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121 COSMIC INFLUENCES AND REACTIONS OF LIVING BEINGS. (Continuation).
2Influence of colours — Chromotherapy By Pitágoras, S. I. Chromotherapy (from Chroma, colour, and Therapeia, therapeutics) is the name that Dr. Foveau de Courmelles has given to the therapeutics of mental, emotional and physical illnesses by the employment of colours.
3Chromotherapy is not a modern discovery, for it has been employed from the remotest epochs.
4We have already seen how the Chinese made certain colours correspond with certain organs of the body.
5In China itself and in the Caucasus for centuries, and in France since the fifteenth century, the sick with smallpox, roseola and scarlatina were cured by means of red light.
6Dr. Albert Garrigues has pointed out that in India, in the third Vedic period, there were used, above all for cutaneous affections, the Eclipta prosyrata, the colocynth (whose infusion is of golden yellow colour) and the Curcuma longa (whose infusion is yellow), to which indigo was added to obtain a green solution.
7In the seventeenth century, the Avignon physician Teodoro Desjardins cured his patients by means of solar rays condensed in water contained in bottles of various colours, mixed with water also contained in bottles of various colours and previously exposed to the lunar rays.
8This method, as we shall see further on, will be advocated anew by the moderns, among whom we mention Phasad Jha in India and Dr. Babbitt in the West.
9With the triumph of materialist ideas, this therapeutic system was more and more forgotten, but there have always been some who had faith in its efficacy and today, after having smiled a good deal over this method and having considered, as always, those who employed it charlatans, the men of science have had to yield before the great quantity of experiments confirming the real action and efficacy of colours upon the sick.
10Goethe already, in his Treatise on colours, wrote with reason: “To reach perfection in the art of colouring, the artist must consider the moral effects of colours, their physiological effects, their technical nature and, finally, the influence external circumstances exercise upon them.
11Colours act upon the soul: they can excite sensations in it, awaken emotions and ideas that rest us or agitate us and provoke sadness or joy.” In 1871, General Pleasanton extended to man the result of his experiments on plants and considered blue and “Mazarine Glass” (cobalt-blue glass) as the most efficacious remedies against all illnesses.
12In India, the Pandit Phasad Jha published an opuscule, “Chromotherapy”, which had many editions, in which he set forth his method of treatment by colours.
13This method consists in filling bottles of coloured glass and exposing them to the sun for a certain time.
14He
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 48 is the review's most Eastern issue to date: a Ramakrishna memorial, the Suddha Dharma Gita commentary, and Guénon's Vedanta-saturated Demiurge instalment fill most of its pages, with only Rouxel's music theory and the astrology course holding the Western line.
The reset masthead introduced in Nº 47 is retained unchanged: the collective 'Instructors and Brothers of Orders' formula, the currency notice, and the 1.80-dollar overseas price.
The SUMARIO prints the Ramakrishna author as 'Arnapakaka' while the article itself signs 'Amapadaka' — a compositor's scramble of the same lodge-name. The contents also show the run's serial discipline: three continuations (Gita commentary, Demiurge, chromotherapy) and one series concluded (Rouxel).
Read at session No. 270 of Papus Centre No. 5 on 15 February — Ramakrishna's birthday fell on 18 February 1836, and the text's 'l10 years since Chandramani gave birth' (the compositor set a letter ell before the digits) confirms the piece as a 110th-birthday commemoration, the Hindu counterpart of the Saint-Yves death-day lecture in Nº 47.
The frame is syncretic from the first line: the Lipikas and 'Lords of Karma' are Blavatsky's terms, the avatar-list runs Rama–Krishna–Buddha–Christ–Chaitanya, and Rama's torch-and-cup and Deva Nahusha come from Schuré's 'Great Initiates' — the lecturer is retelling Ramakrishna's life through the review's own composite canon rather than the Bengali sources.
The Kali prayer given here is a close Spanish rendering of Ramakrishna's recorded prayers to the Divine Mother as transmitted in the Ramakrishna Mission literature ('I want no fame, no psychic powers — only pure love for Thee'). The Ramakrishna Ashrama appears among the masthead's fraternal orders, so the group had direct access to Mission publications.
The eulogy breaks into free verse — 'Tenuous as a sigh, tender as a flower' — the same devotional-poem register the review's memorials reach for at their climax, as in the Saint-Yves invocation of Nº 47.
The three paths — Wisdom, Devotion, Action — are the classical jnana, bhakti and karma yogas; the lecturer's counsel that devotion is preferable 'while the feeling of personality endures' reproduces Ramakrishna's own teaching that bhakti is the path for this age.
The succession scene is historical: Narendranath Datta — Swami Vivekananda — was designated by Ramakrishna before his death in August 1886 ('he is a roaring blaze' is from the recorded sayings), and the closing detail, the Master dying with Kali's name three times on his lips, is from the Mission's account of his last night. The article ends with the mantra OM MANI PADME HUM — Tibetan Buddhist, not Bengali — one more layer of the review's syncretism.
Rouxel's 'Kabbalistic Theory of Music' here reaches its 'continuation and end'. Rouxel was a contributor to Papus's Paris 'L'Initiation' in the 1890s; the Montevideo review, which took its very name from that journal, is translating the French run's back catalogue for its own readers.
'Numbers govern the world' — the conclusion turns Pythagorean: music as the bridge (Kant is quoted for it) between physics and metaphysics, and the lost 'synthetic Science' founded on Number as the Kabbalah proper. This is the same doctrine of the One differentiating into the many that the review teaches through the Tarot's twenty-two keys and the Archeometer's correspondences.
The parallel columns — Music and Theology — map the fundamental, its octave and its fifth onto Father, Son and Holy Spirit, with the Latin Credo quoted clause by clause. The bracketed commentary is Rouxel's own; the review transmits the Latin as printed, slips included.
Chateaubriand's line on the three ('a fraction that is not engendered and engenders all the others') is from 'Le Génie du christianisme'. The article closes the series by declaring music 'human and consequently metaphysical' — the aesthetic apologetics of 1802 pressed into kabbalistic service.
Surya's judicial astrology course reaches Neptune, 'the planet of Divinity', ninth in his planet-by-planet march through the houses. The delineations are standard early-twentieth-century textbook astrology (Alan Leo's school), with the period's moralised vocabulary intact — 'effeminate', 'dissolute', mediumship as danger — transmitted as printed.
House-by-house planetary delineation in exactly this format — planet, house, 'well aspected' versus 'afflicted' — is the practical method of The Light of Egypt's astrological chapters; Surya's course is the Montevideo group's equivalent of that Hermetic manual, and the shared Anglo-American astrological vocabulary shows both drawing on the same tradition.
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With Neptune's twelve houses completed, only Pluto — discovered 1930, still absent from the course's canon — remains untaught; the course's planetary roster (Saturn through Neptune) is the classical-plus-Uranus-and-Neptune set of pre-war manuals.
The Suddha Dharma Mandalam was founded in Madras in 1915 by Sir Subramania Iyer ('Swami Subramanianda') with the theosophist T. M. Janardana; its edition of the Bhagavad Gita — attributed to the initiatic compiler 'Hamsa Yogi' — has 745 slokas in 26 chapters against the vulgate's 700 in 18, exactly the 745/620/57/67/1 distribution tabulated here. The review is serialising the Spanish version by 'G. Bruno' of the Mandalam's own commentary; the order also heads the masthead's list of fraternal bodies.
The anubandha-chatushtaya — subject, purpose, means and qualified aspirant — is the classical Sanskrit prologue-analysis applied by every Vedantic commentator; the Suddha synthesis compresses it to 'theme and aspirant', and the review's readers meet standard shastra method dressed in initiatic clothing.
The first verse of the Gita is read as pure allegory: Dharmakshetra and Kurukshetra as man's dense and subtle bodies, Kauravas and Pandavas as lower and higher nature, the whole question resolved into the Delphic KNOW THYSELF and 'as above, so below' — the Hermetic maxim welded directly onto the Sanskrit canon, which is the review's method in a single sentence.
The translator's footnote names names: 'It is known that René Guénon is anti-reincarnationist and anti-theosophist…' — the Montevideo circle knew exactly who 'Palingenius' was, and prints a signed dissent (the footnote defends reincarnation against him) while continuing to serialise his text. A remarkable document of critical transmission: the group publishes its source and its disagreement side by side.
The long quotations are from the Atmabodha ('Knowledge of the Spirit') attributed to Sankaracharya, which Guénon cites in the original French of 'Le Démiurge'; the rope-and-serpent illusion and the waking/dream/deep-sleep triad are Vedantic staples the review's readers would later meet again in its own courses.
Guénon's closing distinction between the higher and the lower Brahma — the latter 'nothing other than the Demiurge considered as the reflection of Being' — resolves the essay's whole argument: the creator-god of division is real only from inside the division. The review's own teaching on Maya and the two faces of the Absolute runs on the same rails.
The chromotherapy history is built from real figures: Foveau de Courmelles (French radiologist who coined the term), the red-light smallpox treatments of folk and medieval practice, General Augustus Pleasanton's 1871 blue-glass craze in Philadelphia, and Edwin Babbitt, whose 'Principles of Light and Color' (1878) is the fountainhead of Western colour-healing. Goethe's Farbenlehre supplies the epigraph-grade quotation.
The modern dossier continues with datable references: Regnault's colour experiments (1911–1924, Côte d'Azur médicale), the International College of Chromatics in England, Mangin's 1929 note to the Académie des Sciences, and the Lausanne radiesthesia congress of September 1934. The '1830' printed for Larvaron sits against the article's own chronology — likely 1930 — and is transmitted as printed with a Sic gloss.
The synthesis turns clinical colour-science into aura-reading: health as harmonic play of vibrations, illness as disharmony, and the clairvoyant diagnosis of mental, astral or physical origin. The three-body scheme is the same one the chromotherapy series established in Nº 47's twenty-point summary — the course is building a complete esoteric medicine.
The G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ plate stands unchanged from Nº 47, with Sister UPASIKA's Buddhism course still on the roster.
The Buenos Aires book lists are likewise unchanged: four Martinist Library titles at Publicidad 'Ateneo' and the Kier list pairing Sevaka with Sédir and Hartmann.