Initiatic Discourse – for a Martinist Reception of the 3rd Degree
By Stanislas de Guaita
From L’Initiation – Issue #10 July 1889
Translated by – Alex Bushman
Translator’s Note: In this article we find a brief expression of the the myth central to the Martinist tradition and indeed the Kabbalistic tradition. Thus far my experience has shown that Martinists and Rosicrucians in the west tend to overlook the works of Stanislas de Guaita. I hope this glimpse into his works sparks renewed interest into his contributions to our experience of the Martinist and R+C traditions.
– Alex
You have been successively clothed in the three hierarchical grades of our order; We salute you S∴I ∴, and when you have transcribed and meditated on our notebooks, you will become an Initiator in your turn. To your faithful hands will be committed an important mission: the burden will fall on you, but also the honor, to form a group where you will be before your conscience and before the divine humanity the intellectual father, and on occasion the moral guardian[1].
It is not a question here of imposing dogmatic convictions. Whether you believe yourself a materialist, a spiritualist, or an idealist; whether you are professing Christianity or Buddhism; whether you proclaim yourself a free-thinker or even an absolutely sceptic, this matters very little to us after all: and we will not offend your heart, by upsetting your mind with problems that you must only solve face to face with your conscience and in the solemn silence of your soothed passions.
As long as your heart is burning with real love for your human brothers, never seek to break the bonds of solidarity that bind you to the Human Kingdom considered in its Synthesis, you are of a supreme and truly universal religion, because it is that which manifests itself and imposes itself, (multiform it is true, but essentially identical to itself), under the veils of all the exoteric cults of the West and the East.
Psychologist, give this feeling the name you want: Love, Solidarity, Altruism, Fraternity, Charity;
Economist or philosopher, call it Socialist, if you want … Collectivism, Communism … Words are nothing!
Honor it, Mystic, under the names of Divine Mother or Holy Spirit.
But whoever you are, never forget that in all truly true and profound religions, that is to say those founded on Esotericism, the implementation of this feeling is the primary, capital, and essential teaching of this very esotericism.
Sincere and unselfish pursuit of truth, this is what your Spirit owes to itself; brotherly kindness to other men, that is what your heart owes to your neighbor.
These two duties excepted, our Order does not pretend to prescribe others, at least not in an imperative fashion.
No philosophical or religious dogma is further imposed on your faith. As for the doctrines in which we have summarized for you the essential principles, we only ask you to meditate on it at your leisure and without bias. It is by persuasion alone that the Traditional Truth wants to conquer you to its cause!
We have opened to your eyes the seals of the Book; but it is up to you to learn how to spell the letter first, then to penetrate the Spirit of the mysteries that this book contains.
We have started you: the role of your Initiators must be limited to that. If you arrive on your own to the intelligence of the Arcana, you will merit the title of Adept; but know this well: it is in vain that the most learned magi of the earth would reveal to you the supreme formulas of science and magical power; the Occult Truth cannot be transmitted in a discourse: each one of us must evoke it, create it and develop it in oneself.
You are an Initiatus: the one that others put on the way; strive to become an Adeptus: he who conquered the Science by himself; in a word, the son of his works.
Our Order, I told you, limits its pretensions to the hope of fertilizing good grounds, sowing good seed everywhere: the teachings of the S∴I∴ are precise, but elementary.
Whether this secondary program suffices for your ambition; whether your destiny pushes you one day to the threshold of the mysterious temple where shines, for centuries, the luminous deposit of Western Esotericism, listen to the last words of your Unknown Brothers: may they germinate in your mind and bear fruit in your soul!
I protest that you can find there the infallible criterion of Occultism, and that the vault key of the esoteric synthesis is there, not elsewhere. But what is the use of insisting, if you can understand and if you want to believe? On the other hand, what good is it to insist again?
You are quite free to take what remains to be said for a mystical allegory or for a literary fable of no impact, or even for a daring imposture…
You are free; but Listen. – Sprout or spoil the seed, I will sow!
In principle, at the root of Being is the Absolute; The Absolute – which the religions call God – cannot be conceived, and who pretends to define it by altering the notion, by assigning limits: a God defined is a finite god[2].
But from this unfathomable Absolute emanates eternally the Androgynous Dyad[3], formed of two indissolubly united principles: The Vivifying Spirit ☿and the Universal Living Soul 🜍. The mystery of their union constitutes the Great Arcanum of the Word[4].
Now, the Word, is the collective Man considered in his divine synthesis, before his disintegration. It is the Celestial Adam before his fall; before this Universal Being was modalized, from Unity to Number; from the Absolute to the Relative; from Collectivity to Individualism; from Infinity to Space and from Eternity to Time.
On the Fall of Adam, here are some notions from the traditional teaching:
Incited by an interior motive, whose essential nature we must here silence, the motive which Moses called נחש, NAHASH, and that we would define, if you will, as the selfish thirst for individual existence, a large number of fragmentary Words[5], conscious potentials vaguely awakened in emanation mode in the womb of the Absolute Word, separated from this Word which contains them.
They broke away, – tiny sub-multiples, – of the mother Unity that engendered them. Simple rays of this occult sun, they darted to infinity in the darkness of their nascent individuality, that they wished independent of any previous principle, in a word, autonomous.
But as the luminous ray exists only from a relative existence, relative to the focus that produced it, these Verbs[6] are equally relative, devoid of auto-divine principle and of light proper, they darkened as they moved away from the absolute Verb.
They fell into matter, falsehood of the substance in delirium of objectivity; in matter, which is to Non-Being what the Spirit is to Being; they descended until the elementary existence, until the animality, until the vegetable, until the mineral! Thus matter was elaborated of the Spirit, and the concrete Universe took an ascending life, rising up from the rock, apt for crystallization, up to man, capable of thinking, of praying, of understanding, and of devoting himself to his fellow man!
This sensible repercussion of the captive Spirit, sublimating the progressive forms of Matter and Life, to try to get out of his prison, – contemporary science recognizes it and studies it under the name of Evolution.
Evolution is the universal Redemption of the Spirit. By evolving, the Spirit ascends.
But before ascending, the Spirit had descended: that is what we call Involution.
How did the sub-multiple verbal stop at a given point of its fall? What Force allowed him to turn back? How did the obscure consciousness of his collective divinity finally awaken in him, in the still imperfect form of Sociability? – These are profound mysteries, which we cannot even approach here, and whose intelligence you will acquire, if Providence is with you.
I will stop myself here. We have taken you far enough on the path; here you are provided with an occult compass which will allow you, if not never to be misled, at least to always find the right way.
So there is some precise data on the grande affaire[7] of the human destiny : it is up to you to deduce the rest, and to give the problem its solution. But understand, my brother, a third and last time I adjure you, understand that Altruism is the only way to the unique and final goal, – I mean the reintegration of the submultiples into Divine Unity; – the only doctrine which provides the means, which is the tearing up of the material obstacles, for the ascension, through the higher hierarchies, towards the central star of regeneration and peace.
Never forget that the Universal Adam is a homogeneous whole, a living being, of which we are the organic atoms and the constituent cells. We all live in one another, for one another; and merging ourselves individually saved (to speak the Christian language), we would never cease to suffer and fight until all our brothers were saved like us!
The intelligent Egoism thus concludes as traditional Science has concluded: universal fraternity is not a decoy; it is a reality of fact.
He who works for others works for himself; he who kills or wounds his neighbor is injured or killed; he who outrages others, insults himself.
Let these mystical terms not frighten you: we are the mathematicians of ontology, the algebraists of metaphysics.
Remember, sons of the Earth, that your great ambition must be to reconquer the zodiacal Eden from which you should never have descended, and finally to return to the Ineffable Unity, BEYOND WHICH YOU ARE NOTHING , and in whose bosom you will find, after so much work and torment, this heavenly peace, this conscious sleep that Hindus know as Nirvana: the supreme bliss of Omniscience, in God.
STANISLAS DE GUAITA א S∴I∴
[1] tutor
[2] Eliphas Lévi
[3] Union of two philosophical principles which complement each other
[4] Verbe
[5] The French “Verbes” really makes more sense here than the standard English translation of the “Word”
[6] I am going to continue using Verb as the translation, you are welcome to substitute Word or Logos as you prefer
[7] Saint-Martin
