Fetching
One moment.
1“El horror de este espectáculo espanta al anciano; el olor infecto de estas heridas lo sofoca; el espíritu lo deja bañado en lágrimas y le ordena avisar a aquellos hermanos suyos que todavía están en la casa de su padre (Saint Martin: “L’Homme de Désir” – Párrafo 83.
2enfermedades.
3- Vosotros conducís las naciones a la muerte, le dijo Wilfrid.
4Habéis adulterado la tierra, desnaturalizado la palabra prostituido la justicia.
5Después de haber comido la hierba de los prados, ¿matáis ahora a las ovejas?
6¿Os creéis justificados mostrando vuestras heridas?
7Yo voy a avisar a aquellos hermanos míos que todavía pueden entender la voz, par que puedan ir a beber a las fuentes que habéis ocultado” (Balzac: “Seraphita”, páginas 337-338.
8Edición del Centenario) Las pruebas que hasta ahora hemos expuesto han sido extraídas exclusivamente de las mismas obras de Balzac.
9¿Pero, existen otras provenientes de otras fuentes y que puedan corroborarlas?
10A sólo título informativo decimos que, cuando Papus pudo tener en sus manos, en 1893, la mayoría de los documentos que formaron parte de los archivos de la logia “La Biensaisance” de Lyon, milagrosamente salvada por J. B. Willermoz y entregados por Cavarnier a Elie Steel, entonces representante en Lyon del martinismo reorganizado por Papus, éste pudo finalmente poseer elementos para iluminar, por lo menos en parte, la historia del martinismo durante la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII.
11Sirviéndose de estos elementos contenidos en documentos originales y auténticos, Papus efectuó varias búsquedas y, entre otras, algunas sobre Balzac.
12En una carta que Martines de Pasqually envío a J. B. Willermoz en 13 de agosto de 1768, hace referencia a un discípulo suyo, un tal Balzac de la Rochelle, que el esperaba de un momento a otro en Bordeaux.
13Papus, a pesar de todas sus indagaciones, no pudo establecer ningún parentesco entre este Balzac y Honorato de Balzac.
14Papus sentía mucho no haber podido obtener ninguna información segura.
15“Esta búsqueda, escribe Papus1, era tanto más tentadora, cuanto que Honorato de Balzac conoció seguramente las doctrinas martinistas, pero, ¿por qué caminos?
16Misterio”.
17Es posible que mucho más tarde haya podido tener Papus informaciones más precisas sobre la iniciación martinista de Balzac, porque en su “¿Qué es el Ocultismo?”, ya no demuestra sentimiento por no poder establecer claramente la iniciación martinista del gran escritor francés y si la afirma categóricamente.
18En efecto, escribe exactamente: “Cuando recordemos que Shakespeare fue iniciado, que Goethe practicó el hermetismo, que, más cerca de nosotros, Balzac fue martinista.
19¿Cómo, dónde y de quién, pues, pudo obtener Papus datos seguros?
20Es preciso pensar que él ha conocido todo lo que referiremos inherente a la iniciación martinista de Balzac y que proviene de Agustín Chaboseau, co-organizador con Papus, como se sabe, de la Orden Martinista en Francia.
21Sería muy probablemente esta fuente informativa la que le ha permitido afirmar categóricamente y no presentar más como 1 PAPUS – Martines de Pasqually, París, 1895.
2216
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.
1“The horror of this spectacle appals the old man; the infected odour of these wounds suffocates him; the spirit leaves him bathed in tears and commands him to warn those brothers of his who are still in his father's house (Saint-Martin: “L'Homme de Désir” — paragraph 83.
2diseases.
3— You lead the nations to death, Wilfrid said to them.
4You have adulterated the earth, denatured the word, prostituted justice.
5After having eaten the grass of the meadows, do you now kill the sheep?
6Do you believe yourselves justified by showing your wounds?
7I shall go to warn those brothers of mine who can still hear the voice, that they may go to drink at the springs you have hidden” (Balzac: “Séraphîta”, pages 337-338.
8Centenary Edition). The proofs we have set out so far have been drawn exclusively from Balzac's own works.
9But do others exist, from other sources, that might corroborate them?
10Purely for information we record that when Papus was able to have in his hands, in 1893, the majority of the documents that had formed part of the archives of the lodge “La Bienfaisance” of Lyon — miraculously saved by J. B. Willermoz and delivered by Cavarnier to Elie Steel, then representative in Lyon of the Martinism reorganised by Papus — he was finally able to possess materials to illuminate, at least in part, the history of Martinism during the second half of the eighteenth century.
11Availing himself of these materials contained in original and authentic documents, Papus carried out various searches and, among others, some concerning Balzac.
12In a letter that Martines de Pasqually sent to J. B. Willermoz on 13 August 1768, he makes reference to a disciple of his, a certain Balzac of La Rochelle, whom he expected at any moment in Bordeaux.
13Papus, despite all his enquiries, could establish no kinship between this Balzac and Honoré de Balzac.
14Papus much regretted not having been able to obtain any certain information.
15“This search, writes Papus[1], was all the more tempting in that Honoré de Balzac certainly knew the Martinist doctrines — but by what roads?
16A Mystery”.
17It is possible that much later Papus was able to obtain more precise information on Balzac's Martinist initiation, because in his “What is Occultism?” he no longer shows regret at being unable to establish clearly the Martinist initiation of the great French writer — rather, he affirms it categorically.
18In effect, he writes exactly: “When we recall that Shakespeare was initiated, that Goethe practised hermeticism, that, nearer to us, Balzac was a Martinist.
19How, where and from whom, then, could Papus have obtained certain data?
20One must suppose that he came to know all that we shall relate concerning the Martinist initiation of Balzac from Augustin Chaboseau, co-organiser with Papus, as is known, of the Martinist Order in France.
21It would most probably be this source of information that permitted him to affirm categorically, and no longer to present as [1] PAPUS — Martines de Pasqually, Paris, 1895.
22· 16
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
The Master AMO is identified in parentheses as "Phillippe" — Nizier Anthelme Philippe of Lyon (1849–1905), the healer whom Papus openly called his spiritual master. The initials AMO recur in the transmission diagram of Nº 5 ("spiritual power of the West, Christic Realisation"), which places this childhood healing episode inside the run's own map of the current. The spelling with two l's is the retype's.
→ ini:1.5
A private circle at 18, synthesising "Egyptian mysteries" for voluntary trance, is the standard fin-de-siècle occult apprenticeship — compare Guaita's private study circle before the O.K.R.C. The dagger with undulating blade recalls the flaming sword of Masonic and Martinist furniture rather than any Egyptian instrument.
The GROUPE INDEPENDANT D'ETUDES ESOTERIQUES is Papus's Paris circle — the body whose name the Montevideo GIDEE takes for its own. We hold the first number of its organ: L'Initiation, October 1888, is on this shelf, and the reader can walk from this sentence to the journal the young Cedaior would have read. Montagne, Raymond and Moutin are named only here; Raymond and Moutin reappear below as his companions in Martinism (reported, not independently verified).
Initiated by Sédir in 1892, esoteric name SDR2H — read by the author as "eighth disciple initiated by Sédir". Sédir (Yvon Le Loup, 1871–1926) was himself barely 21 in 1892, which makes the date early but not impossible; Chacornac places Sédir's own entry into the Martinist circle around 1890–91. Reported on the family's authority; no lodge register is held to check it against.
The lodge HERMANUBIS is attested in Martinist records of the 1890s as a Paris lodge under the Supreme Council; the description "devoted to the mystical way, preferentially oriental" matches its reputation. That its Master of Ceremonies in 1893 was the future Cedaior is the family's report.
The Adept's prophecy — "you will go to countries overseas and there you will have your most effective and fruitful mission" — is the run's own origin story told in advance: the South American mission is this Review. The thorn-and-rose image returns in the memorial number, Nº 10, whose commemorative article closes on the same figure.
→ ini:2.10
Of this roster of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross — Guaita, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Péladan, Barlet, Oswald Wirth, Papus, Sédir, Lermina — two are on this shelf in the original: *Guaita's Le Serpent de la Genèse* and Péladan's Istar**. Saint-Yves was the Order's honorary president rather than a working member; Péladan seceded in 1890 to found his own Rose-Croix — the list remembers the Order at its widest.
The raising of Hiram by the "five points of fellowship" — foot to foot, knee to knee, breast to breast, hand to back, the Word given in the embrace — is described accurately against printed Masonic ritual of the period. The author's numbering ("57th") continues the clause-by-clause commentary begun in earlier numbers, treating the Craft ritual as a text to be exegeted like scripture.
The founding of the Grand Lodge in London on 24 June 1717 by four lodges is standard Masonic history. The argument drawn from it — that "regularity" is administratively illusory because the four lodges left older initiatic obediences — is the Martinist polemic for spiritual over documentary legitimacy, and it reappears wherever the run touches Masonry.
Read in full against the excision standard: this passage and 6:004 are the run's most explicit statement of universalism — union "of all nations, of all continents, of all races, WITHOUT EXCEPTIONS". The keyword screen flagged both; the reading shows them to be the doctrine's centre, not its failure. White and Black Magic are here defined purely by union versus separation.
The folio device "A A et MEN U M" interleaves AMEN and AUM — the same closing device set as "AMEN et AUM" in Nº 11. The compositor breaks the two words across each other so the West's seal and the East's seal are typographically one word: the whole doctrine of the run in a printer's line.
→ ini:2.11
The author claims the complete table of peregrine signs — Neptune and Uranus included — had never been published in the modern epoch. The traditional dignities behind it are Ptolemaic (Tetrabiblos is on this shelf); the extension to the outer planets is necessarily post-classical, and Surya's stated method — least affinity, at most of "face" — is his own reconstruction of why the ancients chose the signs they did.
An erratum published against the run's own Nº 8: Mars is missing from the debilitated planets in the horoscope diagram there. That diagram is the worked-example horoscope plate we hold and mirror — the reader can open Nº 8 at page 11 and see the very figure being corrected. The run corrects itself in print; the correction is part of the record.
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Saturn as ruler from a Capricorn ascendant follows the classical domicile scheme exactly; the "secondary ruler" by decanate announced for the next number follows the Chaldean order. The pedagogy — rule, table, worked example, correction — is a correspondence course in the strict sense.
Reproduced as printed, not endorsed. The claim that asanas can cure leprosy, syphilis, tuberculosis and the rest is period naturopathic doctrine, stated here with the author's own limit — asanas contraindicated in acute febrile illness — but far beyond anything supportable. The passage is preserved because it is what the Review taught in 1943; it is not health guidance.
The "Spiritual Diary" — thirty daily questions of conduct, diet, chastity, anger, charity, silence — is the examen of conscience crossed with the yogic niyama of self-study. Compare Franklin's virtue ledger for the form and the Philokalia's nightly review for the lineage; the instrument is old, the questionnaire's bluntness ("how many lies did you tell or were obliged to tell") is the Review's own.
"True Unknown Philosophers" — le Philosophe Inconnu was Saint-Martin's pen-name, and the phrase is a deliberate wink: his Des erreurs et de la vérité and Tableau naturel stand on this shelf in the French. The sentence quietly places the alchemists of the inner laboratory in Saint-Martin's line two pages before the Balzac article makes the debt explicit.
The first quotation is the opening of Rubén Darío's "Canción de otoño en primavera" (1905), exactly rendered. The second stanza ("Forever I leave exultation behind…") is attributed by the author to Darío but has not been located in his canonical collections; it may be a memory-quotation or a translation of another poet — recorded as the author's attribution, unverified.
"Varonofí, Steinach, Brown, Fequard" — the retype's rendering of Serge Voronoff, Eugen Steinach and Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, the three names of 1920s–30s rejuvenation science (gland grafting, vasoligature, organotherapy). The English normalises the names; the Spanish preserves the retype's garble as the witness prints it.
The article's central claim — that a page of Séraphîta reproduces a page of Saint-Martin's L'Homme de Désir almost textually — can now be walked in this reader: Séraphîta stands on this shelf in Balzac's French and Wormeley's English, acquired because Nº 11 and this number argue for it. The parallel passage is quoted across the next two pages.
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The author announces the shared phrases will be set in bold type — and the retype we hold sets no bold anywhere: the comparative device this paragraph promises is invisible in our witness. The label disagrees with the thing it labels; only a photographic copy of the 1943 printing could recover which words were emphasised.
Verified against the held text. The Wilfrid speech quoted as Séraphîta "pages 337-338, Centenary Edition" stands in our own copy: "Ye have defiled the earth, perverted the Word, prostituted justice… I shall warn those of my brethren who still can hear the Voice, that they may slake their thirst at the springs that you have hidden." The Spanish translation tracked Wormeley's English sense for sense; the scene sits late in the book, in the vision before the Assumption.
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The La Bienfaisance archive story is real in outline: Willermoz's Lyon papers survived him, and Papus's access to Willermoz material in the 1890s is the documentary spine of his Martinès de Pasqually (Paris 1895) — the work footnoted here at [1], likewise not yet on this shelf. "Elie Steel" and "Cavarnier" are the retype's spellings; the chain of custody is reported on Papus's authority.
The letter of Martines de Pasqually to Willermoz, 13 August 1768, mentioning "a Balzac of La Rochelle", is in the published Pasqually correspondence — and Papus's honest failure to connect that Balzac to the novelist, quoted here, is what gives the later categorical claim its weight: the author shows the negative result before the positive tradition.
Gérard van Rijnberk (the retype prints "Van Rijnbeck"), Un thaumaturge au XVIIIe siècle: Martines de Pasqually, 2 vols, 1935–1938 — footnote [2] cites vol. II p. 29 ff. The chain that follows is Chaboseau's oral testimony at Sceaux in 1938, explicitly undocumented; van Rijnberk records it as testimony, and this article inherits exactly that status: reported, important, unproven.
Two printed dates fail against standard biography: André Chénier was born in 1762, not 1752; and Hennequin is given the same dates as Latouche (1785-1851) in the next sentence — a compositor's eye-skip; the advocate Antoine-Louis-Marie Hennequin lived 1786–1840. The chain's shape (Saint-Martin → Lanoue → Chénier and Hennequin → Latouche → Balzac and Desbarolles → Noüel de Latouche → Chaboseau) is as van Rijnberk reports it; the dates are the retype's errors, preserved in the Spanish as printed.
Henri de Latouche (1785–1851), who edited Chénier's poems in 1819 and knew Balzac well in the 1820s, is the one link in the chain with an independently documented close tie to Balzac — which is precisely why the oral tradition naming him as Balzac's initiator has held such appeal. Desbarolles (1801–1886 by most references; the retype prints 1804–1880) is the chiromancer whose Mystères de la main was a nineteenth-century standard.
The occasion is datable: the transfer of the presidency in Uruguay on 1 March 1943 — Juan José de Amézaga's inauguration, which ended the Baldomir transition. The "illustrious brother", a diplomat and man of science left unnamed at his own wish, was in Montevideo for that ceremony; the Review's discretion has so far defeated identification, and the anonymity is respected as printed.
The roster of the 5 March meeting is the estate's own map: Ramana Ashrama represented by Asuri Kapila, Suddha Dharma within Martinism by Jehel — the Suddha Dharma Mandalam whose seal is reproduced at Nº 29 p. 16 — the O.K.R.C., the South American Martinist Order, and the GIDEE itself. One paragraph holds the whole ecology of the Montevideo work in 1943.
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"Children of one same Father, we are Brothers even when we are ignorant of it" — the meeting's closing formula restates the White-Magic-as-union doctrine of p. 6 in devotional key, and the "oriental greeting" that ends the number, "My soul is with yours", is the run's recurring seal for East–West unity of practice.
Asuri Kapila's asana course resumes with counsel rather than a new posture; the nine plates published so far (Figs. 1–9, Padmasana through Savasana) are all held and shown in this reader at their pages in Nº 3–8. The advice to practise selectively by ailment reads against the table on the next page.
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This page carries the two texts side by side as the article promised: Saint-Martin's subterranean vision (the shepherds, the rich, the assembly in gold showing their worm-eaten bodies) and then Balzac's reworking of it — Wilfrid before the seated ministers, kings, warriors and sages. The Balzac half is verifiable in our held Séraphîta; the row of dots at 15:010 is the article's own ellipsis between its two exhibits, preserved as printed.
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The Saint-Martin quotation is cited to L'Homme de Désir, paragraph 83 — and the citation now verifies: the 1790 Lyon printing (Gallica, 432 pp, acquired and gated into the shelf on this citation) carries the passage at image 150: «L'horreur de ce spectacle effraie le vieillard ; l'odeur infecte de ces plaies le suffoque ; l'esprit le laisse baigné de pleurs, & lui ordonne d'avertir ceux de ses frères qui sont encore dans la maison de leur père». The review's Spanish is a faithful rendering with one shift: «la casa de su padre» (his father) where the French reads leur père (their father). Third work acquired because the run cited it.
→ stmartin:homme_de_desir