Fetching
One moment.
1Where to subscribe to or obtain "La Iniciación"
2ARGENTINA Librería Kier. — Talcahuano 1075 - Buenos Aires. Librería Saborido. — Rivadavia 1649 - Buenos Aires.
3BRAZIL State of Rio Grande do Sul Agent: Mrs. Cecy M. Viamonte. — Rua Américo Vespucio 1255 - Porto Alegre. Livraria Vera Cruz. — Edificio Vera Cruz - Caixa Postal 936 - Porto Alegre. Livraria Olimpia. — Avenida João Pessoa N. 115 - Porto Alegre. State of São Paulo Livraria Cultura de Gaspar Junior. — Caixa Postal 222-A - São Paulo. State of Minas Geraes Agent: Mr. José Toniolo. — Itajubá 448 - Bello Horizonte. Federal District Agent: Dr. José Gaspar Gouveia. — Rua Nascimento Silva 100 - Ap. 1 - Rio de Janeiro. Livraria Freitas Bastos. - Rua 13 de maio 74 - Rio de Janeiro.
4CHILE Librería Orientalista. — Casilla 1398 - Santiago. COLOMBIA Agent: Roberto Nel Barona - Calle 15 N.o 1149 - Cali. Librería Pythagoras. — Apartado postal 119 - Bucaramanga. Librería Irradiación, of Hernando García. — Apartado postal 704 - Aéreo 720 - Barranquilla. COSTA RICA Bookshop of Gerardo Vega B. — Apartado 884 - San José.
5MEXICO Agent: Mr. Julián Garma Alvarado. — Plaza Carlos Pacheco N.º 21-5; Apartado Postal 9967 - México D. F. Librería "El Volador", of J. Medina, Seminario N.º 14, D. F. Bookshop of Evaristo Vivanco, Av. Guatemala N.º 47, A. - D. F. PANAMA Librería Ibero-Americana. — Apartado 256 - Panamá. URUGUAY Gidee. — Av. 18 de Julio 1018, 2nd floor - Montevideo. VENEZUELA Agent: Pedro José Romberg — Sur 13, No. 55 (Petión á Callao) San Agustín del Norte - Caracas. — 2 —
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
This copy was scanned out of binding order: the back-cover book lists come first, the front cover second. The two Buenos Aires libraries stand exactly as in Nº 50 thirteen months earlier — the same three titles still 'in preparation'.
Nº 63 (July 1947), the fourth original-paper issue in the archive, carries the same previous owner's ink signature across the masthead as Nº 62: the two numbers came from one subscriber's run.
The masthead has lost a line: where Nº 62 still printed 'Redactor Jefe: Pitágoras', the post simply disappears. Dr. Orestes Bernardi's resignation (Nº 58) and marriage (Nº 62) are now complete in the plate itself — the review no longer has an Editor-in-Chief.
The SUMARIO announces the answer to the question Nº 62 left open: 'Work on the surface and work in depth'. Between them, the two instalments constitute the fullest statement of Martinist policy the run contains.
The distribution directory is unchanged: sixteen addresses in ten countries, holding steady through 1947.
Instalment XII descends from the Divine plane to the intermediate — and warns that here the writer must be 'less explicit', since the real initiatic MYSTERY lies on the middle plane. The compensation offered is method, not information: whoever finds the true analogy (defined as RELATION AND PROPORTIONALITY between things) holds 'the end of Ariadne's thread, for every matter'.
The digression on language is the series' sharpest epistemological moment: our idioms are 'the fruit of a three-dimensional conception' while reality is multidimensional, every three dimensions synthesising into a fourth that is the first of the next world. The triangle is offered as the one notation that survives the translation.
The coinage that carries the instalment: an UNCONSCIOUSNESS is 'a CONSCIOUSNESS VEILED FROM ITSELF THAT STRUGGLES TO REVEAL ITSELF' — comparable to trying to remember something without knowing you are making the effort. Subconsciousness is admitted as a borrowed word, 'for want of a more appropriate one'.
A leaf is missing from this copy. The page ends mid-word ('a los impulsos recibi-') at printed page 5, and the next surviving leaf opens at printed page 8 with the broken '…CIA' of INCONCIEN-CIA. Printed pages 6 and 7 — one leaf of the triangular-hierarchies exposition — are absent from the only copy the archive holds. The gap is recorded rather than smoothed over.
The catalogue of triangles-with-attributes is a working key: bare triangle = the ternary law; with a point = a central consciousness; with a sacred letter = a word of the Divine Decree; with a full Divine name = the God whose life must be reverenced in every created form. A grammar of the symbol rather than a lexicon.
The triangle 'surrounded by little rays' carries the series' ethical sting: THE THING in itself is worth nothing save for what emanates from it — for how well it delivers, in quantity and quality, the message its central consciousness was sent with. The same doctrine Jehel states in Martinist terms eleven pages later: 'worth nothing save by service'.
The astrology course reaches Venus and Mercury in mutual aspect — the two planets whose maximum elongation from the Sun the text carefully notes (48° and 76°), so that certain aspects are geometrically impossible between them. The course's technical care sits oddly beside its moral vocabulary.
Venus–Uranus afflicted brings 'clandestine and irregular relations, with loss of friends and of prestige; abandonment of home and family' — the period's social anxieties written into the aspect delineations, and transmitted as printed.
Mercury–Uranus in trine 'produces good astrologers and great occultists, engineers and electricians', whose ideals are 'incomprehensible to ordinary and vulgar people' — the course flattering, and describing, its own readership.
The answer to Nº 62's deferred question, again signed by the President of the Grand Council. He recapitulates the three simultaneous processes of the previous instalment and states his method for this one: questions and answers, no names cited, 'so as not to trouble anyone in particular, nor to exalt any person or society over others'.
The two tendencies are stated fairly, each in its own best terms — reach the greatest number and modernise, versus admit only the apt and diffuse through exoteric bodies. What follows is not a refutation of the first but a demonstration that it mistakes what an Order is.
The survey of the 1947 occult book market is a small masterpiece of impatience: bookshops never so full, 'Spiritism white, grey and... dark grey, Magic of all colours and shades', and from the East 'everything that is publishable — and even what ought not to be' including 'dangerous parts of tantric or sexual Yoga'. The grocer on the corner and the frivolous coquette argue about the human soul; every ten blocks someone has revelations. The Order's own publishing programme is judged against this.
The second question and its answer are the essay's pivot: if what Ram, Krishna, Zoroaster, Orpheus, Buddha and Jesus said and lived 'has produced no more than what is plain to see' — who can claim to publish an active ferment for the mass? The conclusion: publishing cannot be the essential end of an Order, since a good publishing house does it better.
The role left to an Order in relation to reading, stated flatly: 'to prevent its members from reading too much' — to keep them from mistaking erudition for advance, and to indicate what may be read at each stage, sparing them the mental indigestion that turns students into 'polemicists for sport'.
The Papus-era curriculum is set out as a list: human constitution; terrestrial and universal constitution; judicial astrology with chart erection; the correspondence sciences (chiromancy, graphology, physiognomy, the four temperaments); elementary Sanskrit and Hebrew; notions of Kabbalah and theoretical mysticism — assimilable, they concluded, in 6 to 18 months. It is the syllabus this review has been serialising for six years.
The syllabus item 'synthetic history of the civilisations, races, continents and of the evolutive law of human collectivities' names the cyclical-cosmology course of the schools; a curriculum heading, kept as self-description under the ratified boundary.
A candid self-criticism from the head of the Order: 'Later, we wished to be more modern and more cultured. The result has been… the martinists have set themselves to read a little of everything — too much taken together, and too little as regards initiatic synthesis.' The remedy is Papus's Tratado, credited to its translator 'V∴H∴ Pitágoras' — Bernardi's work still doing service after his departure.
The position stated in capitals: LITTLE FOR FEW PERSONS APT, OR AT LEAST DISPOSED, TO FOLLOW A PRE-TRACED NORM. An esoteric order defining itself against the growth logic of every voluntary association around it.
The double mission of a prepared member: esoterically as INITIATORS; exoterically as 'INITIATES WHO DO NOT SAY THEY ARE' — teaching in the GIDEE, giving physical and moral cures, and living as 'Social Ferments', emancipated from dogmatic or sectarian creeds and always ready to sacrifice themselves for humanity's higher ideals. Concealment reframed as a mode of service.
The essential end of an Order, in profane terms because the initiatic ones will not carry: TO CREATE A GENIUS — a psychic-spiritual organism working on both planes, waking and sleeping, for others. The Egregore doctrine stated as an engineering objective rather than a mystery.
The honest account of what follows acceptance: the second stage brings 'all the struggles of souls and of minds', the clash of temperaments among initiands and with their families and world, plus the struggle against astral agents opposed to the collectivity's ideal — and the nucleus 'never attains a degree of full spiritual unity'. An esoteric body describing its own friction in print.
The dilemma for growth-minded Orders is put as a fork with no third tine: either it does not know what a Genius, an Egregore and an Order are and confuses them with a club or a university, or it knew and is forgetting, seduced by 'the mirage of numerical growth, of economic prosperity, or of the vanity or convenience of social power'.
The Suddha instalment is a practical-supervision document: Jehel writes to lighten the Ashrama secretariats' work by commenting on how disciples perform their practices and keep the required diaries — while stating openly that he may not reveal the exact content of the practices, so he will use examples that both instruct the general reader and let disciples recognise their own exercises. Discretion and clear exposition, deliberately reconciled.
The teaching on attention opens with a burst tyre in the street: more than 60% of bystanders turn to look, though almost all could know what happened without turning. Involuntary attention is enormous, conscious attention 'still poor in humanity in general' — a discipline argued from ordinary observation, not scripture.
The specimen diary is the comic centre of the piece: 'First day: With all good disposition, I set myself to practise what was indicated, observing nothing special. From 8 to 8:20. 2nd day: The same, from 8:05 to 8:25… nothing extraordinary happens to me.' And the reply: what did you expect, having breathed day and night since birth?
The correction is a small doctrine of practice: sit cheerful, make a while of inner silence first, and recall the general purpose before beginning — which not only reaffirms the intent but means 'some Invisible Agent' may notice the practice is being done as such 'and not as a mechanical thing'.
The eight numbered observations that might arise are the finest passage of applied introspection in the run: air temperature stabilising to a mean; taste or aroma noticed after a lifetime of breathing; the two nostrils coming into balance; attention discovering it can hold two or three facts at once; results varying with dress, meals, mood; and the practice ending itself after an exact number of minutes — 'Who or what determines it?'
The pay-off is the Delphic maxim earned rather than quoted: observe the phenomenon well and one comes to know not only the breath but the workings of mind, attention and memory — enriching 'our store of KNOW THYSELF', so that the diaries stop resembling railway timetables.
The opposite failure — the disciple with an 'excess of results' who sees luminous points and announces 'I have visions' — is answered with unusual gentleness and then firmness: rejoice if you saw something, but you were asked to observe the breath. The analogy of the street painter (look back at the passer-by and he leaves; persist and you stop painting) explains why fixing attention on an inner vision ends it.
The instalment closes with a passage set as an inverted pyramid, narrowing to a single word: NO ONE IS EVER ALONE WHILE PERFORMING A PRACTICE BEGUN WITH AN ELEVATION OF THOUGHT OR A PRAYER — the attention and method we bring being the least we can offer the beings who accompany us 'as a mother follows the child who is trying to walk'. Typography doing the work of doctrine.
The World Spiritualist Congress met at Brussels 10–13 August 1946, one year after the war; its Spiritualist Charter of Humanity is reproduced entire here from the Spanish version issued by the Buenos Aires circle 'Progreso Espírita'. The preamble names the totalitarian war 'without precedent in history as to its extent' and indicts 'the so-called Christian Society' for abandoning human solidarity.
The Charter's philosophical principles are the review's own in ecumenical dress — a Supreme Power called by many names, an interior direction of humanity, immortality of the soul, each being a microcosm, man trine in body, soul and spirit. Whatever else the Congress achieved, it wrote a creed the Montevideo group could print without a word of qualification.
The science articles are of their moment: positive science confined to space and time; 'the latest discoveries of physico-biological science' read as proof of a spontaneous internal energy behind matter — a spiritualist gloss on the physics that had, one year earlier, ended the war it condemns.
Rule 6 is the Charter's most concrete demand: society must protect all Nature and its creatures, and therefore 'the death penalty, the experiments of vivisection, as well as every practice of cruelty toward men and animals' must be condemned. Abolitionism and animal protection stated together as a single principle in 1946.
The literary page prints 'Springtime of Love' by 'Sócrates', dated MCMXXXII — a poem fifteen years old when published here; the run's literary section drew on members' drawers as well as on living correspondents.
The North American transplant, dated. The news pages record that Brother VAYUANANDA, having taken up residence in the United States, is designated Personal Representative of the President of the Grand Council of the Martinist Order 'in the great northern republic', to promote relations with kindred institutions there; he and Sister Isis passed through Montevideo on their way, seen off at the airport by a group of Uruguayan martinists. Vayuananda is the teacher named as her initiator in the Nº 47 poem and the source of the Vayu materials in this estate.
→ vayu
The Suddha pages complete the same movement: Sister ISIS, Secretary and Officiant of the Buenos Aires Ashrama, is 'designated with powers to found in the United States of North America one or more Ashramas of the Suddha Dharma Mandalam' under her direct orientation, still re-ligated to the Montevideo Central. Her Buenos Aires functions pass to Brothers Jemard and Zanti. Two orders sending representatives north in the same month.
The first 'Day of Reincarnation' (24 June), instituted by the Buenos Aires Congress of 1946, was observed with a soirée at the Lasalle Theatre: the Argentine national anthem on record, a lecture on reincarnation and the destiny of man, Massenet and Rimsky-Korsakov played by the three Zipman women, and 'apposite poems in the charge of Dhyana' — the poet of Nº 47's initiation verses, still active six years on.
The GEIDE plate stands as in Nº 62 with seven courses; Pitágoras's Androgony has not returned.