "in Active Silence". This is the last issue in which he is written of as living.
The 21st of February carries three commemorations at once — Willermoz, the Unknown Martinists, and Bricaud — and the issue gives one article to each. It is the only number in the run built entirely around a single date.
Willermoz was indeed a contemporary of Martines de Pasqually and the pivotal figure of Lyon masonry. The dates here are close but not exact against the standard references, which give his birth as 10 July 1730 rather than the 1st, and his death as 29 May 1824 rather than the 20th. The internal arithmetic holds either way: 1730 to 1824 is the 94 years the article states.
The meeting that matters: Willermoz, in Paris on silk business in early 1767, is initiated by Martines de Pasqually into the Rite of the Élus Coëns — "the basis of the future Martinism". The article is careful to date it and to explain why he was in Paris at all, which is the kind of detail that makes a chronology checkable.
A striking piece of internal criticism: Martines protests that Willermoz was raised to Rose-Croix prematurely by a badly executed ceremonial, and predicts it will mark his whole initiatic life. The article then endorses the prediction — "Willermoz never achieved much either in the magical or in the mystical way". A commemorative piece that declines to flatter its subject.
The Convent des Gaules of 1778 and the Convent of Wilhelmsbad of 1782 are both historical, as is Willermoz's achievement in carrying the grades of Profès and Grand Profès — Élus Coën teaching in masonic dress — into the Strict Observance. The article's account of the backlash is also fair: the reform did not take in the lodges.
Willermoz's turn to magnetism in 1784 and his entry into "La Concorde" belong to the real Lyon story, and Mesmer was in France in exactly those years. The diagnosis of diseases in horses "afterwards verified by autopsy" is reported by the article, not evidenced.
The Cahier de l'Agent Inconnu is genuine and is the best-known document of the Lyon circle — revelations received from 1785 through a young woman described as a magnetic subject. The article calls this the summit of Willermoz's personal mystical career, and on the evidence of the archive that is a defensible judgement.
The verdict is the most honest sentence in the article: revere in him "not a great initiate but, especially, the man of heart", who attempted the hardest thing — "to try to re-spiritualise masonic rites" — and then, drily, "whoever has tried it knows what it means."
The closing point is made deliberately and is the magazine's own position: women have always had the right to be initiated in truly initiatic rites, and Willermoz initiated his own sister and Mlle. de Chevrier. It sets up the criticism of Bricaud two pages later for excluding them.
The heading is wrong. It prints "Jean Bricaud (1881–1943)"; the article itself gives his death correctly at p. 6 as 21 February 1934, at the age of 53 — which is right, and which is why the 21st of February is a commemoration at all. 1881 to 1934 is 53 years; 1881 to 1943 would be 62. The compositor appears to have set the current year. Marked [Sic] in the translation.
Two threads open here. Bricaud studied magnetism with Maître Philippe of Lyon — "Philippe Nizier (Amo)" — who reappears on p. 17 as one of the Masters most often seen or felt by members of the Order. And he studied Kabbalah with Jacques Charrot, "one of the disciples of Eliphas Lévi", which puts the magazine two steps from Lévi by its own account.
The chain of office is accurately given: Téder (Charles Détré) succeeded Papus and died on 25 September 1918, leaving the Memphis-Misraïm hierophancy vacant until Bricaud assumed it on 10 December 1919. The dates are the ones the Order's own records give.
The commemoration of the Unknown Martinists is analysed on three planes — moral, astral, spiritual — and the middle one is the most revealing: performing the ceremony is said to set the accumulated work of the dead vibrating in the terrestrial atmosphere and so to "re-vitalise the Invisible Current of the Order". Memory is treated as a mechanism, not a sentiment.
Paschimottanasana is correctly named and described — seated, legs extended, forehead to the knees, the great toes grasped — and the instruction to hold the breath throughout and to increase by one minute a day to a maximum of ten is specific enough to follow. The half posture offered to those who cannot fold is sound teaching.
The claims made for this posture are the most extensive in the run: cure of liver inflammation, gastritis, lumbago, rheumatic pain, haemorrhoids, constipation, and the disappearance of neck wrinkles. These are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. The account of the spleen absorbing solar energy and individualising it as "pale rose" particles is period occult physiology, not anatomy.
The glossary on Ida, Pingala and Sushumna is accurate to the tradition: the left current negative and lunar, the right positive and solar, the central channel between them, with Sushumna also identified with the spinal cord. Naming Pingala "the Vehicle of the Gods" and locating the doctrine in a Taraka Raja Yoga school is a Theosophical framing rather than a Sanskrit one.
The annual report is the most administratively candid document in the run. The Grand Council grew from 13 members to 17; it aims at 21 "as it was in the time of Papus and as it ought to be, in accordance with our internal Law Nº 1". An occult order publishing its own constitutional arithmetic is unusual.
1,122 documents passed through the register, and the writer stops to note "the influence of the numbers 11 and 22". The count is real and the numerology is imposed on it — the same move as the fifteen conspirators becoming Tarot XV in Nº 9. Worth marking because the arithmetic elsewhere in this report is scrupulous.
The cash account reconciles, but only on the second of two figures given for receipts. A balance of $411.00 brought forward and a closing balance of $3,147.85 require receipts of $2,736.85 — which is the figure the article itself uses two lines later. The $2,736.65 printed here is a slip of two digits.
The most human passage in the volume. Outsiders ask, "fraternally", what these men live on — and the President answers in public, by name: Asuri Kapila, Surya and Pitágoras have small private incomes and live very modestly on them; Jehel gives language lessons. And then the detail that settles it: the Order owes Surya $550, more than a third of its annual dues income. Nobody is drawing from it; one of them is lending to it.
"In our Order the Degrees are not given away out of friendship nor sold for gain." The claim is then supported with numbers — 17 members raised across all grades in a year, out of hundreds — which is a low enough proportion to be credible.
Third statement of parentage in three issues: the review is "made in the image and likeness of the one Papus created". Nº 2.9 p. 1 said it of the body, Nº 1.6 p. 4 named him founder of both; here it is listed as one of the year's achievements.
And here the Ramana thread closes a circle. Among the currents the Order reports serving in 1942 is "The Ramana Ashrama (the Venerable Master Maharshi)" — the same ashram a Uruguayan contributor had described visiting in Nº 1, pp. 22–25. What read as one traveller's account turns out to have been an institutional relationship.
The stated directive is explicit and worth recording given what the run is screened for: a fraternal welcome to every teaching, eastern or western, "without preferences of race, of continent or of sect, and without the predominance of one sex over the other". Printed in February 1943.
The exhibition included portraits of "the Masters Maharshi and Saint-Martin" by Sister Fátima, and 106 works by Brother Sadananda including portraits of Peter Deunov and Krishnamurti. Deunov and Krishnamurti were living men in 1942. The Press has not located the catalogue; the works are recorded as described.
A three-month radio programme — "The Hour of the Mysterious Sciences", on La Voz del Aire — and a "Chain of Thought" of hundreds petitioning nightly at 21h30 for the sick. It was discontinued for want of money. This is the magazine at its most concretely institutional: a broadcast schedule, a station name, and an hour.
The cures reported here — a cardiac case given up by doctors, pulmonary lesions cicatrised in under three months, a "miraculous" operation, an obstetric intervention — are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. No records are cited beyond the Order's own minutes, and no physician is named. Note that the writer himself sets "miraculous" in quotation marks and follows it with "(??)".
The five Masters said to be most often seen or felt are named: Amo (Maître Philippe of Lyon), Maharshi, Papus, Subrahmaniayananda and Aurobindo. Four of the five appear elsewhere in the run as historical figures with documented lives; the list reads as a map of the Order's actual affiliations rather than a pantheon.
Stanislas de Guaita and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky are named among beings seen on special occasions. The Press holds Guaita's Le Serpent de la Genèse, acquired for Nº 9 — so a figure the Order reports encountering in vision is one whose actual book now sits in the library beside this issue.
The balance sheet checks out almost everywhere and fails in two places. Correct: furniture 1,022.78 less 120 gives 902.78; publications 309.30 less 26.40 gives 282.90; cash 3,147.85 less 3,054.55 gives 93.30; the GIDEE contribution 410.16 less 44 gives 366.16; and both grand totals balance exactly at 9,699.84 and 4,309.88. Wrong: rents 1,775 less 600 is 1,175, not the 1,165 printed. And Objects of Worship at 230.60 less a deduction printed as 2.36 gives 228.24, not the 218.24 shown — the true deduction must be 12.36, a digit lost at the column edge. For a hand-set table of twenty accounts, two slips is a good showing.