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1THE DEMIURGE (Continuation and end) By Palingenius IV After having characterised the three Worlds and the states of the being corresponding to them, and having indicated, so far as was possible, what the being liberated from the demiurgic dominion is, we must return once more to the question of the distinction between Good and Evil, to draw some consequences from the preceding exposition.
2First of all, we might be tempted to say this: if the distinction between Good and Evil is completely illusory, if it does not in reality exist, it must be the same with morality, for it is quite evident that morality is founded upon this distinction, which it essentially presupposes.
3That would be going too far; morality exists, but in the same measure as the distinction between Good and Evil — that is, for all that belongs to the domain of the Demiurge; from the universal point of view it would no longer have any reason for being.
4In effect, it can be applied only to action; now, action presupposes change, which is possible only in the formal or manifested; the World without form is immutable, superior to change and, consequently, to action, and that is why the being that belongs no more to the Empire of the Demiurge is without action.
5This shows that great care must be taken never to confuse the diverse planes of the Universe, because what is said of one might not be true of the other.
6Thus morality necessarily exists on the social plane, which is essentially the domain of action; but it can exist no longer when one considers the metaphysical or universal plane, because then there is no more action.
7This established, we must point out that the being who is superior to action possesses, nevertheless, the plenitude of activity; but it is a potential activity, an activity, then, that does not act.
8This being is, not immobile, as might unreasonably be said, but immutable, that is, superior to change.
9In effect, he is identified with Being, which is always identical to itself, according to the biblical formula: “Being is Being”.
10This should be set beside the Taoist doctrine, according to which the Activity of Heaven is non-acting; the Sage, in whom the Activity of Heaven is reflected, observes non-action.
11Nevertheless, this Sage, whom we have designated as the Pneumatic or the Yogi, can have the appearances of action, as the Moon has the appearances of movement when the clouds pass before her; but the wind that drives the clouds has no influence upon the Moon.
12In the same way, the agitation of the demiurgic World has no influence upon the Pneumatic.
13In this connection we can once more cite what Sankaratcharya said: “The Yogi, having crossed the sea of the passions, is united with Tranquillity and rejoices in the Spirit.
14“Having renounced those pleasures that are born of external perishable objects, and enjoying spiritual delights, he is calm and serene as the candle beneath the extinguisher, and rejoices in his own essence.
15“During his residence in the body he is not affected by its properties, as the firmament is not affected by what floats in its bosom; knowing all things, he remains unaffected by contingencies”.
16We can now understand the true meaning of the word Nirvana, of which so many false interpretations have been given; this word signifies literally extinction of the breath or of agitation — the state, then, of a being that is subject to no agitation,
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 49 is a devotional issue: Jehel's essay on Prayer opens it, the Suddha Dharma pages call the whole community to pray for a pilgrim in India, and the literary section closes with an elegy for a dead child. The doctrinal serials — Guénon's Demiurge (concluded) and the chromotherapy course — run between.
Masthead unchanged from Nº 47: the collective collaborators formula, the exchange-control notice, the 1.80-dollar overseas price.
The SUMARIO shows two of the masthead's fraternal orders now writing under their own banners — Suddha Dharma Mandalam and Maha Boddhi Sangha each head their own section — the review functioning as the shared organ of Montevideo's several Eastern-rite groups.
Jehel's 'La Oración' proceeds by numbered conclusions from a single epigraph by 'Sevananda' — prayer as the murmur of Divine Love in the heart. The essay's method — seven deductions, then a litany — is scholastic in form and devotional in content, the director's characteristic register.
The 'final key' is given by Zanoni's words to his wife — 'There are beings whose thoughts and feelings are constant prayers' — from Bulwer-Lytton's initiatic novel, which the circle knew intimately: Sevaka's own 'El Hijo de Zanoni' (a sequel) heads the Kier list on this issue's back cover.
→ thread:zanoni_bulwer_lytton
The closing rollcall — 'Masters like Papus, Philippe (AMO), Ramakrishna' — names Maître Philippe of Lyon (Nizier Anthelme Philippe, 1849–1905), Papus's own spiritual master, under the initials AMO by which the Martinist tradition and this review's earlier lineage diagrams designate him. The three names bind the essay's doctrine of prayer to the run's twin lineages, French and Hindu.
The astrology course pivots from houses to signs: having finished the planets-in-houses cycle (Saturn through Neptune, Nºs 42–48), Surya begins the planets-in-signs cycle again with Saturn, 'the planet of sorrow'. The delineations remain in the Alan Leo textbook mould.
'Situated at the 29 degrees of this sign, the seat of its exaltation' — Saturn's exaltation degree in Libra (the classical 21st degree is often given as 29 in Spanish-language manuals of the period); the course keeps the traditional dignities alongside its modern psychological vocabulary.
'The Pilgrim of the Full Moon' interrupts the Gita commentary by editorial decision — Jehel's footnote says so — to relay news from 'The Suddha Dharma' (Madras, last quarter of 1945): Sri Vasudeva Row, President of the Suddha Dharma Mandalam, was renouncing his office to walk into the interior of India seeking the order's hidden Elders.
The response in Montevideo: collective petitions and meditations in the 'little Temple' of the Guru Subrahmanyananda Ashrama — the Suddha community in Montevideo and Buenos Aires organised as an ashrama under the deceased founder's continuing patronage, with reported manifestations of his presence and a message from Vasudeva Row himself. The page is primary evidence of the group's devotional practice, not just its reading.
The appointed night is 'the Full Moon of May' — Wesak, the Buddha's festival, which the theosophical world held to be the annual convergence of the Masters. Jehel dates the piece 14-4-46, one lunar month ahead: the review is coordinating a hemisphere-distant act of collective prayer to a precise astronomical hour, the same time-discipline its planetary-hours praxis teaches.
Upasika's 'The Way of the Buddha' brings her G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ course ('The doctrine of the Buddha', on the back-cover roster since Nº 45) into print under the Maha Boddhi Sangha banner, signed 'Bikku'. The opening moves — Buddhism as philosophy not religion, Buddhagama, Vibhajja 'those who analyse' — frame the Dhamma in the review's analytic idiom.
The space-meditation — suspend the senses, hold 'Nothing now exists for me', then eliminate space itself — walks the reader through the formless-jhana sequence (infinite space, then nothingness) as a reasoned psychological experiment rather than a scriptural citation: the course's signature translation of contemplative technique into introspective argument.
'I am not an organism; I possess an organism' — the anatta analysis lands on the vocabulary of the review's Western courses (the I as owner of its instrument), and the section closes with the Pali homage formula transliterated as the compositor could manage it: Namo Tassa Bhagavato...
The Demiurge reaches its fourth and final section. Guénon draws the moral consequence — morality is real within the Demiurge's domain and meaningless beyond it — and reaches for the Taoist wu wei: the Sage's non-action that is the plenitude of activity. In La Gnose this essay ended Guénon's debut sequence; the review has now serialised it entire, across four numbers.
'Nirvana, very far from being annihilation… is the plenitude of Being' — the conclusion the review's Buddhist course (three pages earlier in this same issue) will need: the two serials, gnostic and Buddhist, converge on the same doctrine of the formless, and the issue's architecture lets the reader watch them agree.
The chromotherapy course turns clinical: diagnosis before treatment, with the aura as the ideal instrument and — for those without astral vision — face, nails, sclerotic, urine and faeces as colour-indicators. The Mars-red / opposite-blue example applies the planetary correspondences the course laid down in earlier instalments.
The physical methods catalogue is the practical heart of the series: painted rooms, coloured dress, window glass, mineral-salt crystals, colour-corresponding foods, and solarised water — bottles exposed 4 hours minimum, dosed 30 grammes each half hour — the Babbitt/Phasad Jha technique of Nº 48 now given posology.
Astral and mental chromotherapy — projecting visualised colour or dynamised thought into the patient's aura — are underwritten by Calligaris again: his 'Telepatía e radio-onde cerebrali' is cited with page numbers for the plaque that transmits red from 1 metre to 10 kilometres. The course wants its subtle-plane therapeutics to stand on laboratory paper.
The colour-blocking experiments yield an affect-lexicon — violet for pain, blue for pleasure, dark red spotted for excitation, grey for calm — which the course reads as proof that feeling, thought and colour are one vibratory fact: the theoretical bridge to the ten conclusions that follow.
'Pasan los Ángeles' is by Hérib Campos Cervera (1905–1953), the great Paraguayan poet of the Generación del 40, writing from Asunción with an epigraph from Pablo Neruda; the dedication — 'for Lydia and Augusto, in the hour of the passing of their Son' — makes it a consolation elegy. That the review could print a new poem by the leading Paraguayan modernist, dated two months before publication, shows its literary reach across the Río de la Plata.
'The Angels are ours; they are our broken wings' — the poem's angels are the dead and the unlived selves at once, sailing 'the nocturnal channels of the blood'. Its placement after the chromotherapy course's aura-doctrine is an editorial rhyme: the issue ends where clinical vibration turns into elegy.
Signed at Asunción, 15 March 1946 — six weeks before this May number; the review's literary section is running on a fast exchange with the Paraguayan capital.
The G∴E∴I∴D∴E∴ plate unchanged; Upasika's course, whose print debut fills this issue's Buddhist pages, still stands on the roster.
Back cover unchanged: the Ateneo Martinist list and the Kier Rose Cross list — the latter's 'El Hijo de Zanoni' by Sevaka closing the loop with the Zanoni quotation in this issue's opening essay.