Stanislas de
Guaita address to 3rd Degree Martinist initiates
That which
follows is my translation, to the best of my ability, (it was not easy!) of an
address to 3rd Degree Martinist initiates by Stanislas de Guaita,
published in his ‘Au Seuil du Mystère’. It is an important text showing the
deeper implications of what he and his associates such as Papus regarded as the
gist of initiatory fraternities.
You have been successively admitted
to the three hierarchical grades of our Order and we greet you now as Supérieur Inconnu, and when you
have transcribed and meditated on our papers you will become an Initiator in
your turn. An important mission will then be committed to your faithful hands, a
duty that is also an honour: to form a
group of which you will be the intellectual Father, and on occasion the moral
Tutor, subject to your conscience and Divine Humanity.
This is not a matter of imposing
dogmatic convictions. It matters little whether you consider yourself to be spiritual,
materialistic or idealistic; whether you profess to be Christian or Buddhist;
call yourself a free-thinker or affect absolute scepticism. We do not impose mental
questions that you can only resolve
yourself face to face with your own conscience in the silence of your heart.
So long as you embrace a true love
for your fellow human beings and do not seek to deny your humanity you remain a
member of a supreme and truly universal religion. One that expresses itself in
many ways in the various religions of East and West.
Give to this sentiment whatever name
you choose: love, solidarity, altruism, fraternity, charity or even express it
in political or economic terms. Labels are not important! Honour it Mystically under the names of Divine
Mother or Holy Spirit. And never forget that putting it to work is the first and
main essential.
......
Sincere and disinterested pursuit of
the Truth is what your Mind owes to itself. Brotherly love is
what your Heart owes to others.
Apart from these two duties, no
philosophical or religious dogma is
imposed on your faith. As for our doctrine, we have outlined the essential
principles and ask only for meditation on them at leisure and without prejudice.
It is the only means of persuasion by which traditional Truth seeks to win you
to its cause.
We have presented to your eyes the
seals of a Book. But it is for you to learn to spell out the Letters and then
to penetrate the Spirit of the mysteries that the words contain.
......
We have given you a start. The
role of Initiation must be limited to that. If by yourself you come to an understanding of the Arcana,
you will merit the title of Adept. But remember this. It is impossible for even
the most knowledgeable masters to reveal the supreme formulae of knowledge and power of magic to you. True
Occultism cannot be transmitted by discourse. You must evoke, create and develop it in yourself.
As an Initiate you are one
that others have started on your way. Strive to become an Adept; one who
has conquered the Science by himself; has become the son of his work.
......
Our Order, we have told you, limits
its pretensions to the hope of harvesting the good earth by sowing the good
seed everywhere. The teachings of the S*I* are precise, but elementary.
May this secondary programme satisfy
your ambition. May your destiny bring you one day to the threshold of the
mysterious temple from whence, for centuries, the luminous source of Western
Esotericism has radiated. Listen to the words of your unknown Brothers. May
they germinate in your mind and fructify in your soul.
......
I affirm that you can find there the
infallible criterion of Occultism. And that the key to the vault of
esoteric synthesis is there and nowhere else. But what point is insistence if
you can understand and want to believe? And what good is insistence if you do
not?
You are completely free to take what
remains for me to say as a mystical allegory or as a literary fable
without meaning, or even as an audacious imposture...
You are free; but LISTEN. Whether
the seed sprout or perish, I intend to sow it!
......
In the
beginning, at the root of Being, is the Absolute.
The Absolute – which the religious call God -
cannot be conceived. And whoever claims to define it denatures
his notion by assigning it limits: “A God defined is a God finished.” {Eliphas
Levi}.
But this bottomless Absolute
emanates eternally the androgynous Dyad, formed by two indissoluble
principles united: the Life-giving Spirit {sulphur} and the Universal Living Soul {mercury}.
The mystery of their union
constitutes the Great Arcanum of the Word.
Now, the Word is collective
Man considered in his divine synthesis before his disintegration, and is Celestial
Adam before his fall. By which Universal Being knew it was modalised,
passing from Unity to Quantity; from Absolute to Relative;
from Collectivity to Individualism; from Infinity to Space
and from Eternity to Time.
With the Fall of Adam, here
are some ideas of traditional teaching:
Incited by a mobile interior, about
which we must be silent as to its essential nature, mobile in that Moses calls it
נחש
NaHaSh and that we define, if you like, as the egoic thirst for individual
existence, a great number of
fragmented Words, potential consciousnesses, vaguely awake in a mode of
emanation in the heart of the Absolute
Word, separate from the Word that contains them.
They detach themselves – minute
sub-multiples – of the Mother-unity who has engendered them. Simple rays from
this occult sun, they shoot into infinity through the shadows, in their
individual coming to birth, in that they wish to be independent of any anterior
principle. Or in a word, autonomous.
But as a luminous ray only has a relative
existence in rapport with the source that produced it, the equally relative
Words, stripped of the auto-divine principle and of the true light,
obscure themselves in the measure that they distance themselves from the
absolute Word.
They fall into matter, into
the untruth of substance in objective frenzy. Into matter that is
to Non-Being what the Spirit is to Being. They descend as far as elemental existence,
as far as animality; as far as vegetation; as far as minerality
. {* They descend, as far as potentialities of these things, to
the astral plane, which is the normal plane of Involution, while the physical
plane is the normal plane of Evolution. By virtue of this ascending and
repercussive movement called Evolution, beings appear in turn progressively on
the scene of the material world on departure from the more elemental.}
Thus matter is born, soon elaborated
from Spirit, and the concrete Universe takes on an ascending life,
reascending from stone, apt to crystallisation, as far as man, susceptible
to thought, to prayer, to consent to the understandable, and
devotion to the similar!
This sensory repercussion of the
captive Spirit, sublimating the progressive forms of Matter and Life, trying to
escape from prison – contemporary Science defines and studies under the name of
Evolution.
Evolution is the universal Redemption
of the Spirit. In evolving, the Spirit remounts.
But before remounting, the Spirit
had descended; which is what we call Involution.
How is the verbal sub-multiple
arrested at a given point in its fall? What Force enabled it to retrace
its way? How is the consciousness numbed by its collective divinity finally
awakened within it under the still very imperfect form of Sociability?
Such deep mysteries we cannot approach here,
but of which you will acquire understanding if Providence is with you.
......
These few facts are precise, on the
‘great affair’ {term of
Saint-Martin} of human
destiny. It is for you to try to deduce the rest and state the solution to the
problem.
But understand well, my Brother,
for a third and last time I implore you to understand that Altruism is
the only way that conducts you to the unique and final end – the reintegration
of the sub-multiples in the Divine Unity – the only doctrine that furnishes
the means from the grip of the material chains, to the ascension, through the superior
hierarchies, towards the central star of regeneration and peace.
Never forget that the Universal Adam
is an Homogenous All, a living Being, of which we are the organic
atoms and constituting cells. We live all one in others, all one for
others, and if we would be individually saved (to use Christian
terms) we will never cease to suffer or to struggle until all our brothers are
saved with us!
Intelligent
Egoism thus concludes as traditional
Science concludes. Universal brotherhood is not a delusion; it is a factual
reality.
Whoever works
for others works for himself; whoever kills or wounds his neighbour wounds or
kills himself; whoever offends him, insults himself.
May these mystic terms not scare
you; there is nothing arbitrary in this high doctrine; we are mathematicians of
being, algebraists of metaphysics.
Remember, son of the Earth, that your
great ambition must be the reconquest of the zodiacal Eden from which you
should never had descended; finally to return to the Ineffable Unity, WITHOUT
WHICH YOU ARE NOTHING, and in the heart of which you will find, after much work
and adversity, that heavenly peace, that conscious sleep that the Hindus know
under the name of NIRVANA: the supreme beatitude of Omniscience, in God.
S de G ﬡ S.I.
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