Saint-Martin, who
published under the pseudonym of "the Unknown Philosopher", was born
into a pious family of the minor nobility.
Not satisfied with
enlightenment philosophy, he found an alternative solution through some of his
fellow officers who were initiates of the Order of Elus-Coens,
a masonic Rite (or System) comprised of High degrees only, and devoted
essentially to theurgical practices founded by Martines
de Pasqually (see appendix underneath).
Sometime between
August and October 1768 Saint-Martin received initiation into the Order. He
quickly rose through the grades. From 1768 to 1771 Saint-Martin worked, at
Bordeaux, as secretary to Martines himself. It is
during this time that he acquired detailed knowledge of the Order's practice. Martines' Illuminism centred on
the existence and theurgic cultivation of superior, primarily angelic, powers.
Saint-Martin's duties included organizing Martines'
papers and copying the ritual manuals in which were set out the ceremonial
magic by which the adept attains illumination and - the ultimate goal of
Masonic theosophy - recovers the primitive faculties possessed by Adam before
the Fall.
His secretarial
duties brought him into contact with J.-B. Willermoz,
leader of the Lodge of Coens at Lyons. In 1771, at age twenty-eight,
Saint-Martin resigned from his regiment in order to devote himself to the study
and propagation of Illuminism. Living, principally at Paris and Lyons, in the
company of esoteric Masons such as the comte d'Hauterive, l'abbe Fournie, and Willermoz, he spent
his time gathering notes for a book, and improving his meditation and practice.
At Lyons, living under
Willermoz' roof, Saint Martin wrote his first book, Des erreurs et de la
verite, ou Les hommes rappeles au Principe universel de la science (1775). This work develops a theosophical system in which the
ideas of Martines de Pasqually
are transformed into an original system. Des erreurs
et de la verite, in presenting a philosophy of
nature, of society, and of knowledge, offers a wide-ranging critique of secular
Enlightenment reason. Its immediate occasion was NicolasAntoine
Boulanger's assertion, in L'Antiquite devoilee par ses usages (1766),
that religions were born of the terrified imaginations of survivors of the
great Flood and allied calamities whose capacity for rational thought had been
destroyed by the horrors of the natural catastrophes they had witnessed.
Saint-Martin counters that religion is a supernatural gift by which the divine
mercy continues to transmit its wisdom to those who can perceive it. He
argues that the true cause of, not only religion, but also social institutions,
natural laws, and human nature itself is an active, intelligent being.
Saint-Martin's second book, Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre
Dieu, l'homme, et f'univers
(1782), structured as a theosophical version of the design argument for the
existence of God, continues Saint-Martin's attack on Enlightenment philosophy.
Saint-Martin's
theosophy is an epic of fall and rehabilitation. The history of humanity begins
from the prevarication (a term Saint-Martin borrowed from Ad info from
dictionary --Martines de Pasqually
to designate the metaphysical Fall of humanity) in which humanity lost the
perfection of its primordial state in which it participated in the divine
pleroma. Saint-Martin teaches that humanity subsists in a state of forgetfulness
of its true nature owing to the Fall, but that its spiritual nature renders it
susceptible to receive the light emanating from the divine intelligence that
permeates the universe. Fallen humanity, which retains the germ of the image
of Divinity within itself. must draw out its divine life from under the bondage
of its fallen status by reorienting its will, still free despite the Fall, with
the divine will. Saint-Martin calls souls who. moved by desire for God, acquire
knowledge of the interior truths hommes de desir.
These "men of aspiration" imitate Christ both in incarnating
consciousness of the Word (divine truths) and in expiating the fallen world
through sacrificial suffering. Their self-immolation having separated them from
the material kingdom, they exercise a spiritual ministry by regenerating others
through their sacrifice. Once a critical mass of "men of aspiration"
has been achieved, the homme-esprit, or corporate regenerated humanity, is
created. The ministry of the Man-Spirit is to complete the regeneration of
humanity through the radical development of its intimate essence. The identity Saintt Martin posits between the regenerated human will and
the divine will makes it possible for humanity to reattain its true end and
become once again the image of God. The attainment of this glorious future is
to be the "Great Work" of reintegration.
The imagination, for
Saint-Martin. is the human form of magism. Its
original role was to perfect the sphere wherein humanity lived. This
imagination remains with us despite the Fall, but its role is now to discern
the spiritual glory hidden under the appearances of sensible nature. and allow
us to grasp the spiritual unity of the cosmos. The Illuminist universe, that
is, is a universe of correspondences.
With the success of
his first book, Saint-Martin became the apostle of Illuminism to the beau
monde. His task was to lead humanity to the supernatural things that belong to
it by right, but of which Saint-Martin's generation has lost totally the idea.
He saw himself as a 'cleanser of the temple of truth', in opposition to both
Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity in which the letter of
Scripture appeared to be valued over the spirit. In his ministry he allied
himself with a wide range of fellow-minded personalities: an interest in
animal magnetism brought him into contact with the Marquis de Puysegur and the Societe de l'Harmonie of esoteric Mesmerism; he met William Law
on a trip to London in 1787; and at Strasbourg he made the acquaintance of the
Swedish baron Silferhielm, the nephew of
Emanuel Sweden borg, who interested him in his
uncle's ideas. In fact, Saint-Martin wrote Le nouvel
homme (1792) under the immediate influence of Swedenborg, although from the
very beginning he was highly critical of the Swedish visionary.
The fundamental idea
of this work is that we carry in ourselves a sort of text, of which our entire
life ought to be the development, because the soul is primitively a Thought of
God. We must renew ourselves by reentering into our true nature.
In a letter to Willermoz, dated 4 July 1790, SaintMartin asks
to be struck off the masonic registers. This request signals a profound
reorientation of Saint-Martin's theosophy. It is easily explained: he had,
during his residency in Strasbourg between 1788 and 1791, discovered the works
of --> Jacob Boehme (1575- 1624). Creditfor
introducing SaintMartin to Boehme's writings goes to
--> FriedrichRudolf Saltzmann,
a Freemason theosopher, and Madame de Boecklin. In Boehme, who was little known in France,
Saint-Martin found a theosophy of human regeneration: if we are not renewed in
our essence, we will not attain true understanding. According to Boehme, this
second birth is magical, although this magic has nothing to do with theurgy.
The Crocodile
The most unknown work
of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who styled himself "the unknown
philosopher" (ie philosophe inconnu), was an
epic drama entitled Le Crocodile, ou la guerre du
bien et du mal arrivee sous le regne
de Louis XV, which, was a commercial failure when it was first published in
1799 and was not reprinted until 1962. This epic, actually written in 1792, was
published anonymously, as Saint-Martin himself described it as "a
trifle," which he wanted to keep separate from his serious, philosophical
works. Le Crocodile is certainly the strangest and most difficult of
Saint-Martin's works to understand, because it is a wholly fantastic, clearly
allegorical tale of struggle and ultimate deliverance. It can, at least to a
certain degree, be taken to symbolize the struggles of the French Revolution
(although the subtitle describes the events as taking place under Louis XV),
and Stanislas de Guaita has seen it as an allegory of
"a clash of titans between adepts of two different initiations,"
thereby linking it to the legend of a feud between Martinists
and Illuminists in the rumors surrounding the Wilhelmsbad Masonic congress of 1782, which took place
during the reign of Louis XVI.
There are, however,
few precise dates or references to specific political events in Le crocodile,
and the tone and scope of the work suggest rather a timeless and transcendent
struggle between the forces of light and those of darkness, which is to
culminate in nothing less than the end of history and the coming of a post
historical, purely spiritual golden age. Despite its opacity and fantastic
character, Le crocodile may be seen as the key to Saint-Martin's thought,
because it offers a vision of the apocalypse within the optimistic vision of
the Martinist cosmology.
The title character,
the Crocodile, is a demonic personage who represents the gross and selfish
temptations of the material world and who seeks to deter the French people from
their spiritual mission. At the start of the epic, it is announced, in an
assembly of demons off Cape Horn, that the moment is coming in which the "mould of time" (Ie moule du temps), where humanity has been trapped since the
Fall, is to be shattered and that the French nation has been chosen to begin
this epochal transformation. The demons, who can exist only in the fallen world
of historical time, are determined to prevent this from happening and so
resolve to assist the English, "who are more bound to time than any other
people" to "completely exterminate the French nation."l
For this purpose, the Crocodile departs from his lair beneath the pyramids of
Egypt to arrive in Paris, which is then being led into corruption by false
philosophers and radical street agitators. The Crocodile appears before an
assembly of academicians, whom he tells that "politics, over all the earth,
is ... a game of chess which always recommences and can never end, because the
powers that form the different pieces can capture one another, but they cannot
capture me, I who am the king."2 After he has spoken, the academicians bow
down before the Crocodile and honor him. The Crocodile, therefore, is revealed
as master of the fallen material world and as the hidden, ultimate arbiter of
earthly political and military contests.
In this apocalyptic
vision, standing against the Crocodile is not a powerful last emperor or great
pope but a small band of virtuous, humble individuals, who seek to vanquish him
not through the force of arms but by the power of truth. The leader of the band
is a Spanish Jew named Eleazar, who dearly represents Saint-Martin's first
spiritual master, Martines de Pasqually.
Eleazar tells one of his friends and collaborators, Sedir
(a virtuous magistrate who likely represents Saint-Martin himself), that he had
been forced to flee Spain by the Inquisition, and the latter responds with outrage
that "these men who preach a religion of peace and charity pretend to
serve God with ingratitude and by cruel and precipitous judgments!"3
Eleazar, however, also tells Sedir that his studies
of "the fundamental truths that are within man before being in any
book" have convinced him of the truth of Christianity, and he states that
he plans to convert when the time is right. Eleazar and Sedir
are assisted in their struggle with the powers of darkness by an association
called the Societe des Independants,
led by a Scandinavian mystic named Madame Jof and a
former skeptic named Ourdeck, whose experiences with
the Crocodile lead him to become a follower of Eleazar. The arrival of the
Crocodile is accompanied by a strange phenomenon, which Saint-Martin calls the
"plague of books." A mysterious plague strikes all of the books of
Paris (by implication those of the philosophes), turning them into a grayish
paste, which the starving people of the city eat, causing nausea and "such
a confusion of thought and speech that the tower of Babel, in comparison, was a
beacon of clarity. "4 Both commoners and academicians are driven mad by
consuming this paste of books, but Madame Jof and her
followers are able to cure them by means of a magic power.5 The Societe des Independants seems
clearly to represent the mystical, esoteric branch of Freemasonry, and Martinism and the spiritual renewal it offered are thus
presented, in a very literal sense, as the antidote to the unhealthy
materialist philosophies of the Enlightenment.
The narrative of Le
Crocodile is highly fantastic, and many of the events that occur make sense
only in an allegorical manner. In the midst of a battle against the forces of
evil, Ourdeck and his comrades are swallowed up by
the Crocodile and journey for days within its apparently infinite interior. The
innards of the Crocodile in fact appear as a sort of purgatory, in which Ourdeck encounters thousands of people of all nations and
ages and is told by an old man that "all the people that are found here will
soon be delivered, for ... the mould of time will be
broken, and the empire of the evil one will be abolished."6 While inside
the Crocodile, Ourdeck has a vision of a game of
cards in which the cards bear the symbols of all the kingdoms of the world and
declares, "I suddenly understood whence comes the perpetual upheaval of
the empires of the earth.7 Ourdeck also witnesses,
still inside the Crocodile, a Greek city of the fifth century BC, here
identified as "Atalante," which had been destroyed by an earthquake,
leaving all of its inhabitants "suspended by death in the same state in
which they were found, so that one day their abominations would be known to all
of those whom they thought to fool, and by that means hypocrisy, which devours
the earth, would be covered in confusion, and could have no victory."8
Within the city, Ourdeck encounters an orator at the
Temple of Truth, who speaks words that are pure and holy but from whose heart
flows a visible "current of words," dark bronze in color, which are
"impious, extravagant and blasphemous." By following this current of
words, Ourdeck arrives at the house of an evil priest
who has bewitched the orator and whose plans for world domination Ourdeck discovers in a book guarded by a pair of iron
monkeys.9 This bizarre vision of a city frozen in time, like Pompeii, as the
result of a natural disaster reflects the author's strong condemnation of a
hypocritical society and its conventions and the longing for a completely
transparent world, a sort of spiritual panopticon in which all evil intentions
can be seen and met with proper scorn.
At this point, Ourdeck is suddenly returned to Paris, where the combat
between the Crocodile and his adversaries continues to rage. As a result of
magic rites performed by Eleazar, the two warring armies are expelled from the
Crocodile and cast into the heavens. A mysterious visitor, who later is
revealed to be the husband of Madame Jof, explains
this turn of events to Sedir, telling him that
Eleazar had "retraced the primitive deliverance of man," returning
man from his fallen material state to reintegration with his divine origins.
Finally, the Crocodile is unmasked, leading to the desertion of his army, and
is forced to abandon Paris and return to his prior confinement beneath the Egyptian
pyramids. A wise man then proclaims, "the mould
of time is broken, we are delivered from the bonds which have held us for
centuries, chained and deprived of the principle of our lives; from now on we
will live in an eternal alliance."10 Following this happy turn of events, Ourdeck is rewarded for his service by marrying Eleazar's
daughter Rachel, and Paris acclaims the victorious band as heroes. Compared to
most of the apocalyptic visions offered by the political prophets of the
post-revolutionary century, Saint-Martin's Le Crocodile is an optimistic
work, for, true to the philosophical optimism of its author, it holds out the
promise of salvation for all people, not just a small elect, and if the
struggle against the Crocodile is carried out by a select band of initiates,
their efforts are pursued for the good of all humankind. Nevertheless, Le
Crocodile reflects many of the standard assumptions of the Christian
apocalyptic tradition, as history is defined, circumscribed, and almost
completely overshadowed by its beginning and endpoint; that is, by the Fall and
the ultimate redemption of humanity.
The invented
tradition of secret brotherhoods had, as we have seen, a sunny and optimistic
side to it, a vision of tolerance and harmony in which all world religions were
reflections of a single, primordial truth, which small communities of dedicated
men constantly sought to preserve and to pass on for the benefit of all
humanity. The tradition of secret brotherhoods had, however, a darker, more
sinister side, particularly among the post-revolutionary Right, which
interpreted the Revolution as the result of an evil Masonic conspiracy against
all established order. The conspiracy theory of the French Revolution though
present to some degree in counter revolutionary discourse from the very
beginning, received its most complete and vitriolic articulation in the
four-volume Memoires pour servir sur l'histoire du jacobinisme written
by the abbe Augustin Barruel in exile in London in
1797 and republished in France under the Restoration. Barruel
declared unambiguously that, within this French Revolution, everything up to the most shocking deeds, was planned,
premeditated, conspired resolved; everything was the effect of the most
profound villainy, because everything was prepared and led by men who had long
woven the threads of conspiracy in the secret societies, and who chose and
hastened the moments favorable to their plots."11 Barruel
alleged that the Revolution had first been envisioned by the philosophes of the
Enlightenment, who were able to infiltrate the Masonic movement, more
specifically the higher grades of the esoteric and Scottish Rite lodges, and
utilize it for their dastardly purposes.
At the heart of the
darker side of this invented tradition of secret brotherhoods was the
assumption that the Freemasons, the Illuminati, or at least some branches
within these organizations, were the direct heirs of the Knights Templar, a
medieval military-religious order that had gained tremendous wealth and
influence during the Crusades, later to be condemned by the Vatican and
brutally suppressed by the French monarchy. The Templar myth first won
adherents among Masons on both sides of the Rhine in the 1750s and 1760s who
sought a more distant and noble origin for their movement. Charles, baron of
Hund, established the Rite of Strict Observance, which celebrated festivals in
honor of Jacques Molay, the martyred last leader of
the order, and declared in its rituals that the order had been maintained in
secret for centuries. A manuscript published in Strasbourg in 1760 took this
legend a step further, arguing that the Templars had restored the ancient Order
of Hiram, which they took back from Jerusalem to Cyprus, until their
destruction by Philippe Ie Bel. Jacques Molay, whom the manuscript described as "a virtuous
man, of an exemplary life and irreproachable conduct," was said to have
passed on the order's secrets to his nephew, the Comte de Beaujeu,
just before his arrest and condemnation.12
Why did the
(completely speculative) association of Freemasonry with the Knights Templar
gain such rapid popularity in the eighteenth century? A.Faivre
has remarked, "Why were the Masons so quickly intrigued by and drawn to
this order in particular? Probably because it was more possible to make use of
a long dead order or to claim to be its successor, since proof to the contrary
will almost always be lacking."13 Rene Le Forestier has further observed
that "the Templar flirtation gave Scottish Rite Masonry the historical
genealogy that it lacked and the homogenous composition which it had hitherto
been missing. Not only was the descent from the Templars more flattering than
that from stonecutters, and justified the title of Chevalier which the Masons
gave themselves, but furthermore the history of this illustrious order,
destroyed as a result of a political and judicial drama which was present in
all minds, was universally known."14 Auguste Viatte
has observed that eighteenth-century Illuminists, deeply religious yet
fundamentally opposed to the established churches, Were particularly attracted
to beliefs and sects that had been condemned as heretical: The little which
they knew of medieval heresies led the Illuminists to believe that there they
could find kindred spirits. The duchess of Bourbon, who pleaded for the freedom
of conscience, proclaims herself in agreement with the Frerots,
the Albigensians, the Mennonites, and the poor
Vaudois, lung Stilling went on, whom the Roman hierarchy persecuted 'like a ]ezebel.' Boehme no doubt inspired their Biblical curse,
for, if we go to the sixteenth century, it is not Luther or Calvin whom the
mystics admire, for they had soon built formal churches, but what praises do
they sing to the shoemaker of Goerlitz! ... Paracelsus,
Agrippa, Reuchlin, Guillaume Postel, Pico della Mirandola, Valentin Weigel,
Von Helmont, Kircher, Fludd;
their reveries occupy entire generations; magnetizers, prophets, visionaries
claim to hold the key to their work.15
The Templar legend,
though flattering in many ways, raised a number of problems for its adherents.
Not the least of these, Le Forestier has remarked, is the fact that the
Templars did not enjoy the best of reputations. The members of the order, after
all, had been condemned of "heresy, idolatry, simony, magic, the worst of
crimes and the most corrupt morals. It was said that they had, following their
return to Europe, lived dissolute lives, and the phrase 'to drink like a
Templar' had become a popular proverb."16 More serious, however, was the
hint of subversion that inevitably associated itself with any effort to revive
the long-abolished order, or even to rehabilitate its memory. Le Forestier
remarks, "It is evident that the rehabilitation of the Templars of the
fourteenth century implied the moral condemnation of Philippe Ie Bel and of Bernard Gui who, if
the former had been innocent victims, their slanderers and executioners could
only have been motivated by the most vile passions." For this reason, Le
Forestier concludes, "following the logical consequences of the legend,
Templar Freemasonry could be seen as the organ of a vast conspiracy against the
established order, particularly against the institution of monarchy and the
authority of the Holy See." Although, Le Forestier notes, "the German
Brothers and the great majority of French Brothers who considered themselves,
as Masons, the successors of the Templars never took literally a four
hundred-year-old vendetta," the legend of a Templar-Masonic conspiracy to
destroy both throne and altar gained currency among the anti-Masonic Right,
especially once the French Revolution seemed to demonstrate the veracity of
these charges. Barruel would later declare that
"the same projects, the same means, the same horrors could not be more
faithfully transmitted from fathers to their children" and that "the
Templars were therefore what our Jacobin Masons are today."17
Even before the
Revolution, the Templar legend gave rise to a great controversy within esoteric
Freemasonry, as some enthusiastic Masons saw themselves as the heirs of the
crusading order and proposed the reestablishment of the order and the
rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, while others considered such a project
chimerical and dangerous. Ferdinand of Brunswick, a leading patron of esoteric
Freemasonry and a frequent correspondent of Willermoz,
rejected the Templar legend and threatened to withdraw his support unless it
was dropped. At the suggestion of Ferdinand and of another German prince,
Charles of Hesse, an international Masonic conference (though in practice
limited to French and German esoteric lodges) was held in Wilhelmsbad
in 1782 to discuss the question of the Templar filiation. This conference,
which Le Forestier describes as a sort of "Estates General, or at least
Assembly of Notables of continental European Freemasonry," was attended by
thirty-five delegates and presided over by Ferdinand of Brunswick. It must have
been a very strange assembly, because many different interest groups were
present and many chimerical projects were considered. Support for the Templar
filiation was strongest among the German delegates, particularly those from the
petty nobility, some of whom sought to restore the Templar Order as a bulwark
of feudal particularism in absolutist Europe and to recover the wealth that had
been stolen from their putative forerunners in the fourteenth century. Others
proposed raising an army to launch a new crusade against the Turks in the
Mediterranean.18 The central French lodge, the Grand Orient, was not admitted
to the conference, though it sought to send representatives, and the Bavarian
Illuminati, repudiated as excessively radical by most attendees, were
represented by just two delegates. The Illuminist delegate Christophe Bode,
curiously, argued that the Templar legend was in fact a Jesuit conspiracy to
return Protestant nations, notably England, to the Catholic faith, and he
alleged (a charge that was not unique to him) that the unknown superior of the
Strict Observance Order was in fact the Stuart pretender to the English
throne.19 Willermoz was present to represent the Martinist Order and to seek to spread its cosmology and
doctrines to the French and German lodges.
The Wilhelmsbad conference ended somewhat anticlimactically,
with the delegates called upon to vote on a series of questions. By majority
vote, they adopted a declaration that Freemasonry was not descended from the
Knights Templar, though there existed an analogy between them, and that they
had no goal to restore the Order of the Temple, to recover its lost
possessions, or to trouble the existing political order. The conference then
adopted a system of ranks and titles proposed by Willermoz,
the sixth and highest of which was the rank of Chevalier Bienfaisant.
Soon after the conference, however, new feuds prevented the adoption of a
uniform system of high grades, and the different lodges went their separate
ways.20
Although the reality
of the Wilhelmsbad Conference of 1782 was quite
benign and in some ways almost farcical, following the French Revolution it was
to become the stuff of counterrevolutionary legend, as reactionaries, following
the abbe Barruel, who saw the Revolution as the
result of a Masonic conspiracy, presented the conference as a defining moment
in its elaboration. Le Forestier remarks that, to make such a leap of
interpretation, "it was sufficient to take seriously the grades of
Vengeance, to reread the trial of the Templars, and to associate ancient
eastern heresies with the mystic doctrines in vogue in the eighteenth century to,
with the best faith in the world, transform the harmless distractions,
speculations, and researches of peaceful dreamers into horrible conspiracies
against the social order and established religion."21 This interpretation
gained added strength when the legendary Italian magician and mountebank
Balsamo Cagliostro was detained by the Inquisition in Rome in December 1789,
and, under the pressures of a brutal interrogation, "confessed" to
his participation in a vast Masonic conspiracy, according to which almost two
hundred thousand Illuminists, organized in two thousand lodges around the
world, had sworn an oath to destroy both the monarchy and the church. Le
Forestier writes of Cagliostro that, "as he knew very little of the
history of contemporary Freemasonry, he amalgamated the bits he had heard about
the Bavarian Illuminati, the Templars and the Strict Observance, and he
invented a novel which the investigators of the Holy Office took down with the
greatest seriousness."22 This confession was later published and
circulated throughout Europe, once the Terror and the execution of the French
royal family seemed to confirm the truth of its allegations. These charges were
later repeated in a 1797 pamphlet, Le Tombeau de
Jacques Malay, which claimed that the ancient Templars had joined the Society
of Assassins during their time in the East and had learned its evil secrets and
alleged that many of the leading figures of the Revolution, from the duc d'Orleans and Mirabeau to
Danton and Dumouriez, were part of this Masonic
conspiracy.
The allegations were
finally repeated and elaborated to their greatest extent in the abbe Barruel's Memoires pour servir a l'histoire du jacobinisme, which
also included the Martinists as part of the
conspiracy. Barruel denounced Saint-Martin as a
hypocrite and (rather inaccurately) as a Manichean and declared that "of
the sects which conspired against the Empire and all civil government, the
adepts of the Martinist lodges are the worst of
all."23 This charge led Joseph de Maistre, certainly
no friend to the Jacobins, to come to the defense of Saint-Martin. In the
eleventh dialogue of de Maistre's Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, one of the participants laments that the same
term, Illuminism, is used indiscriminately both for revolutionaries who
conceived "the frightful project of killing off Christianity and
sovereignty in Europe and for "the virtuous followers of Saint-Martin, who
not only profess Christianity but who work only to raise themselves to the most
sublime heights of this divine law."24 De Maistre's
defense of SaintMartin, which was rather
half-hearted, merely modified rather than refuted the conspiracy theory,
because it would give rise to a subsequent legend a struggle between rival
factions within Freemasonry, upon whose outcome would turn the history of the
world.
In the end one could
correctly argue that in stark contrast to the conspiracy theories of
LaRoche, the Martinists failed to achieve their
vision because they were fundamentally out of step with the tenor of their
times. They envisioned an order of peace and harmony, with France playing the
central role, in an age of rising nationalism and militarism, in which France
had irrevocably lost its former position of European hegemony. If, as Bismarck
famously declared, even the most powerful leaders could not reverse the tides
of history, but could only seek to pilot the ship of state through the stormy
waters, the Martinist political and social project
was doomed from the outset. Martinist doctrines of
politics and society, which were inseparable from the broader philosophical and
spiritual aims of the movement, were essentially eighteenth century in
character. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, Martinists
sought to discover abstract, alleged timeless principles of social harmony,
identifying the fundamental principles behind the forms of government, began
their inquiries into the nature of society with speculative dissertations on
the nature of man, and emphasized the cultivation of particular virtues as the
key to social well-being. This philosophic idealism and attachment to abstract
universal principles reflected Martinism's origins in
late Enlightenment France, but it made Martinist
doctrines appear increasingly quaint and out of touch with the more empirical,
positivist science of society that began to emerge in the nineteenth century.
But the social vision
of Martinism was not only timeless and idealized but
also largely preindustrial. Economic matters rarely figure into Martinist discussions of society, and Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who at least included an economic council in
his blueprint for the synarchy, offered little discussion of economics in his
writings. His few specific references to how this council would work recall a
rather idealized vision of the medieval guild system, similar in this regard to
the paternalist, social Catholic doctrines of fin de siecle
Legitimists, who were arguably almost as out of touch with contemporary French
realities as were the Martinists themselves. In their
efforts to assert the moral superiority of the ancients over the moderns, Martinist writers such as Guaita
and Papus tended to dismiss the significance of nineteenthcentury industrial innovations, and there is no
sense that the Martinists understood the degree to
which industrialization, urbanization, the reshaping of the class structure,
and the emergence of mass society had changed the political and social
equation.
In addition to being
out of step with the broader development of French society, Martinism
also notably lacked a theory of praxis by means of which its ambitious program
could have been realized. Saint-Yves d'Alveydre,
broadly influenced by Fabre d'Olivet and Levi,
produced thousands of pages on the structure and purposes of the synarchy but
precious little on how it was to be enacted. The empire of Ram, the
organization of the tribes of Israel, the lost sanctuary of Agarttha,
and even the medieval French Estates General are presented as simply existing,
or appearing suddenly and completely formed as the product of divine
inspiration. SaintMartin's writings from the
revolutionary decade of the 1790s praise the Revolution as a means of purifying
and renewing French society, but SaintMartin did not
affiliate with any political faction during this period, nor did he take
positions with regard to specific issues or conflicts within the Revolution. As
a defrocked clergyman and romantic socialist, the young Alphonse-Louis Constant
actively opposed the July Monarchy and sought to playa
political role in the spring of 1848, but in his mature years, the newly
christened magus Levi maintained an Olympian disdain for pel political
squabbles. Similarly, neither Guaita nor Papus was actively en gaged in electoral
politics or political associations in the fin de siecle
years, although both men had substantial personal ties to the antidemocratic
new Right of Maurice Barres and Gaston Mery.
The Martinist and synarchist
political project is, therefore, a utopian one, following Georgii
Plekhanov's definition of a utopian as "one who seeks a perfect social
organization departing from an abstract principle."lo
Metahistorical writers such as Saint-Yves d' Alveydre
and his predecessors, Delisle de Sales and Fabre d'Olivet,
were also "utopians" in another, more literal sense, as they located
their models for the ideal society in places which never existed: the
primordial civilization of the Caucasus, the prehistoric empire of Ram, or the
secret shrine of Agarttha. Citizens of a
postrevolutionary society polarized, as many commentators have noted, between
defenders of the Old Regime and those of the Revolution, and unable to accept
either alternative, Martinists and their kindred
spirits sought to transcend this impasse by appeal to a distant, ideal
civilization that existed only in their imaginations, in which the best
elements of both Old Regime and revolutionary France (the principles of divine
right and of human right, as Wronski called them)
would be integrated into a durable synthesis inspired by divine providence.
The political vision
of Martinism, from Fabre d'Olivet
to Levi to SaintYves d' Alveydre
and his admirers in the fin de siècle, was an elitist, organicist utopia, but
significantly one that was not limited to a particular race or nationality, but
that, it was hoped, would lead to a new golden age of world peace and harmony.
France was to play the role of initiator and model, the sage among nations, but
was not to dominate the rest by force of arms. The distant past that Saint-Yves
d'Alveydre longed to recover was not an age of
racially pure, warrior tribesmen, but rather a highly civilized, pacific global
federation of peoples. Both men hoped to see nineteenth century France's record
of foreign wars and domestic strife give way to what they imagined as a more
truly enlightened age. Their vision, however, was a utopian one, and their deep
and sincere (if unorthodox) spirituality, their rejection of materialism, their
horror of violence in any form, and their disdain for mass society put them
fundamentally out of step with their society. The generous, universalist ideals
of nineteenth-century French occultists may, in my opinion, absolve them of
complicity in the emergence of fascism (which in France had Catholic and
Legitimist roots that, if they at times overlapped with the occult community,
were nonetheless distinct from it), but it also condemned them to growing
irrelevance to the political debates of their time and ultimately to being
forgotten by all but the devoted but tiny circle of their admirers.
Reference to
"the Bilderbergers" generally means those who have attended at least
one of the meetings' but there is no set list of members as such. Rather, the
group's steering committee (including figures such as the former U.S. secretary
of state Henry Kissinger and Canadian media-mogul Conrad Black) is in charge of
deciding who will attend the meeting in any given year. The list of those who
have attended Bilderberger meetings is impressive, including leading
politicians and military figures, businessmen and bankers, and lawyers and
academics (see conspiracistfor complete lists). The
first meeting was allegdly not only attended by
high-ranking CIA officials, but was financed in part by the CIA as well. Also,
which is important for a certain strain of anti-old world conspiracy theory,
the group allowed members of Western European royal families to reclaim the
political power they had abdicated through constitutional reform. The
Bilderbergers claim that their limitation of press coverage and overall secrecy
is necessary in order to ensure an environment ot,openness
and freedom of speech during the meetings. In this age of media proliferation,
it is truly stunning that they manage to retain such a low profile, with nearly
none of the members ever agreeing to be interviewed on the subject of the
meetings. Many antiBilderbergers see this high level
of secrecy as sure evidence of a conspiracy. In the minds of some, further
evidence of conspiracy can be found in the Bilderbergers' ties to the Council
on Foreign Relations (CFR)-an extremely high percentage of u.s.
Bilderbergers are also members of the CFR-and to the Trilateral Commission,
which was founded from within the Bilderberg meetings by David Rockefeller
(Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission, Cambridge
University Press, 1990, p. 137). Even mainstream writers often suggest that u.s. Bilderbergers may well be contravening the Logan Act,
which makes it illegal for u.s. citizens to negotiate
with foreign powers without being granted the authority to do so by the U.S.
government.
Many argue that
future heads of state are handpicked by the Bilderbergers. It is no
coincidence, they charge, that Bill Clinton attended the 1991 meeting and went
on to become president the following year, or that Tony Blair attended in1993
and became the Labour Party's leader a year later,
ultimately becoming Britain's prime minister in the 1997 election. Furthermore,
the policies made by the parties of the left in both Britain and the United
States during the 1990s-policies that proved highly successful in capturing
"moderate" voters-seem to be in line with the policies of the
Bilderberger group, particularly those that favor the promotion of economic
globalization (i.e., the New World Order). When faced with the impressive list
of attendees, no one would dispute the fact that the Bilderbergers wield
immense political and economic power; the question is, rather, whether or not
this obvious power is best described as a conspiracy or secret world
government. The forces of international capitalism are indeed powerful, and, as
even mainstream theorists have argued, the forces of globalization create
interconnected networks of power that operate just the way a conspiracy to create
a New World Order would (see, for example, Michael Hardt and Antonia Negri's
book, Empire). Furthermore, by their own admission, the Bilderbergers are out
to promote the advance of global capitalism. So it is fair to ask exactly what
makes anti- Bilderbergers "merely" conspiracy theorists. For many,
anti-Bilderbergers are designated conspiracy theorists because of their
reliance on an array of concepts, rhetorical figures, and, perhaps most
importantly, targets that are often to be found in other "extremist"
theories. As with other conspiracy theories, anti- Bilderberger rhetoric
focuses on an international cabal run by the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds,
and many would argue that the choice of these two families as targets is no
accident. Critics of these "international bankers" and "secret
governments" tend to draw their metaphors, figures, and arguments from a
vast conceptual reservoir that includes, among other things, attacks on the
so-called Jewish-Masonic world conspiracy. Whether or not anti-Bilderberger
writings are manifestly antisemitic groups highly attuned to the language of antsemitism (such as the Anti-Defamation League) often
detect antisemitism in certain code words (i.e., the Rothschilds,
"international bankers," etc.). When labeled antisemitic by the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the conspiracy theorists ask: if there were a
conspiracy of international bankers that was orchestrating world events, how on
earth are we to investigate it and critique it other than by using terms such as
"international bankers"? In the eyes of the antiBilderbergers,
the ADL may be unwittingly (or wittingly) playing into the hands of the
Bilderbergers. Yet in the very virulence of their attacks on the ADL and
international Jewish bankers, the right -wing antiBilderbergers
often seem to betray their true intentions. Most recently promishing
the "True Story of The Bilderberggroup"(2007)
by Daniel Estulin is no more then a re-hash of the
conspiracy theory described above.
Louis-Claude de
Saint-Martin created neither an Order nor a society. Whether or not an
"apostolic succession", originating from him, reached into the late
I 9th century, remains a matter of some debate. In the 1880s, two well-known
figures in the Paris esoteric milieu, namely magnetist
Henri Delaage (1825-1882) and librarian Augustin Chaboseau (1868-1946), claimed independently to have
received such a succession, through an unbroken lineage of "Unknown
Superiors" (Superieurs Inconnus) dating back to
Saint- Martin himself. No evidence confirming (or definitely disproving) their
claims has ever surfaced.
Both Delaage and Chaboseau were
friends of Papus (Gerard Encausse,
1865-1916), a key character in the development of contemporary Martinism. Papus claimed to have
been initiated by Delaage in 1882, and exchanged
initiations with Chaboseau in 1888. That same year, Papus created his journal, L'!nitiation,
which was published until 1914. In 1891, Papus and Chaboseau founded a Martinist
Order, which included some of the most well-known figures of the Paris esoteric
underground, such as -+ Stanislas de Gua'ita
(1861-1897) and -+ Josephin Peladan
(1858-1918). The Order was probably the most successful among the many founded
or led by Papus. It became a matter of course for
everybody interested in esotericism to become initiated into the Martinist Order; even Rene Guenon (1886-1951) was one of
them, before breaking with Papus and leaving the
Order in 1909. As was usual then, most Martinists
were, at the same time, members of one or other Rosicrucian, neo-Templar, or
neo-Gnostic body. Most, but by no means all, were Freemasons, and members of
the "Egyptian" Rites of Memphis and Misraim
in particular.
Appendix: Martines de Pasqually
It has been well said
of Martines de Pasqually
that he was a "living enigma". The mystery begins with his surname.
From comparison of official documents (registry and military certificates) it
seems very likely that his full name (with many orthographic variations) was
Jacques de Lyoron (or de Livron)
Joachin Latourior de
Latour) de la Case Martines de Pasqually
(or else: Jacques de Lyoron Latour de la Case Joachin Martines de Pasqually). This name appears to consist of two successive
surnames, each preceded by a Christian name (Jacques, Joachin).
Van Rijnberk suggested that Martines
de Pasqually was a "hieronym":
a sacred name attached to the function of "initiatic
chief" with which Pasqually had been endowed,
following his father. But this ingenious hypothesis has been eliminated by the
military certificates discovered and published by Christian Marcenne
in the Bulletin de fa Societe Martines
de Pasqually (no. 6, 1996; a society based in Bordeaux).
From these, it appears that an uncle, designated as "doum
Pasqually", commanded in 1737 a company of
the regiment of Edinburgh Dragoons in the service of Philip V of Spain. As for Pasqually himself, the Spanish title of nobility
"Don" (or "Dom") almost always precedes the second part of
his name (Martines de Pasqually),
and before the first part of his name (Latour de la Case) it is often
duplicated by the French title, also indicating nobility, of "Messire" or "Sire". There is no doubt about Pasqually's noble status, attested by many official
documents, nor of his title, which was that of ecuyer
(esquire). He almost always signed himself "Don Martines
de Pasqually".
The next enigma is
his date of birth. The Societe Martines
de Pasqually, in its Bulletin no. 9 (1999), compared
two chronologies deduced from existing documents that are totally incompatible
with each other. One, calculated from the death certificate among other
documents, has Pasqually born in 1726 or 1727. But it
appears to be invalidated by the military certificates mentioned above, which
show that Pasqually had a military career in the
service of the King of Spain for at least ten years, from 1737, when he was a
lieutenant, to 1747 which cannot have started when he was ten years old. On
the other hand, these certificates accord with the masonic letters patent that Pasqually produced as having been issued to his father in
1738, which mention him (the son) as being twenty-nine at the time. This would
indicate a birth date of 1708 or 1709. The probabilities thus support an early
chronology, which Van Rijnberk already favored (II,
9-10).
Pasqually's place of birth was almost certainly Grenoble; all the
official documents agree on this point. His family certainly originated in
Spain. In fact, the letters patent of 1738 which he produced in 1762 indicate
that his father was born in Alicante in 1671. This Spanish origin, on which
all specialists agree, is reinforced by the certificates relating to his
military career in the service of the Spanish crown. Several contemporaries
close to him bear witness to the fact that his native language was not French
(the purely phonetic orthography of his letters also points to this, though
that in itself is not a proof).
His origin was not
only Spanish, but Jewish. This was already apparent to many of his
contemporaries. The denials on this point in a very late letter (1821) of
--> Jean-Baptiste Willermoz are not enough to
cast doubt on Pasqually's Jewish origins. Besides, on
closer reading Willermoz's denials apply to
religion, much more than to race. In fact, Martines
not only declared himself a Roman Catholic, producing in support a certificate
of catholicity, but he also required postulants for entry to the Ordre des Elus Coens to belong to this confession. This is the very
reason why several members of the Reformed Church (e.g. Du Roy d'Hauterive) had to abjure their membership of the latter.
Robert Amadou, after studying the question for some fifty years, concluded (d.
Introduction to his 1995 edition of the Traite sur
La Reintegration) that 'his paternal family was ... of Spanish Jewish Marrano
origin, or, more precisely, semi-Marrano'. The term "semi-Marrano" is
used because the authentic Marranos only pretended to be converted to
Christianity, to deceive their countrymen, whereas Christianity is inherent in Martines' doctrine, and he always professed it himself.
This Christianity, as it appears in his works, is peculiar but nonetheless
authentic. According to Amadou, who thoroughly analyzed it (in the Introduction
cited above, and in the Preface to his 1999 edition of the Leons
de Lyon), Pasqually belonged to a very particular and
very archaic category of Christianity, which one would have thought extinct for
over a thousand years:
"Judeo-Christianity".
This would seem to confirm his own constant contention that the knowledge he
possessed had been transmitted to him by succession. Willermoz,
echoing this, states that 'in his ministry, he had succeeded his father'. The
possibility of an "esoteric transmission" inside or outside the
family had already been aired by --> Rene Guenon, whom the "enigma of Martines de Pasqually"
provoked to the point of writing at least four articles, some of them long
ones, between 1914 and 1936.
Be that as it may,
nothing is known about Pasqually's youth except his
recently discovered military career. We do not even know his biography before
his entry onto the masonic stage - and the historical stage - during the decade
1750-1760. The first chapter founded by him seems to have been the Chapitre des Juges Ecossais in Montpellier, 1754. He then travelled through
France, mainly in the south but also in Paris and Lyons. At Toulouse, where in
1760 he explained before the "united lodges of Saint John" what seems
from the minutes to have already been a sketch of his system, he failed to
convince the brethren. He had more success in Guyenne, which is important for
what follows.
Starting on April 28,
1762, Pasqually settled in Bordeaux, where he resided
(except for a few months in Paris in 1766-1767) until his departure for San
Domingo on May 5, 1772. He won over the lodge La Fran;;aise,
within which he set up a "Temple particulier" (private temple): a
lodge which, after wranglings with the other Bordeaux
lodges, especially L'Anglaise, flew its true colors
by taking in 1764 the title of La Fran;;aise Elue Ecossaise. It was especially the regiment of FoixInfanterie, which, after a five year tour of duty in
San Domingo, returned to take up quarters in Bordeaux in July 1765, that
became a privileged field of activity for Pasqually.
He founded there a "Temple coen" called
"des Elus Ecossais",
under the aegis of the military lodge Josue which was probably created for
this purpose. Among other masons, he initiated two officers, P.A. de Grainville and G.A. de Champoleon,
who would later become his official collaborators and his voluntary secretaries.
It was through them that --> Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, assigned to the
Foix-Infanterie in the very month of its return to
France, became acquainted with Pasqually - a decisive
encounter for both men - and was speedily admitted to the Order.
As the Grand Lodge of
France became caught up in the quarrels between L'Anglaise
and La Fran;;aise, Pasqually
addressed to it a copy of the translation of the "constitution and
patent", written 'in the English idiom', as he said, granted to his
father on May 20, 1738, and transmissible to himself by 'Charles Stuard [sic], King of Scotland, Ireland, and England,
Grand Master of all the Lodges on the surface of the earth'. This patent makes
mention of 'Don Martinez Pasqualis, Esquire, aged 67
years, native of the town of Alicante in Spain', and of 'Joachim Dom Martinez Pasqualis, his elder son, aged 28 years, native of the town
of Grenoble in France'. This document is generally considered as apocryphal,
though Robert Amadou suspends judgment on this point. In any case, no decisive
argument has been produced either to confirm or to disprove its authenticity.
The question of the Stuarts' relations with --> Freemasonry, whether overt
or veiled (a question also relevant to the charter granted to Baron Karl von
Hund, founder of the system known as "Strict Observance") is
currently under research in the North of England and in Scotland. Finally, the
Grand Lodge of France took a step of general import: in August 1766 it decreed
the abolition of the high degrees. It rescinded this order in October, but not
before it had excluded Pasqually from the lodges
under its control, calling him a "sectarian". However, being itself
prey to persistent troubles that sometimes involved acts of violence, the Grand
Lodge was dissolved by royal edict on February 2I, 1767.
Henceforth, Pasqually had a clear field to set up his own system, the
Ordre des Chevaliers Ma<,;ons Elus
Coens de I'Univers (originally called Ordre des Elus Coens de Josue). During a several months' stay in
Paris (end of 1766 to beginning of 1767), he admitted many masons, including Willermoz - an encounter that would be as important as that
with Saint-Martin, though of a very different kind - and also Bacon de la Chevalerie. The latter was a mason of great skill, whom in
the following year Pasqually made his "universal
Substitute", at the same time (spring equinox, 1767) as he founded the
Sovereign Tribunal and promulgated the statutes of the Order.
Returning to
Bordeaux, Pasqually married in September 1767 the
niece and sister of two officers of the regiment of Foix Infanterie.
She bore him a son in June 1768, whom he counted on as a successor (using this
term in a letter to Willermoz) at the head of the
Order, and wrote to Willermoz that he had admitted
him as Grand Master Co en right after his baptism.
The Abbe Pierre Fournie (see below) was his tutor for
a time. But thanks to the turbulences of the revolutionary period, this son
ended as a simple police superintendent under the name of De La Tour (or
Latour) de la Case ("Pasqually" having
disappeared). Serge Caillet (in the journal L'Esprit des choses 7, 1994), and the Societe
Martines de Pasqually
(Bulletin 8, 1998) have traced the drab career of this son from 18 14 to 1830.
Another son, born in 177I, died in 1773. In 1768 Saint-Martin, then aged
twenty-five, was introduced to Pasqually by Grainville and Champoleon, while
in the same year Willermoz was ordained Reau-Croix by Bacon de la Chevalerie
in Paris. Willermoz was re-ordained "sympathetically",
meaning at a distance, by Pasqually himself in 1770.
From 1767 to 1772, Martines organized his Order, furnishing it with
instructions, rituals, and various recommendations. He started writing the Traite with the enthusiastic but disordered assistance of
the Abbe Pierre Fournie as secretary, then, from
177I, with the much more methodical and effective help of Saint-Martin (whom he
ordained Reau-Croix in 1772). His faithful disciples Grainville and Champoleon acted
as occasional collaborators. Despite this, things were far from being finished
when Pasqually embarked on May 5, 1772 for San
Domingo, in order to sort out matters of inheritance (the Societe
Martines de Pasqually has
passably explained the latter; see Bulletin 6, 7, and 8, 1996-1998.
Incidentally, this society has published a calendar, year by year, of all the
events relating to Martines' life).
From 1772 until
September 20 (or more likely 21), 1774, the date of his death in
Port-au-Prince, Pasqually was actively engaged with
his Order: much more so than has been claimed, indeed almost
"feverishly" according to Van Rijnberk. He
sent out rituals, instructions, messages of all kinds. As his successor as
Grand Souverain de l'Ordre, since his son was not yet
old enough, he had named his cousin by marriage Caignet
de Lester. But the latter died in his turn on December II, 1778, and was
replaced by Sebastian de Las Casas, who is supposed also to have been a
relative of Pasqually's. Meanwhile the Order
disintegrated, and in 1781 Las Casas set all the members at liberty. But
the history of the Elus Coens was far from over.
At the height of its
prosperity, the Ordre des Chevaliers Macons Elus Coens de l'Univers had
counted scarcely a dozen temples, enrolling about IoO
members. Most of the temples fell into decline, and the members changed their
allegiance. However, at least two temples remained active until the
revolutionary epoch. The Toulouse temple, as revealed by the Du Bourg papers,
continued working under the direction of Du Roy d'Hauterive;
that of Lyons, under Willermoz. It was in Lyons, from
1774 to 1776, that occurred those "rehearsals" of Martinesian
doctrine already noted by Vulliaud and Guenon, first
published by Antoine Faivre in 1975 under the title
Conferences des Elus Cohens de Lyon, and in a more
complete edition by Robert Amadou in 1999 under the title Les Le00ns de Lyon
aux Elus Coens.
This document is of
capital importance, and an indispensable complement to the unfinished
exposition which is the Traite sur la reintegration
des etres dans leur premiere
propriete, vertu et puissance spirituelle divine
(Treatise on the reintegration of beings in their first property, virtue, and
divine spiritual power; edited by Robert Amadou in 1995 from a manuscript of
Saint-Martin), or Traite de la reintegration des etres crees dans leurs primitives proprietes, vertus et puissances spirituelles divines (Treatise on the reintegration of created
beings in their primitive properties, virtues, and divine spiritual powers; ed.
R. Amadou in 1974 from two other texts). To these should be added the numerous
rituals and instructions made available by the discovery of Fonds Z (derived
from Saint-Martin) and the correspondence of Pasqually
published by --> Papus, by Van Rijnberk,
and in the journal Renaissance Traditionnelle. Among
the notable interpreters of Pasqually's thought are
Saint-Martin, who developed it in his works Des erreurs
et de la verite (On errors and truth, 1775) and the
Tableau naturel des rapports qui existent entre Dieu, l'homme
et l'univers (Natural table of the relationships
existing between God, man, and the universe, 1782); and Willermoz,
who expounded it in the Instruction secrete au Profes
(Secret instruction to the Profes) and especially in
the Instruction secrete aux Grands Profes (Secret
instruction to the Grands Profes), both written
shortly before 1778. There is also the work of Abbe Pierre Fournie,
Ce que nous avons ete, ce que no us sommes, ce que nous deviendrons (What we
have been, what we are, what we shall become; 1801): a confused and diffuse
work but not lacking in original inspiration.
If one combines the
last title with that of the Traite sur la
reintegration, one has a first glimpse, partial but faithful, of Pasqually's doctrine. "Doctrine" is the right
term, because he taught "with authority", like a master, not like a
thinker expounding a theory of his own invention. Pasqually
presented himself as the heir and the transmitter of a long tradition, of
supra-human origin: he declared in a letter to Willermoz:
'The science that I profess is certain and true, because it does not come from
man'. Pasqually was confident of having been taught
or inspired from above; in one place in the Traite he
writes: 'I will explain it to you as clearly as the truth of wisdom has
dictated it to me'. It is clear that for him, the wisdom in question was not
human or mundane.
The doctrine taught
by Pasqually is thus a science, a "science of
man" as Joseph de Maistre would later
write (he who never reneged on his original Martinesism,
on this point as on many others). It is a science of man in his 'relationships
with God and with the universe', as Saint-Martin expounds it in his Tableau
naturel. Taking as its point of departure man and the world in their current
state, this science goes back to their origins and anticipates their final
ends. It begins by speaking of the primitive state of immediate proximity, even
of unity, with God of man created in God's image. It goes on to the present
state of "privation", of rupture and separation from God. It
anticipates a state of reconciliation with God, followed by "reintegration",
a return to God. For Pasqually, sacred anthropology
and cosmology are thus inseparable, each explaining the other. They are
tributaries of a certain "science of God" which is not theology
properly speaking, but rather theosophy, because what the theosopher
grasps of God, or what grasps him, is Divine Wisdom.
This science is a Judaeo-Christian gnosis, or rather one that is both Jewish and
Christian: a gnosis not descriptive, but active. It does not merely obtain
knowledge of the reasons for the original fall of man, of his
"prevarication", but urges and helps him to repair the consequences
of this fall. To this end it obtains the "motor" or instrument of a
reconciliation of man with God, then of his 'reintegration in his primitive
properties, virtues, and divine spiritual powers'. For Pasqually,
the Ordre des Chevaliers Elus Coens de l'Univers was supposed to provide this "motor"
or instrument.
If this Order seems
to resemble other high-degree masonic systems or regimes flourishing at the
time, Pasqually thought, on the contrary, that those
belonged to the "apocrypha", to the "profane". For him, his
system was the only authentic one. Thus he wrote, in his rather peculiar style:
'I am only a feeble instrument which God wishes to use, unworthy as I am, to
recall men, my fellows, to their first masonic state, which is to say
spiritually man or soul, so as to make them see truly that they are really
man-God, being created in the image and semblance of this all-powerful Being'
(letter to Willermoz, August 13, 1768).
The Order created by Pasqually consisted of a sequence of ten degrees, if one
includes the three "blue" degrees of Apprentice, Companion, and
Master, outwardly similar to those of regular --+ Freemasonry which he called
"profane" (an understandable epithet in this context, since the term
etymologically refers to that which is "outside the Temple"). But
the similarity is limited to the names of these three degrees. As for the
actual Coen degrees, they are seven in number, distributed in four classes
(these numbers are important, for the Martinesian
doctrine is accompanied by a precise and complex numerology). Though their
names vary with the sources and epochs, their divisions remained unchanged: (A)
MaItre Grand Elu (or MaItre
Parfait Elu), transitional degree (somewhat like the Maitre
Ecossais de Saint-Andre in the Regime Ecossais Rectifie). (B) Classe du Porche, comprising the degrees
of Apprenti Coen, Compagnon
Coen, and Maitre Coen (or MaItre
particulier). (C) Cia sse du Temple, with the
degrees of Grand Maitre Co en
(or Grand Architecte), Chevalier d'Orient
(or Grand Elu de Zorobabel), Commandeur d'Orient (or Apprenti Reau-Croix). (D) The degree of Reau-Croix,
which constitutes a class of its own. Pasqually
conceived of these seven degrees as referring to the seven gifts of the Spirit,
and as leading progressively and pedagogically to the ever more advanced and
integral practice of a ceremonial cult. This cult was a theurgy, in that it
involved and activated the divine energies. It was also a liturgy, the
"common work" of masons (a word synonymous, for Pasqually,
to "men") who are involved in it and of "spiritual and intelligent
beings" (namely angels) who cooperate in it. The first man, priest-king of
the universe, was originally consecrated to this "primitive cult". Pasqually thus proposed to his disciples that they should
apply themselves to it again, following new methods appropriate to the new
state of man, who carries the stigmata of his original fall; and this so as to
"operate" his personal reconciliation and the universal
reconciliation (that of all creation): the "reintegration". These
views are not dissimilar to those that some Fathers of the Church called
"transfiguration" and "deification". Meanwhile, the cosmic
liturgy proposed by Pasqually does not intend rivalry
with the church liturgy, nor to substitute for the latter (Pasqually
required his disciples to assiduously follow the services of the Roman
Catholic Church, as well as the daily practice of a ritual of prayers
modelled, with due adaptation, on the monastic "hours").
This is why the Ordre
des Elus Coens, which is (to quote the recent title
of an article by Serge Caillet in Renaissance Traditionnelle) 'a school of virtue and prayer', finally
appears as a sort of religious order. Its theurgical ceremony was not magical,
in the often negative sense of the word. It was not aimed at acquiring natural
or supernatural powers. The famous "passes" or "luminous
glyphs" (that is, the tangible manifestation of a "presence" in
the chamber of theurgical operation) were not, as is sometimes thought, the
actual goal of the operations. Pasqually saw in these
passes nothing more than symptoms or signs indicating to the theurgist that his
reconciliation was in progress. Theurgy, he wrote, is 'a ceremony and a rule of
life to enable the invocation of the Eternal in holiness'. This rule of life,
an indispensable condition, demanded a rigorous hygiene of body, soul, and
spirit that is almost ascetic. The ceremonial was precise, exacting, and
religious: it was destined to ensure the communication with good spirits and to
prevent communication with the "perverse spirits" (i.e., demoniac).
The "pass" was thus the manifestation of what Pasqually
called fa Chose (the Thing), by which he meant Wisdom personified, the divine
Sophia. According to the discriminating analysis by Robert Amadou (in a radio
broadcast of March 4, 2000 devoted to the Elus
Coens), 'the Thing is not the person of Jesus Christ ... , the Thing is not
Jesus Christ; it is the presence of Jesus Christ', just as the Shekinah was the
presence of God in Solomon's Temple. In the Martinesian
cult, the Thing was not summoned, for it could not be; it manifested, it caused
an epiphany, to express its satisfaction and benevolence. That having been
said, the cult itself did not have as its goal the manifestation of the Thing;
it was only the occasion for it. This cult had another object, which is
sacrificial: it was a matter of "operating", or at least of
advancing, the reconciliation of man and that of the universe. As Willermoz summed it up, it was a cult of expiation, of
purification, of reconciliation, and of sanctification.
The time seems to
have passed when Martines was decried as a charlatan
and an impostor, or else as merely a fantasist full of muddled and bizarre
ideas. One is entitled to re-read today, with new eyes, the concordant witness
of two of his disciples: 'This extraordinary man, of whom I have never known
the like' (Willermoz); 'This extraordinary man is the
only living man I have known whom I have not fathomed' (Saint-Martin).
Martines de Pasqually, Traite de la reintegration des etres
crees dans leurs primitives
propriites, vertus et puissances spirituelles divines,
Paris: Chacornac, I899 • new eds.: (A) Robert Amadou
(ed.), Paris: Robert Dumas, I974 (on the right-hand page, copy of the I899
edition, on the left-hand page, reproduction of one of the original
manuscripts) • (B) Paris: Editions Traditionnelles,
I988 • (C) Le Tremblay: Diffusion rosicrucienne, I993
(which presents the facsimile of a manuscript different from that of A) • (D)
Le Tremblay: Diffusion rosicrucienne, I995
(scholarly ed. of the I993 manuscript).
Pierre Fournie, Ce que
nous avons ete, ce que nous sommes, et ce que nous deviendrons. Premiere partie (the second
part was not published), London: A. Dulau, 1801.
Lit.: Robert Amadou,
"Martines de Pasqually", L'Initiation I (I969), 6-30; 2 (I969),
58-84; 3 (I969), I39I74 • R. Amadou & Catherine Amadou, "Le combat
singulier du Grand Souverain contre la Mas:onnerie apocryphe, ou Martines de
Pasqually aux Archives du Grand Orient de France", Renaissance
Traditionnelle I3 I-I32 (2002), 250-28I • Thierry Boudignon, "La mort du
fils de Martines de Pasqually", Renaissance Traditionnelle I2I
(2000),32-43 • Bulletin de la Societe Martines de Pasqually (Michelle Nahan
etc., Annual Newsletter), Bordeaux: Librairie Au Vieux Grimoire, I990 • Serge
Caillet, "Le Parcours insolite de Jean Delatour, fils de Martines de
Pasqually", L'Esprit des Choses 7 (I994), 72-84. Alice Joly, Un mystique
lyonnais U.-B. Willermoz] et les secrets de la Franc-Ma'fonnerie, Macon:
Protat, I938; reprinted Paris: Demeter, I986 • Rene Le Forestier, La
Franc-Ma'fonnerie occultiste au XVIIIe siecle et I'Ordre des Elus Coens,
Paris: Dorbon, I928 • idem, La Franc-Ma'fonnerie templiere et occultiste aux
XVIIIe et XIxe siecles (A. Faivre, ed.), Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, I970; reprinted
Paris: La Table d'Emeraude, I987; Paris: Arche-Edidit, 2003 Papus (Gerard
Encausse), Martines de Pasqually, sa vie - ses pratiques magiques - son oeuvre
- ses disciples, suivi des catichismes des Elus Coens, Paris: Chamuel, 1895;
reprinted Paris: Dumas, 1976; Paris: Demeter, 1986 • Michel Taillefer,
"Les disciples toulousains de Martines de Pasqually", in: Le Temple
cohen de Toulouse (1760-1792), Cariscript, Paris: Documents martinistes 2.5,
1986 • Gerard Van Rijnberk, Un thaumaturge au XVIIIe siecle: Martines de
Pasqually (sa vie, son Oeuvre, son Ordre), vol. I, Paris: Alcan, 1935; vol. 2.,
Lyon: Derain-Radet, 1938 (several reprints).
1.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 5-6.
2.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 70.
3.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 40-41.
4.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 74-75.
5.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 75, 88-89.
6.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 118.
7.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 116.
8.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 132.
9.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 180-81.
10.Saint-Martin, Le
crocodile, 220.
11. Abbe Augustin
Barruel, Memoires pour servir it l'histoire du jacobinisme (Chire en Montreuil:
Diffusion de la Pensee Francaise, 1973 [reprint of 1818 ed.], Vol. 1, 42.
12.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 111-12, 69.
13.Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1994), 187.
14.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 80.
15.Auguste Viatte, Les
sources occultes du romantisme francais: Illuminisme, Theosophie, 1770-1820
(Paris: Honore Champion, 1928), Vol. 1,28-29.
16.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 76.
17.Barruel, Memoires,
Vol. 1,474,476.
18.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 649, 658-60.
19.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 638.
20.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 663-64, 695.
21.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 847.
22.Le Forestier, La
Franc-Maconnerie Templiere, 848.
23.Barruel, Memoires,
Vol. 1, 449.
24.Joseph de Maistre, Les
soirees de Saint-Petersbourg, ou entretiens sur Ie gouvernement temporel de la
Providence (Paris: Garnier Freres, n.d.), Vol. 2, 213-14.
For updates
click homepage here