October 1945; the last surviving number of Year IV.
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La Iniciación: Mensuario del Grupo Independiente de Estudios Esotéricos
The Initiation: Monthly of the Independent Group of Esoteric Studies
La Iniciación · Año IV, Nº 42 · October 1945
Gate passedSeeker and aboveModern transcription — not a facsimileOperator ruling: no copyright implications asserted for this work. Uruguay life+50 (Leo d. 1970 → PD 2020); US URAA restoration assessed at ~2041 in the collection plan and overridden by the operator.
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1Lyon, November 28, 1924. Dear Master and Sir: I inform you, as I promised, that I repeated your experiment concerning the transmutation of silver into gold.
2On a quantity of 125 grammes of virgin silver I put, at the rate of one ounce per pound, orpiment, and 1/3 of kermes — that is, 7 gr. 5 of orpiment and 2 grammes of kermes.
3I heated the silver to 500/600º for half an hour, and brought the temperature of the furnace to 1150/1200º for four consecutive hours. [Sic: the second figure is printed l200 with a letter ell.]
4After this cooking, I added 7 grammes of orpiment, 3 grammes of kermes and 5 grammes of sal ammoniac, 5 grammes of saltpetre, 5 grammes of borax, as well as 200 grammes of grated soap — the whole amalgamated, placed in a new crucible, upon which I poured the molten silver; and I put the whole back in the furnace for 3 hours. [Sic: the Spanish prints ama1gamado, with a numeral.]
5I afterwards cooked the silver for 7 consecutive hours, and obtained a white ingot (the added elements are the cause of the loss of colour of the ingot, primitively yellow).
6My assayer, Louis Gagneux of Lyon, found traces of gold, but could not weigh them.
7He told me, however, that the quantity of gold there may be in this ingot would be approximately 1/4 of a gramme.
8Deign to accept, etc. P. A. Lestrade, 136, Route de Crémieu, Lyon — Villeurbanne. I have likewise effected the assays mentioned above, indicated by the wet way: treating the substances, intimately mixed, with pure nitric acid at 40º, first cold, then boiling, for many days.
9The substance not dissolved in the nitric acid, of blackish aspect, was treated with aqua regia, first cold, then boiling, likewise for many days, until the dissolution of almost all the deposit.
10Then the liquor was evaporated in a bain-marie, treated with distilled water, filtered, and submitted to the ordinary reagents of gold, which set in evidence the presence of this metal.
11To obtain more considerable yields it would doubtless be opportune to make gold intervene as a ferment, introducing a small, minutely measured quantity into the mixture of silver, arsenic and antimony.
12This falls, moreover, within the theory of Le Brun de Virloy on the growth of metals.
13METALLIC GROWTH. The metal whose growth is desired serves, in some manner, as a ferment, a cell — as in the case of the growth of crystals. For example, to obtain gold, a small quantity of gold must be placed, which will determine the atomic change sought and will serve as centre for a group identical to its own nature.
14Thus, I precipitated a minimal quantity of gold by a solution of ferrous sulphate; and it was only after many days that the solution treated by the ferrous sulphate no longer gave the deposit of gold.
15The precipitation of gold was more abundant and more continuous than · 21
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Masthead stereotype unchanged.
Six articles; Lorelair returns to open the number with her prophecy's reckoning.
The forecast scored: Lorelair's June 1944 prediction — peace visible only "from the end of September to October of this year onward" — is recalled and claimed, the war having ended in August-September 1945. The Nº 29 loading already carries the forward edge to this article; here is its landing. The SUMARIO drops Neptune from her title; the article restores it.
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The article's injunction after victory: "Nor must he permit feelings of defeat or of victory. Only one word must reign: PEACE!" — the review's first postwar number setting reconciliation as practice, closing on "Love one another".
The SUN through the twelve houses — the fourth planet of the reference series; the sixth house named its worst seat, the tenth its surest.
The twelfth house's close: the Sun there "also inclines toward occultism" — the series' habit of ending each planet on the esoteric register.
"Desire" closes on the four powers: TO WILL TO KNOW, TO WILL TO KEEP SILENT, TO WILL TO DARE, TO WILL TO WILL — the Sphinx's to-know/to-dare/to-will/to-keep-silent recast with QUERER as the operator; Mabel Collins's "Light on the Path" quoted; signed only "La Plata".
The Astral Plane page's meditation text — "The Initiator is not a human Being, and the Path is the perfect way of living" — with its two purifying practices in capitals; the praxis layer carries the passage.
The Gita Bashya synthesis resumes: the three invocation verses, Krishna and Arjuna as members of the Spiritual Hierarchy, and AHAMSA — "I AM THAT" — as the Prachina Hamsas' office.
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Why does Vyasa visit the blind King? Compassion for his son, and the Master's duty — the introduction's narrative frame treated as initiation-doctrine: the King as the disciple who cannot yet be taken directly.
The three discipleship grades return with their full Sanskrit apparatus (Jnana Dipa, Viveka, Vairagya, Tapas) and Arjuna's "I am THY disciple. Save me, O Lord" — the number's central practice text, carried by the praxis layer.
Sanjaya's tutorship of the King — Aparaprakriti and Paraprakriti, the Gayatri as the key, the war as "an incident already foreseen" — the S.D.M.'s Gita reading turning the epic's frame-story into a manual of spiritual direction.
The unsigned coda states the three aims of Yoga — know Brahman, know the purpose of individual existence, co-operate in the divine plan — the tidiest summary of the Mandalam's programme the run has printed.
Jollivet Castelot arrives: Papus's collaborator, President of the Alchemical Society of France, translated from Le Voile d'Isis (April 1925) with a full editorial biography — Hyperchimie, Le Rose Croix, La synthèse de l'or. The estate's French-occult shelf gains its chemistry wing; the run's alchemy coverage now has an author with a laboratory.
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Becquerel's physics folded back into Hermes: "present-day science returns to the ancient doctrine of the hermetists… the Grand Man of the Kabbalah" — Castelot's standing move, and the reason the review adopted him.
Castelot's polemical voice survives translation intact: "My God, how clear all this is! And yet, when one of these gentlemen sees white, another sees black" — the alchemist mocking the physicists' confusion over disintegration, 1925.
The hermetist atom: structure as masculine-feminine affinity, "the primordial and absolutely universal law" — set beside Thomson and Rutherford as an equal hypothesis; atoms and stars under identical laws.
The five recipes for gold — thallium minus one alpha, lead minus two alphas and a beta — Rutherford's transmutation results rewritten as alchemical recipes, then dismissed for their "deplorable" yield in favour of the chemical way.
The Lestrade letter, Lyon, 28 November 1924: 125 grammes of virgin silver, orpiment and kermes, the furnace at 1150/1200º, and an assayer's verdict of unweighable traces "approximately 1/4 of a gramme" — the run's most detailed laboratory protocol, printed as testimony.
The Appeal to the Young Chemists: distrust "fashionable theories, algebrism à outrance and the magister dixit… The future of Chemistry is not confined, thank God, to the laboratories of the Sorbonne" — Castelot's manifesto closing the last surviving number of Year IV.
Castelot's critique of infinite divisibility — "the ion and the electron: might they not correspond rather to vital manifestations… of the atomic being?" — hylozoism offered as physics; the era's occult-scientific frontier in one question.
GIDEE prospectus stereotype at page 23.
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Library back cover and imprint close Year IV's surviving run.
QA gate report
- PASS G1 coverage 337/337
- PASS G11 alignment 313/313
- PASS G0 source kind 1/1
- PASS G6 page anchoring 337/337
- PASS G3 bracket legality 337/337
- PASS G10 numeric fidelity 337/337
- PASS G2 no unanchored English 337/337
- PASS G4 no pipeline scaffolding 337/337