Fetching
One moment.
1In the third place, frequent living-together on the one hand; fraternal treatment, the esteem theoretically granted in advance, the conviction of many (not to say unconscious pretension…) that they are already "walking toward elevated regions", on the other — these make it very easy for relations to establish themselves between some persons of such circles which drift, little by little, toward the treacherous ground of sensual attraction.
2In the fourth place — and here the famous resources of the mind’s trap intervene — there occurs among certain spiritualists, or better said "candidates to be possible spiritualists", the counterpart of what usually occurs in "artistic" youth or in certain circles of social studies:
3Artistic youth calls itself "free of bourgeois prejudices", feels itself "superior" to what is common and trivial in people, and… of course, every idyll of the "literary circle" is, at the beginning, the "union of twin souls", the joining of "superior destinies", etc… until the procession through hotels of dubious morality, the birth of natural children and sometimes the ending in the police station or the asylum… bring reality down to its true measure.
4The socially "emancipated" change the terminology, but the picture of symptoms and effects is, lamentably, the same.
5Well then, in the preliminary precincts of esotericism the same dangers present themselves: under the influence of subconscious or conscious desire, and at other times under mental or phenomenal illusion, there are persons who suddenly feel the attraction toward the husband or wife of another incarnation… forgetting that in their present house there is waiting the husband or wife of THIS incarnation, who has… probably, reasons and rights difficult to place in doubt or in discussion.
6There are other types of "CRACKPOTS" or of "SCOUNDRELS" (let the reader excuse me, but sometimes it is necessary to call things by their name) who find other "good reasons" for making love to their fellow member, or to the wife, sister or daughter of the fellow member "and brother": for it turns out that, according to such or such a celebrated author, it is necessary to "polarise oneself" in order to realise elevated things — and, of course, the "pole" is the woman or the young woman who pleases at that moment or whom the occasion puts most readily to hand.
7Others again have rediscovered (what the deviants of other times had discovered before them) that one can do "sexual magic".
8That is: one will be able to cure such or such a person (the interested party herself or third parties), or one will be able to obtain bonds with "elevated entities or forces(?)" by means of ceremonies more or less complicated or simple which, in any case, always require the amorous and sexual union of two persons… and, with such "sublime" purposes, we see file past again all the facts already considered above — together or separately, all or some:
9Either the deception and disillusion of the credulous young woman. Or the adultery and its disillusions and consequences for the woman. Or, besides, the deceiving of the friend, the betrayal of one’s own wife, etc., etc.
10I shall not go on setting out cases, for all know the combinations that can result, and they are all those one can imagine between men and women, when both are single, or only one married, or both already married.
Our translation, period-faithful. Citable as our translation, never as the source.
Nº 68 (December 1947) is the last issue the archive holds — and the run's most ethically consequential. It is also a COMPOSITE: only this cover leaf and the three other wrapper pages are photographed original paper; the body (pages 3–24 of the scan) is a modern retype. The wrapper leaves, moreover, do not belong to this number.
This masthead is not from Nº 68. It still prints 'Redactor Jefe: Pitágoras' (a post vacated by his resignation in Nº 58 and gone from the plate by Nº 63), the full pseudonymous collaborator roster with degree-strings (replaced by the collective formula in Nº 47), and the overseas rate of 1.20 dollars (raised to 1.80 in Nº 47). The leaf is from Volume IV or early Volume V. Recorded rather than passed off: the label disagrees with the thing it labels.
For all that, the roster is worth having in the corpus at full strength: sixteen collaborators with their degrees and specialities — SEVAKA kabbalist and philologist, JEHEL a 33∴, ASURI KAPILA yogi and chemist, PITAGORAS physician, LORELAIR and MAYA and MARTHA among the women — the fullest single statement of who wrote the review.
The SUMARIO of the genuine December 1947 number: the sexual-magic article, the astrology course on conjunctions of significators, the sixth Dialogue of the Ninth Sphere, and the Constitution of the new 'Martinist Assembly'.
'SEXUAL MAGIC AND MAGIC OF PURITY', by an unnamed S∴I∴, is the review's most direct intervention in the safeguarding of its own members. The dedication states the purpose exactly: 'to all those who, for whatever motive, might go astray OR BE LED ASTRAY BY THIRD PARTIES'. It is dated by a planetary configuration rather than a calendar date — written on a day of the conjunction of Venus with Jupiter.
The opening indictment is aimed inward: most Western Orders have abandoned evocative ritual because it was being worked by people who cannot be magi — 'still carnivorous and omnivorous, still sensual or at least sexual, still proud, ambitious, obstinate in opinions'. The article's authority comes from having said this about its own side first.
The central claim, printed in capitals: FEW GROUNDS ARE SO FAVOURABLE TO SUCH MISTAKES AS THE CIRCLES IN WHICH HUMAN BEINGS SEEK TO ACCOMPLISH THE FIRST STEPS OF THE PATH. The author anticipates the indignation and answers it: the intention to seek elevated things is not the same as having realised them, and intellectual culture is not purity.
The mechanisms are named without euphemism. The 'polarisation' pretext — that one must polarise oneself to realise elevated things, and the pole is conveniently whichever woman is nearest. The past-life pretext — feeling the attraction of 'the husband or wife of another incarnation' while the spouse of THIS one waits at home. And the plain sentence: every time a 'brother' or 'sister', under whatever pretext, induces you to amorous or sexual life, at that moment the purpose pursued is to satisfy his own sexual desire and nothing more.
The typology of offenders is unusually careful for 1947: the ingenuous who are talked into it; those 'more abnormal than scoundrels' who half-believe their own justifications; and those 'more scoundrels than abnormal' who have simply 'put on sheep's clothing' in the esoteric setting — 'the same animal in disguise'. The consequences catalogued are 'intimate dramas, possessions and madnesses, suicides or losses of social and moral position'.
The doctrinal core: one cannot LEAP from sensuality to universal love; chastity is transmutation, never imposition or pretence. The vegetarian analogy makes it concrete — he who 'wants to be' vegetarian before the moment has come will look at the hams in the delicatessen window. The Orders therefore classify disciples honestly instead of extracting vows they cannot keep.
The rule stated for the married disciple is fidelity plus natural, spontaneous reduction of sexuality — and the guard clause is the article's ethical signature: that must be neither advised nor imposed by third parties, nor even forced by the interested parties themselves. Chastity is like goodness: no one acquires it by decree, his own or another's.
The self-examination proposed is unsparing and non-judgemental at once: chaste from birth, or sensual? — the great majority, the text says plainly, will answer the second, solitary acts included. From that honest answer, and not from pretension, the practical counsel follows.
The counsel to the reader turns the review's own observational discipline (Nº 63's attention exercises) toward consent: study your internal reactions, 'confess to yourself and warn yourself in time' when a presence, a contact or a glance awakens desire in you — or when you sense desire in the other. Self-knowledge here is a safeguarding tool.
The counterweight to the whole indictment: ceremonial magic has not been abolished, it has been relocated. 'The Priest of any religion — pure of heart, chaste of body and of mind, who loves his parishioners impersonally — IS a Ceremonial Magus', as much when he counsels and consoles as when he celebrates a sacrament. The 'psychic force' of one Father Pinto is cited as having its roots in exactly those virtues.
The article ends by defining the alternative it named in its title. The magic of purity: purity of intention in beginning study; purity of position and conduct within it; purity of feeling toward fellow travellers; and real purity of veneration toward the Masters — 'not making of their texts or teachings PRETEXTS for fantasies'. The pun on texto/pretexto carries the whole argument.
The astrology course reaches its last recorded instalment: the conjunctions of the significators, credited to 'the observations made by the great astrologers there have been' — the traditional-authority mode rather than the psychological one, and the harshest delineations in the run.
The Saturn conjunctions read like a mediaeval judicial catalogue — prison, dying in misery, breaking a limb, persecution by libels. Surya has been running this course since Volume III; here it is at its most fatalistic, and least modernised.
The closing NOTE restores the course's saving principle: none of these effects holds absolutely, since any other planet's aspect modifies them — 'a favourable aspect of the Sun will improve the person's character'. Configuration, not destiny; the qualification the whole series depends on.
The sixth Dialogue of the Ninth Sphere opens with the disclosure the earlier dialogues withheld: Antaeus had come to Magister from the edge of suicide. The metal structure, the ships' sirens, the blackish-green water beneath his feet, and 'the generous, warm and providential hand' that changed the course of his destiny — the frame narrative of the whole series is a rescue.
The question that governs the dialogue — why must pain be the unimpeachable guide of our existing? — is answered first in the modern register (pain as the opposite pole of pleasure) and then, for the Initiate, ceremonially: the answer must be earned by a rite, not merely stated.
The rite is described in full and is the most detailed ceremonial the run prints: the lights lowered, a servant in a white tunic setting an onyx vessel at the crossing of the pantacle's two diameters, a blue flame, a pastorale played, three flowers — a rose, a lily and a lotus — laid in the eastern angle, and the atmic sign traced in the air. The room is 'transfigured into a Temple'.
The kabbalistic answer: Kether, the one without a second, is neither thinking nor sentient until a subject knows it — so it manifests as Hocma and Binah, and 'knows itself as Individual, but does not know itself as Person. It thinks, but does not feel'. The whole emanation exists so that feeling may become possible.
And therefore pain: the Soul, union of Kether and Malkuth, can only feel itself through contrast — 'to be cold in order to feel heat; to be in darkness in order to see light'. Pain is the most elevated manifestation of the Ancient of Days' loving charity, and the dialogue ends in benediction: Blessed be thou, pain… because thou revealest Love to us! The seed of Universal Pain germinates, it says, at the invisible centre of the Bread of Life — as in the philosophers' Stone.
The last document of the run is constitutional: the founding of a 'Martinist Assembly' in Montevideo, with its first officers named — President Kanti, Vice-President Jedidiah, Secretary Serapio, Assistant Secretary Parvati, Treasurer Bhaktidasa, Assistant Treasurer Dan. After Nº 62's 'glass politics' and Nº 63's 'little for few', the Order gives its members a formal deliberative body.
The dividing line is drawn in Article 1: the Assembly handles administrative and cultural matters, 'with the complete exclusion of everything concerning initiatic and liturgical questions', which stay with the Grand Council. Democratic form for the outer organisation, initiatic authority untouched — the settlement the two Martinism articles were working toward.
Article 6 is the striking one: Grand Council members sitting in the Assembly 'shall lose their official investiture', voting like any martinist present. The governing body deliberately disarms itself inside the chamber it created.
But Article 13 keeps the balance: Assembly resolutions become obligatory only after Grand Council approval — and Article 14 requires the Council to give REASONS when it rejects or amends them. Accountability without surrendering authority.
The qualification rules define the Order's actual working membership: dues paid (or formally exempted) and habitual attendance at ceremonies; free martinists need their Initiator's authorisation. Three months' arrears or three consecutive absences cost the vote — the same administrative discipline the news pages of Nº 50 announced.
Among the Assembly's attributions, the most consequential is (f): 'to censure the martinists whose conduct harms the Martinist Order.' Set beside the sexual-magic article at the front of this same number, it is the enforcement clause for the warning: the collectivity is given a formal power to call its own members to account.
The electoral rules close the run: one-year terms, re-election for at most two consecutive periods, elections each April, oral voting when more than one list stands. The last thing La Iniciación prints in this archive is a procedure for changing its own leadership.
This GEIDE plate is likewise photographed from an earlier issue: six courses only (no S. DEVI, no second and third year astrology), and the La Plata address at Calle 60 Nº 987, superseded by Calle 4 Nº 639 during 1946. It shows the school at an earlier moment than the number it is bound into.
The final leaf, also an earlier state: the two Buenos Aires libraries without the Pryse and Castellot titles that Nº 50 had already announced. Four wrapper leaves from an earlier year, wrapped around a December 1947 body — the archive's copy of the run's last surviving number is, quite literally, assembled from what remained.