The masthead plate continues unchanged into Year VI — including the compositor's 'URUGUAY0'. The stereotype survived the year-change untouched.
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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 VI, Nº 58 · February 1947
Gate passedSeeker and aboveOperator 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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1THE JOURNEY OF RABBI JOSHUA By Hibur Maaciot
2An obsession besieged Rabbi Joshua Ben Levi without cease. He ardently desired to see the prophet Elijah, and to obtain that grace of heaven he persevered a long time in fasting and prayer. Heaven heard the supplication. The prophet manifested himself before him in all his majesty, saying to him:
3—Here I am. I am disposed to satisfy your desire. What do you ask of me? Rabbi Joshua replied:
4—I desire to accompany you on your journeys through the world, O prophet!, and to see what you do, to instruct myself by the acts of your wisdom.
5—How imprudent you are! — said Elijah —. You will be incapable of bearing the spectacle of my acts, for they exceed your understanding.
6—I promise, — said the rabbi —, not to importune you with my questions. I only desire to see what you do.
7—I consent to your accompanying me, — the prophet then declared —, but on the express condition that at no moment will you question me about the motives of my conduct. I shall leave you at the first question you address to me.
8Thus agreed, they set out on their way. They came first to the house of a poor man who possessed no other good than a cow. That man and his wife were seated on the threshold of the door of their house. Both rose to their feet on catching sight of the travellers. They welcomed them with joy, installed them in the most comfortable room and served them drink and food. The travellers passed the night in the house, and early in the morning, as they were preparing to resume their way, Elijah asked God to make the cow die. The animal succumbed instantly.
9Rabbi Joshua, stupefied and indignant at once at that act, said to himself:
10—How is this? Here are two poor people who have practised toward us the duty of hospitality, and for all recompense the prophet makes their only cow die... In truth, it is a thing that revolts one.
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
The back-cover lists stand as in Nº 50 — Castellot and Pryse in place, the PUBLISHED / IN PREPARATION split unchanged after eight months: wartime paper economics kept 'in preparation' a long category.
Nº 58 opens Year VI and survives, like Nº 50, on original 1947 paper — a colour scan of the actual booklet (the archive holds a second, two-up spread scan of the same stapled copy). Between Nº 50 (June 1946) and this number, seven issues (51–57) are lost from the archive: Jehel's symbolism series has jumped from instalment I to instalment VIII.
The SUMARIO shows the review's La Gnose vein now running rich: beside the continuing courses stand Palingenius (Guénon) on the production of numbers AND — unannounced here — a closing note signed Matgioi. The literary part turns Hasidic with 'The Journey of Rabbi Joshua'.
The distribution directory has grown since Nº 50: Rio de Janeiro adds the Livraria Freitas Bastos (Rua 13 de maio 74), and Mexico City adds two more bookshops — 'El Volador' of J. Medina and that of Evaristo Vivanco. Ten countries, now sixteen addresses: the network expanded through the second half of 1946.
Jehel's series reaches VIII: 'Horizon, Vertical and Triangle — SECRET HUMAN AND COSMIC MEASURES' (the header's 'Hornzonte' is the compositor's). The preamble is a discipline of reading: something 'cannot be SAID, yet no one is barred from finding it through Meditation' — the article as veil made deliberately thin.
The method is anthropometric Kabbalah: the Vitruvian datum (arm-span equals height) generates the TAU — 'the mysterious symbol we used in the Egyptian Temples' — from the naked standing body itself. The 1.64/1.70 'average man' and the 1:300 scale drawing put the sacred measure in the language of the anatomy manual.
The full-page diagram is the series' master figure (extracted to the imagery layer): the Tau inscribed in the equilateral triangle, with legend printed beneath — vital horizon H–H2, material limit M–M1, astral limit D–V, the divine triangle ADV, navel O, axis-crossing C, cranial limit F. The text even remarks that the plate's reduction 'changes the measures to hide certain figures' — concealment as printed fact.
Man discovers the two oblique lines through his fingertips and with them the equilateral triangle that 'seems merely to contain him' — then the reversal: he is always with his PARTICULARISED UNIVERSAL TRIANGLE, because the TAO is present in all. The pun TAU/TAO ('todo') carries the whole doctrine.
The demonstration runs on exact thirds and halves: navel O divides the triangle at the third (material/astral limit), H2–D gives the second third (astral/divine limit), the arm-line halves the total height, and H2–T cuts the vertical at F, the crown. The body verifies the cosmology by measurement — the 'living key' the series promised.
The five key-points spell ADAMaH — A, D, A1, M, H — the Hebrew for 'earth/Adam': the diagram's letters were placed to yield the name, as the preamble warned ('every Letter placed in a determinate spot has a particular reason'). The article ends with a doxology of Number and the date 11-1-1947.
The astrology course reaches Neptune in the signs — completing the planet begun in the houses back in Nº 48. With Aries through Pisces delineated here, Surya's sign-cycle now covers Saturn, Jupiter (Nº 50) and Neptune.
Neptune in Cancer 'puts one in contact with the higher forces of nature… one may reach great heights through devotion' — the course consistently reads Neptune as the mystic's planet, its afflictions running to mediumship, obsession, drugs and drink: the period's spiritualist dangers catalogued as astrological pathology.
Neptune in Scorpio's affliction — 'a propensity to drown by accident or deliberately' — and in Libra the 'clandestine, unconventional and illegitimate relations': the moralised delineation idiom of the Leo school, transmitted whole.
Neptune in Aquarius draws the course's most sympathetic portrait — visionaries 'advanced with respect to their epoch… dangerous to society', heralds of unsuspected fields — a self-portrait of the review's own readership, drawn in the idiom of affliction and aspect.
The Suddha Gita commentary resumes under the order's OM seal (the header sets 'MANDALAN'): Samikaranam, 'the harmonisation of apparent opposites', is unpacked in five aspects with their technical names — the commentary at its most scholastic.
The illustrations ladder the ordinary mind into synthesis: 'this is bad and this is good' resolved into 'all is necessary' (Samavijnanam); preference resolved into 'all can be dear to me' (Sama Sankalpa); choice of tasks into 'all that MUST be done shall be done by me' (Samakarma). Ethics as the harmonisation of opposites, verse-anchored.
The synthesis-verse concordance — one verse cited for each of the twenty-four chapters across the four sections — is the Suddha recension's internal cross-referencing apparatus, reproduced entire. The 745-sloka Gita reads itself.
The digression defends the title 'Bhagavad Gita' philologically: Bhagavati Vidya in the Bhargava Bharata, the Chandogya and Svetasvatara Upanishads cited, 'many saints have been called Bhagavan' — the commentary arguing its scripture's name with the full apparatus of Sanskrit learning as the Montevideo reader receives it.
Only this Gita, the argument runs, treats both the Manifest and the Unmanifest, and realisation comes 'through the study and experience of the manifested aspects… Atma and Prakriti with their 24 tattvas' — the same both-worlds doctrine Guénon's Demiurge series reached by the gnostic route; the issue's Eastern and Western serials keep agreeing.
The footnote apparatus is at its densest here: the Adhyatma Sabda Ratnarnava's five Vidyas and its 48 polysemous technical words, numbered — with the printed numbering skipping from 40 to 43, transmitted as printed. The compositor also numbers the footnote (7) where the text calls (1).
Why did the knowing king still ask? — because knowledge under egotism still feels limitation: the commentary reads Dhritarashtra's question as the signature of the aspirant who knows the doctrine and remains bound, against Kurukshetra/Dharmakshetra as Svatantrya and Paratantrya — sovereignty and dependence — in the footnotes.
Arjuna 'in his character of representative of Humanity' asks for the discipline 'of the highest importance for the race' — raza here is humanity entire, the theosophical usage; kept as self-cosmology under the estate's rule. The victory of Kurukshetra is glossed as the ascendancy of Suddha Bhagava over Prakrita and Atmiya Bhava.
Arjuna as Nara, 'the representative of the human race', judging war an inescapable duty to restore a decadent Dharma — the commentary immediately marks BOTH his war-ardour and his recoil as stained (Svartha): the text refuses to bless either militancy or pacifism, which is its answer-in-advance to the 'gospel of violence' question two pages on.
The instalment ends on the Upodghata's live question — 'Is the Gita merely a GOSPEL OF VIOLENCE (Himsalaksharkam), improvised for the occasion?' — printed in February 1947, months before India's independence and partition, when that question was anything but antiquarian.
A full advertising page for the group's own publishing: the Year-1 material of the review republished as a 300-page BOOK with engravings of 'the Masters PAPUS, MAHARISHI, AMO, WILLERMOZ' and portraits of Jehel and Asuri Kapila; the complete collection offered from No. 1; and Papus's 1200-page Tratado Metódico announced for the press. The review has become a publishing house.
Palingenius returns: 'Considerations on the Production of Numbers' is Guénon's 'Les conditions...' — properly 'La production des nombres' material from La Gnose — here concluded. The Schin-in-Tetragrammaton passage (Iod-He-Schin-Vau-He, the Pentagram on the Flaming Star) restates Lévi's pentagrammaton within Guénon's number-metaphysics.
The essay cross-references its own serial history — 'we have said in our study on the Demiurge' — knitting the two La Gnose translations into one course: five the individual, six Creation (the Seal of Solomon's two ternaries), seven Formation (Bereschith's six letters and the seven Elohim as planetary spheres).
Eight as material realisation and equilibrium — the world 'not a place but a state or modality of being' — nine as the circumference of Multiplicity, 'the realised zero': the sequence builds each number as a phase of manifestation, with its static and dynamic geometrical figures given like theorems.
The cycles beyond ten — circles that must not close, becoming 'successive turns of a helix traced upon a cylinder', ends and beginnings never in the same plane — is Guénon's spiral figure of indefinite succession, promised a sequel on 'the geometrical representation of evolution'.
The conclusion mounts from Being (Unity) through the Zero to Non-Being, 'that is, to the Absolute' — the precise doctrinal point the issue's closing Matgioi note will take up: the two texts were printed as a pair.
'The Journey of Rabbi Joshua' retells the classic theodicy legend of Rabbi Joshua ben Levi and Elijah (the Hibbur Maasiyot tradition — the byline 'Hibur Maaciot' IS the mediaeval story-collection's name, worn as a pseudonym). The tale is the Jewish twin of the Khidr–Moses episode of Qur'an 18.
The three nights — the poor man's cow, the rich man's wall, the two cities blessed with many chiefs or one — grade hospitality against hidden justice; the review's readers, schooled on 'apparent opposites harmonised' two articles earlier, receive the same doctrine as narrative.
Elijah's revelation speaks in proverbs — 'with many pilots the ship is wrecked'; Ben Sira on the single wise guide — and closes on Job's question forbidden to man. The P.S. that follows belongs not to the tale but to the Numbers essay: an editorial splice the page-break makes visible.
The explanatory note is signed MATGIOI — Albert de Pouvourville, Guénon's elder collaborator on La Gnose and the transmitter of the Taoist tradition to that circle. 'Our Master and collaborator Matgioi': Khien and Khouen (the Qian and Kun of the I Ching) given as the Binary under the nameless Tao, with Lao-tse quoted. The Montevideo review is reprinting the innermost La Gnose network — Guénon and Pouvourville side by side, in Spanish, in 1947.
The Mascheville perfume advertisement returns unchanged from Nº 50 — Ganesha, the eight scents, the two-hour meditation coil, orders to Léo de Mascheville at Casilla 317.
The Ateneo de Buenos Aires — celebrating its first anniversary — announces a literary contest of spiritualist orientation, rules printed in full: pseudonymous entries, sealed envelopes, deadline 30 April 1947, themes from 'The eternity of time and the infinity of space' to 'Cycles of evolution and no deaths'. A snapshot of the porteño spiritualist public sphere the review served.
The NOTICIARIO's quiet bombshell: Dr. O. Bernardi resigns irrevocably as Member of the Gidee Directorate, ITS PROFESSOR OF ANDROGONY, and EDITOR-IN-CHIEF of La Iniciación — the three posts the masthead and back cover assign to 'Pitágoras'. The next section confirms it: V∴H∴ Pitágoras resigns as Secretary of the Martinist Grand Council and Phil∴ Desc∴ of Papus Centre No. 5, passing to 'Free Inactive Martinist'. The review has, in effect, printed the civil identity of its chief pseudonymous author — and lost, in one month, its editor, the chromotherapy course, and the Centre's secretary.
The news pages now carry FIVE fraternal sections, each under its seal: the Martinist Order (deaths of Hagal — an original collaborator of the review — and of Sehvet's wife; reform suggestions due 28 February; the President's pointedly 'private' Argentine journey), the Suddha Dharma (99 disciples across nine practices), the Maha Boddi Sangha, the NEW Sri Ramana Ashrama section under Swami Asuri Kapila — the seal's first appearance, extracted — and the Kabbalistic Rose Cross announcing Papus's Tratado at Kier with scientific annotations by 'PTGRS|5-F': Pitágoras's last labour under his cipher.
The GEIDE plate holds the Nº 50 state — timetables, S. Devi, La Plata at Calle 4 — with Pitágoras's Wednesday Androgony course still printed, though the news pages two leaves earlier record his resignation: the plate lagged the month's events.
QA gate report
- PASS G1 coverage 263/263
- PASS G11 alignment 253/253
- PASS G0 source kind 1/1
- PASS G6 page anchoring 263/263
- PASS G3 bracket legality 263/263
- PASS G10 numeric fidelity 263/263
- PASS G2 no unanchored English 263/263
- PASS G4 no pipeline scaffolding 263/263