Fetching
One moment.
1La Psicología Racional y Experimental tiene, a nuestro juicio, el defecto de aislar los fenómenos que estudia.
2Tan pronto como desconectamos las relaciones que unen al fenómeno con el medio universal, del cual forma parte, sacrificamos el procedimiento sintético a la comodidad del procedimiento analítico.
3Y si bien este último resulta el más indicado para las necesidades de la Psicología que podríamos llamar “científica”, no lo es para la Psicología Trascendente.
4Veamos en lo que sigue cuáles son las conclusiones de una y de la otra, por lo que a la definición de la mente se refiere.
5La psicología “Científica” plantea la siguiente premisa: Cuando la atención se dirige a un objeto determinado, ¿cómo se produce la percepción?
6¿Es algo de la mente que alcanza al objeto o es algo del objeto que alcanza a la mente?
7Dicho en otras palabras: ¿la esfera de la mente llega hasta el objeto, o es el objeto el que penetra en la mente?
8La Psicología Trascendente, en cambio, afirma esta otra premisa: El objeto percibido y el órgano asiento de la percepción, están “impregnados” en un continuo al cual se llama mente.
9Más claro, postula el primer principio hermético que dice: El Universo es Mental.
10Una observación orienta de lo que ambas psicologías entienden por mente, nos demostrará, una vez más, que las discrepancias responden únicamente al especial punto de vista en que cada una se sitúa.
11En efecto, la Psicología “científica” plantea un doble interrogante que expresa los dos polos de la síntesis que la preocupa: Primer polo: la mente alcanza el objeto.
12Segundo polo: El objeto alcanza la mente.
13En cambio la Psicología Trascendental, basada en la teoría de los opuestos y en el racionamiento analógico, hace la síntesis que reúne ambos polos: el universo es mente.
14Con esto desaparecen los opuestos y con ello las dificultades de interpretación que tantas discusiones acarrean en el terreno de la especulación filosófica.
15Apenas solucionada esta dificultad surge de inmediato una segunda, no menos importante: si el universo es mental, ¿quién o qué se expresa en este mente?
16Esto plantea el grave problema de la existencia o de la no existencia de un Ser o de un principio del cual emanó el universo.
17Pero antes de tomar partido en tan espinosa cuestión, abriremos un breve paréntesis para establecer una convención en el lector.
18En lo que sigue, abreviaremos la expresión Psicología trascendente con la iniciales p. t., así como representaremos con las minúsculas p. c., la simplificación de lo que hemos llamado, muy caprichosamente por cierto, Psicología científica.
19Continuemos.
20Para la p. c. el universo o mundo sensible es algo así como una simbiosis entre materia y energía; en cambio, la unidad biológica a la cual se llama hombre, contiene un tercer principio: la vida, que no parece reductible ni a la energía ni a la materia.
21Comencemos por anotar una evidente contradicción: si el mundo es un compuesto de materia y energía, el hombre es algo distinto del mundo, puesto que se compone además el principio vida, que no parece estar contenido en aquél.
22Si lo es, ¿de dónde vino la vida?; si no lo es, ¿cómo puede el universo ser algo distinto de él mismo? (Continuará) 12
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.
1Rational and Experimental Psychology has, in our judgement, the defect of isolating the phenomena it studies.
2As soon as we disconnect the relations that unite the phenomenon with the universal medium of which it forms part, we sacrifice the synthetic procedure to the convenience of the analytic one.
3And although the latter proves the more suitable for the needs of the Psychology we might call “scientific”, it is not so for Transcendent Psychology.
4Let us see in what follows what the conclusions of the one and of the other are, so far as the definition of the mind is concerned.
5“Scientific” psychology lays down the following premise: when attention is directed to a given object, how is perception produced?
6Is it something of the mind that reaches the object, or something of the object that reaches the mind?
7Put another way: does the sphere of the mind extend as far as the object, or is it the object that penetrates into the mind?
8Transcendent Psychology, by contrast, affirms this other premise: the object perceived and the organ that is the seat of perception are “impregnated” in a continuum which is called mind.
9More clearly, it postulates the first hermetic principle, which says: The Universe is Mental.
10An observation directed to what both psychologies understand by mind will show us once again that the discrepancies answer solely to the particular point of view in which each places itself.
11In effect, “scientific” Psychology poses a double question expressing the two poles of the synthesis that concerns it. First pole: the mind reaches the object.
12Second pole: the object reaches the mind.
13Transcendental Psychology, on the other hand, based on the theory of opposites and on analogical reasoning, makes the synthesis that unites both poles: the universe is mind.
14With this the opposites disappear, and with them the difficulties of interpretation that occasion so many discussions in the field of philosophical speculation.
15Scarcely is this difficulty solved than a second arises at once, no less important: if the universe is mental, who or what expresses itself in this mind?
16This raises the grave problem of the existence or non-existence of a Being or of a principle from which the universe emanated.
17But before taking sides in so thorny a question, we shall open a brief parenthesis to establish a convention with the reader.
18In what follows we shall abbreviate the expression Transcendent Psychology with the initials t.p., just as we shall represent by the lower-case letters s.p. the simplification of what we have called — very capriciously, it is true — scientific Psychology.
19Let us continue.
20For s.p. the universe or sensible world is something like a symbiosis between matter and energy; whereas the biological unity called man contains a third principle: life, which does not seem reducible either to energy or to matter.
21Let us begin by noting an evident contradiction: if the world is a compound of matter and energy, then man is something distinct from the world, since he is composed besides of the principle of life, which does not seem to be contained in it.
22If he is contained in it, whence came life? And if he is not, how can the universe be something distinct from itself? (To be continued.) 12
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
The column ends by promising the subject a "sure improvement" and a cure that is "total and general". Set beside the same magazine's repeated insistence that readers verify rather than believe, the contrast is sharp: nothing here is offered for checking.
The second year opens by naming the model outright: Papus founded and directed L'Initiation in Paris, and it ran to a hundred pages a number. The Press now holds that review complete — 284 issues, 1888 to 1912 — so the comparison the editors draw can be checked. Their own first year was mimeographed at 250 copies; the Paris parent was a printed monthly of a hundred pages. The ambition is stated as a measurement, not a boast.
"In whose image and likeness our own was founded." This is the plainest statement of descent in the whole run: the Montevideo body is a deliberate refounding of Papus's Groupe Indépendant d'Études Ésotériques, publishing a review of the same name. Nº 6 p. 4 had named him as founder of both; here the magazine says what it is.
A precise piece of publishing history: eight months mimeographed at an average run of 250 copies, and from this number printed, with the run doubled and the page count nearly so. The change in the object itself is visible in the source — the earlier issues are retypes because no printed original survives to photograph.
The four founders named — Guaita, Papus, Barlet, Péladan — were the actual founders of the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross in Paris in 1888. The Press now holds three of the four: Papus's two treatises, *Guaita's Le Serpent de la Genèse (1891) and Péladan's Istar (1888), both acquired for this issue. Only Barlet is still missing — and Istar is itself listed in the sommaire of L'Initiation*'s very first number, October 1888.
The succession given — Guaita, then Barlet, then Papus — is accurate to the Order's own history, as is the role of Brother Teder (Charles Détré) as the link to the later French working under Bricaud and Chevillon. Note the date: Constant Chevillon was alive when this was printed in January 1943. He was murdered in March 1944, fourteen months later.
Two foundation dates for South America, given precisely: Cedaior creates the basis of the Martinist Order of South America from 1920, and installs the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross at Curitiba on 22 March 1927 — the equinox. The magazine is careful with these dates in a way it is not always careful with its quotations.
The barb is worth marking because it is evidence of a real quarrel: someone in Europe had written that Papus's work resembled "the class of the invertebrates" in the animal kingdom. The Montevideo editors cite it as their reason for independence — not doctrine, but an insult to the dead. Intra-Martinist politics surfacing in a magazine that usually keeps them out.
Lévi's tetrad again — knowing proved by willing, confirmed by daring, synthesised in keeping silent — here made the actual examination structure of the three Rose-Cross degrees, and glossed as an active silence. Its third appearance in the run, after Nº 3 p. 7 and Nº 6 p. 8, and the only one where it is put to administrative use.
This passage was raised by the automated screen for "nuestra raza". Read in full, "our race" here means the human race — the Hierarchs are described as watching over its needs and helping suffering humanity. It carries no hierarchy among races and makes no claim about races in the plural, which is what distinguishes it from the Nº 8 passage that was withheld. Retained, and recorded so the decision is auditable.
The Suddha Dharma Mandalam's public announcement of 1915 through Dr. Subramani Iyer is a real event, and the organisation is real, though its claim to an unbroken Himalayan hierarchy has been contested since it appeared. The dates given here — initiation 7 May 1915, further initiations in 1915 and 1923 — are the ones the movement's own literature gives.
The admission is the interesting part: there is at present no External Initiator. Jehel states that the authority died with Subrahmaniayananda in December 1924 and has not been conferred again — and then, on the next page, that he cannot initiate anyone into the order himself. A magazine claiming a Himalayan hierarchy also telling its readers that the door is shut is not doing what puffery does.
"AMAUTA" is the president of the Rosicrucian Fraternity of Uruguay — the body whose founder-president was named in Nº 1 p. 4 as Julio C. Hirian Corda, when his book entered the Order's library. The same institutional thread runs from the first issue's bibliography to this contributor's byline.
The therapeutic claims on this and the following page — that complete breathing will effect an improvement and cure no drug can, that soured milk and wholemeal bread will disinfect the intestines, that planetary aspects show deficient oxygenation — are reproduced as printed and are not endorsed. This is astrological diagnosis of a named living person's illness, offered as treatment, and no part of it should be acted on.
The reading turns on a number: fifteen conspirators, and so the fifteenth card of the Tarot, the Devil — pride, the temptation that threatens an initiate for as long as he is only an initiate. The card is correctly identified, and the interpretative move is the article's standard one, reading a count in the legend as a reference to the trumps.
Of the fifteen, twelve withdraw — the zodiacal number, "the part that feels natural harmony" — and three persist. The article gets a whole doctrine out of 15 = 12 + 3, and it is candid that this is interpretation rather than narrative.
The three blows are correctly given in their ritual order — the rule to the throat, the square to the breast, the mallet to the head — and are then read as three orders of injury to truth: to its form, to its life and law, and to its very principle. It is the most sustained piece of symbolic reading in the instalment.
"JUBELAM (a plural ending — take note)" is the writer catching something real in the ritual names and making it carry weight: the third assassin stands not for an individual fault but for organised, conscious enmity — "the black Magi, the Venal or Corrupted Associations". Whether the grammar bears the reading is another matter.
Raised by the automated screen for "LAS RAZAS". The sentence lists individuals, societies, nations and races as the kinds of agent that suffer the consequences of deforming truth. There is no hierarchy and no claim about races as such — the same reading on which the universalist passages of Nº 8 were retained. Retained, and recorded.
The instalment closes on a social reading of the legend: each stage of initiation is to bring the causes of social and individual ills to light and carry them before the powers, civil and initiatic, that can correct them. The Hiram story is being used as a warrant for public action, not withdrawal.
The classification is worked correctly against the chart built across Volume I: Jupiter and Venus in Cancer and the Wheel of Fortune in Capricorn give three bodies in cardinal signs; Sun, Moon and Mercury in Leo give three in fixed; Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Mars fall in common signs. The elemental sort that follows agrees with it.
"The TEN PLANETS of modern Astrology — that is, including Neptune, Uranus and the Wheel of Fortune." The Wheel of Fortune is a calculated point, not a body, and Papus had been quoted in Nº 3 refusing Uranus and Neptune outright. The course keeps its own counsel and counts all ten, without remarking on the disagreement with its authority.
The five accidental dignities are the traditional ones — angularity, direct motion, nearness to the midheaven, rising before the Sun, and mutual reception — and the article is honest that it applies only the first in the worked example. Its closing caution is a good one: two planets may be dignified in the same house without sharing a sign.
Wronsky returns — the byline that carried the Schopenhauer article in Nº 7 — now on transcendent psychology. Whoever wrote under it was the magazine's philosopher, and the two essays share a method: set two positions against each other, then dissolve the opposition by denying its terms.
The attribution of the word psychology to Melanchthon is the common story and is at best partial. The term is generally traced to Marulić early in the sixteenth century and to Goclenius in 1590; Melanchthon used it in lecturing but did not coin it. The article states a contested point as settled.
Wundt's Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie did appear in 1873–74, and taking it as the origin of psychology as a discipline is the orthodox view then and now. The roll of definitions that follows — Wundt, Roustan, Ladd, James, Lavaissière — is a real survey, not a decorative list.
And here the thread reaches Volume II. "It postulates the first hermetic principle, which says: The Universe is Mental" — the first Hermetic principle is the Kybalion's own phrasing for exactly this sentence. Wronsky is the same writer who in Nº 7 p. 20 credited it to the Emerald Tablet; here he uses the correct framing without naming the book. Across Nº 1, Nº 3, Nº 5, Nº 7 and now Nº 9, the magazine circles one borrowed maxim and lands on the right description at last.
The move is characteristic: where scientific psychology asks whether mind reaches object or object reaches mind, transcendent psychology answers that the question is malformed, since both are in one continuum. The same dissolution of a false alternative that the Schopenhauer article performed on subject and object in Nº 7.
The instalment ends on a genuine dilemma rather than an assertion: if the world is matter and energy and man contains life besides, then either life is in the world — in which case where did it come from — or man is something other than the world, which cannot be. It is left open, "to be continued".
The line given as Pythagoras's — "When injustice reigns, the wise man keeps silent and withdraws" — is not a quotation from the Golden Verses. The doctrine, however, is Pythagorean and the Press now holds it. The 1917 Golden Verses and Thomas Taylor's 1818 Life of Pythagoras were acquired for this issue; Iamblichus describes the school's discipline of silence, the subjugation of the tongue, and the arcana "kept with the greatest silence from being divulged to strangers", and quotes the Asclepius on the age in which "every divine voice is by a necessary silence dumb". That is precisely the writer's point — revelation withdraws where it cannot be rightly rendered. Greek to Latin to French to Spanish is a long road for a sentence; the teaching survives it even where the wording does not.