Fetching
One moment.
13rd) To arrive at the full, sure, firm conviction that THE ONLY REAL END of the physical existence of humans is: one more opportunity, repeated in each "life" (incarnation), of CULTIVATING, EVER MORE CONSCIOUSLY, one’s "Body of Glory" — that is, the SUPERIOR PART OF THE SOUL, the only one that can come to SERVE as sound and pure expression and instrument of the DIVINE SPIRIT that dwells in every form. This point alone requires years and years of the MOST DIVERSE EXPERIENCES, so that this may not be something the individual "accepts as probable, possible, logical, etc.", but that he decide to LIVE IT AND PROVE IT BY HIS ACTS.
24th) To arrive at the full, sure, firm assurance that each one of us, although endowed with relative liberty, with a certain autonomy or free will and, FOR THAT VERY REASON, with the POSSIBILITY OF MERIT (Progress) and of RESPONSIBILITY, IS WORTH NOTHING SAVE BY HIS ACTION TOWARD OTHERS, BY SERVICE TO OTHERS AND "BY HIS EFFORT OF SELF-SURPASSING", provided this be done exclusively or principally with the intention of SERVING OTHERS BETTER.
35th) To arrive, later, at the full, sure, firm assurance that WE ARE HELPED, DIRECTED (with whip and hook — that is, both to impel us to act and to try to prevent us from acting when we go "against" what ought to be) and to arrive at the DESIRE TO COLLABORATE WITH THE HIGHER WILL.
46th) ...(And I shall stop at "six" for today...) to arrive at being able once more to enter a TEMPLE with the body, the soul and the spirit (that is, at least the partial spiritual consciousness) more in accord with what the word TEMPLE contains: A PLACE IN WHICH WE SEEK TO RE-LIGATE OURSELVES WITH THE HIGHER, toward the Divine.
5From these general considerations may easily be deduced all the reasons for the orientation that has been given to our Venerable Order. But, to come to find them (though our rituals and regulations are clear in that sen-
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 62 (June 1947) is the third original-paper issue in the archive, and the most doctrinally consequential of the three: the President of the Martinist Grand Council sets out, over twelve pages and under his own signature, what the Order is FOR. A previous owner's ink signature crosses the cover masthead.
The book lists stand unchanged since Nº 50 — a year of 'in preparation' — though the news pages of this very issue announce Papus's Tratado as at the printer's.
The distribution directory is unchanged from Nº 58's expanded state: sixteen addresses across ten countries, the two Mexico City bookshops and Rio's Freitas Bastos still in place.
Jehel's symbolism series has reached instalment XI — three numbers on from Nº 58's VIII, so 59, 60 and 61 (lost from the archive) carried IX and X. The head-piece is the Kabbalistic Rose Cross pentagram first extracted from Nº 50.
The law stated in capitals — every COMPLETE symbol is inevitably SYMMETRICAL — is the series' governing principle, and the reason the right triangle of the earlier instalments must now be doubled: the asymmetric figure is a half-truth, and the reader is told to ask what whole it is half of.
'The Great TAO (Divinity, Universe) or the Tau (human being or every existent form)' — the pun that carried instalment VIII returns as the hinge of the equilateral triangle: three aspects, inseparable and perfectly balanced. The warning against reading the three sides as a SEQUENCE (a, b, c — first, second, third) is the article's sharpest methodological point: succession is what stops the student of symbols from finding the key.
The triangle is never a container but a scheme: 'every equilateral triangle must always and ONLY be considered as the constitutive and functional scheme by which A CENTRAL CONSCIOUSNESS works, acts and reveals itself to itself' — sited at the centre of figure, the cardiac centre in man, the astral or MORAL equilibrium point in a universe.
The first named triangle: ONE GOD unmanifested, with sides Seidad (Beingness), Gnosis (self-knowledge) and Kinos (action). The coinages are the review's own — Greek-Latin hybrids for the three faculties — and they anchor the four-triangle ladder that follows.
The third triangle names the sides FATHER-MOTHER, MOTHER-SON and HOLY SPIRIT — the Christian Trinity redrawn as relations rather than persons, each side a bond between two terms rather than a term itself. This is precisely the anti-sequential reading the article demanded two pages earlier, applied to the most familiar triad of all.
The meditation closes on the vertiginous image of God's own consciousness 'made of the sum of countless fragmentary consciousnesses', offering to the Consciousness of ANOTHER UNIVERSE the spectacle of one God fulfilling his mission — and seeking the consciousness of it 'in every atom of his Universal Existence'. AMEN, and 'to be continued'.
The astrology course turns a corner: having finished the planets in the houses (through Nº 48) and in the signs (Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune), Surya now begins the MUTUAL ASPECTS — the Sun with each other planet. A serial designed to outlast the review.
The Sun–Moon conjunction delineation carries a striking clause: if the conjunction is also a solar eclipse 'and the child so born survives' — the period's astrological fatalism at its bluntest, and a reminder of infant mortality as an assumed background.
Sun–Uranus 'contrary to social conventions, a lover of free love and prone to divorce and scandals' — and in a woman's chart both good and bad aspects 'make marriage unhappy and provide illegal unions'. The double standard is explicit in the source and transmitted as printed.
Sun–Neptune afflicted brings contact with 'the beings of the invisible world' but attracts 'the undesirable elements such as may be observed in ordinary spiritist séances' — the review drawing its habitual line between disciplined initiatic work and popular spiritism, in the same issue whose news pages catalogue a dozen Paris spiritist societies with evident warmth.
The centrepiece: 'Practical Teachings of Martinism — How to face the road toward Christianity', signed by Jehel as PRESIDENT OF THE GRAND COUNCIL. He opens by defending the Order's 'glass politics' (política de cristal): unlike other societies that hide internal difficulty, this one publishes its problems, reforms, progress and partial failures — closed Groups, resignations — in the review. The preceding issues bear him out.
The two questions put to the Grand Council are the perennial ones of any esoteric body: East or West, and breadth or depth. Jehel answers the first here, quoting Papus — 'The Martinist Order is a Christian Chivalry' — and the 1939 reorganisation as the Martinist Order of South America, whose declared end was to diffuse Christian Esotericism and the Practice of Charity.
The startling admission from the head of the Order: 'I do NOT believe in the value of the intellectual teaching of the Christic doctrine… To form érudits in biblical matters, to manufacture theologians, seems to me neither useful nor desirable.' The Christian end is affirmed and the textual means rejected in the same breath.
'All of us martinists of the white race, with very few exceptions, received a religious education, Catholic or Protestant, in childhood' — a demographic statement about the Order's own membership, offered to explain why catechetical instruction would be redundant for them. Descriptive of the group's own composition rather than a claim about any people; kept under the estate's excision rule, and worth reading beside the review's simultaneous work of translating Sanskrit and Buddhist material for that same readership.
The six-point ladder is the article's practical core, and the first rung is empirical: know your own constitution 'and verify personally that you have a body, a soul and a spirit' — without the vanity of believing yourself notable for having rediscovered you can partly manage your stomach, mind, heart or psyche 'as you manage your hand and your feet: imperfectly, only with part of the consciousness of the act'.
Point four is the ethical hinge: the individual 'IS WORTH NOTHING SAVE BY HIS ACTION TOWARD OTHERS, BY SERVICE TO OTHERS AND BY HIS EFFORT OF SELF-SURPASSING' — and the self-surpassing counts only if done in order to serve others better. Point six recovers the etymology of TEMPLE as the place where we RE-LIGATE ourselves to the higher: religion read as re-binding, the Order's whole programme in a word.
The survey's oddest entry: the 'Centres Bodha', said to have been created in 1934 under the High Council of the Great Esoteric Sanctuaries of Chygatzeh (Shigatse, Tibet) and directed by a Hutulktu — the Paris Tibetan-authority claim reported without comment, beside quite verifiable groups.
The prescription for a 'life ASSORTED in action' — professional or household work, an intellectual life however small, an ideal life, and a mystical life running from solitary prayer to collective ceremony — is the review's clearest statement that initiation is not a withdrawal from ordinary life but a demand that ordinary life be complete. The parenthetical '(the ladies)' fixes the period's assumption about who keeps a household.
The reincarnation passage — that within the maturing individual there are 'being evoked his past incarnations: as a black man, as a yellow man, as a red man', glossed immediately as 'as a member he was of other civilisations… of other religions… of other sects or initiations' — is theosophical self-cosmology in the service of an argument FOR unity: the thinning of the 'Veil of multiplicity' that makes a man a candidate for the UNITARY initiation. Transmitted with its period vocabulary intact; kept under the ratified boundary as doctrine about souls, not an evidence-claim about peoples.
'The best way is always the collective' — and the reason given is not organisational but perceptual: only in company does the fifth point (the possibility, opportunity and near-obligation of serving) present itself from the beginning of the road.
The test of the genuine vocation is put with unusual precision: dedication to others must be felt NOT as decision, NOT as an act of will, NOT as the reasonable course, NOT as imitation of the more advanced — but 'as something forming part of his vital functions as much as breathing, eating and sleeping'. Anything less is not yet the road.
And the immediate qualification, which is the article's moral signature: service must not become exclusivism, dogmatism or imbalance — no dedicating oneself to 'serving' or 'progressing' at the price of another's pain, family and prior commitments abandoned.
The 'pure Christic way' produces its experiences, Jehel says, only under full heroic dedication to others or very profound disinterested devotion — 'both extremely rare in our Western world' — and he concedes, unveiling his thought 'for the third and last time', that the methods of the East make the fifth point perceptible more easily and rapidly. The Eastern turn of the whole review is here given its official rationale by the head of its Western Order.
Papus's formula, received from his own master Philippe of Lyon — GOODNESS, TOLERANCE, CHARITY — is followed by four devastating negations: not offering your life for a sick man and fifteen minutes later refusing to yield a point of view; not calling yourself Christian with ten suits at home while passing furtively by the poorly clothed. The Hermetic tag 'TRUE, WITHOUT ERROR, MOST TRUE' from the Emerald Tablet closes the passage.
The article's climax names Vivekananda and the Ramakrishna Mission: when Swamis serve as 'heroic monks and sisters of Charity to their needy fellows, the Christ is present in spirit and in LIFE'. Nº 48's Ramakrishna memorial supplied the biography; here the head of a Christian chivalric order makes it doctrine.
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The article ends on the Agnus Dei and the date 18-5-1947 — and 'to be continued': the second question, breadth versus depth, was to follow.
The Suddha pages report the May full moon celebrated across the ashramas, with Jehel himself officiating in Buenos Aires under Sister Isis and Sister Hipatia leading some thirty members in Montevideo — the Wesak observance of Nº 49 and Nº 50 now a settled continental institution, its officiants named.
The Gita commentary having ended, Jehel states the Suddha eschatology plainly: a Total Avatara or KRISNAVATARA expected in twelve thousand years, with eight great Instructors to descend before, besides Mitra Deva already incarnate. The seal above the text is the order's Devanagari OM device — extracted here in the first archive impression at which the script can actually be read.
The doctrinal argument opens against those who hold any past or present Instructor to be the final revelation, or who expect humanity's fusion in a single belief soon. The theosophical succession of 'races upon this planet' and the eight positions of the magnetic pole determining 'continental changes and periods of progress, apogee and decadence of racial civilisations' are cited as the received cyclical cosmology of the schools; kept as self-cosmology per the ratified boundary, and flagged for the operator.
The elementary logic offered is generous: every Envoy's incarnation is FUNDAMENTALLY a special mission for its epoch and SUBSIDIARILY the sum of all his predecessors — which makes comparison between Avatars not merely sacrilegious but logically empty. A doctrine of succession constructed expressly to disable rivalry between traditions.
The account of how revelations decay — deformed by intellectuals 'save some Great Initiates who keep silence', adulterated by clergies and faithful alike because a religion always states the highest moral degree its age can reach — is the review's most candid theory of religious history, and it applies as much to the Order's own transmission as to the churches it critiques.
The King of the World is demystified by translation: one Divine King, one Divine Mother ('whether he call her Mary, Mariah, Maya'), one Holy Spirit or NARAYANA, one Divine Prince NARA — and the 32 ways of Wisdom set against the 32 Great Siddhas. Guénon's 'Le Roi du Monde' had appeared in 1927; the Montevideo answer is that the office is a universal cosmogonic function, not a secret.
Synarchy returns as the Order's fundamental social teaching — the Kingdom of God restored when 'the lamentable social classes give place to the social functions consciously and spontaneously discharged'. Barlet's constitutional tables in Nº 50 gave the machinery; here it is given its eschatology.
The closing move is the review's deepest: the mystery is never in the hierarchies or their functions — 'all has been said, in a thousand and one modes' — but in something nearer and harder, the living re-creation within oneself of the bond between mind and spirit. Doctrine is public; realisation is not.
'European Spiritual Resurgence' is a remarkable document of 1947: the editorial board surveying, for Latin-American readers, which French spiritualist bodies have reappeared now that 'the storm has passed in the old continent'. The war is named only as la tormenta.
The list closes with a judgement: 'strong is the impulse spiritualism receives from these societies of external action alone, without speaking of the Orders that work without publicity' — the review positioning its own Order among the latter, on the page after cataloguing the former.
The news pages complete the story Nº 58 began: 'our dear friend Dr. Orestes Bernardi' — the man whose triple resignation as Pitágoras was recorded in February — married at Salto on 26 May, congratulated by 'La Iniciación, which so many times counted on his brilliant collaborations'. His full civil name is now printed. The same page cancels the Buenos Aires and Minas Gerais Martinist delegations: the Order visibly contracting its structure.
The Suddha census stands at 108 disciples across nine practice-grades — up from 99 in February (Nº 58) and 103 in June 1946 (Nº 50): the one continuous quantitative series the run provides.
The Kabbalistic Rose Cross appeal for Papus's Tratado is addressed pointedly to 'EVERY PROFANE PERSON OF CLEAR MIND AND ACADEMIC CULTURE' — the Order courting the university reader, and grounding the appeal on the claim that the book PROVES the scientific foundation of Occultism.
The GEIDE plate has finally caught up with events: Dr. PITAGORAS's Wednesday Androgony course — still printed in Nº 58, four months after his resignation — is gone from the roster. Seven courses remain where there were eight.
The HOLY SPIRIT side is defined, in every one of the four triangles, as the activity of RELATION — the forms acting upon one another — rather than as a third person or a substance. The Trinity is thereby read as two generative bonds plus the whole traffic between manifestations: the article's anti-sequential rule applied to the last and most familiar side.