4

HELL AND THOSE PUNISHED

Today we take up the most delicate point of our doctrine: the application, or more exactly the translation of the charter of the Third Term of the Trinity into human life.

This point is difficult to treat because, throughout the decadent era of materialism, brains have become too habituated to considering every problem, divine or human, in light of the elementary needs of the body, to such an extent that many people do not feel that they have understood something in the philosophical or metaphysical realm unless the proposed solution gives the impression of immediately opening up a new horizon in one of these three areas: eating, earning, or playing at love. Every argument that demands that one forget the sphere of one’s habitual activity in order to understand that which is being presented seems, to those (alas, too numerous) brains, to be a march into indecipherable shadows.

This sad state of affairs has been unfortunate for many of the Words launched into the world in recent years. To facilitate understanding of the divine region, to widen the circle of the fervent around the great ideas, many groups, and first among them the Theosophical Society founded by Madame Blavatsky and directed after her death by Annie Besant, have prostituted the divine by cutting it into small pieces of cake that are easy to digest, and have surrounded the great Central Enigma that they proposed to unveil (for such was the order that had been given them) with a veil thicker than the one before . . . in order not to offend the weak and fearful!

The service that they have thus rendered to the Cause may be easily guessed: Isis of the fecund womb is presented to the world in a more degraded state than ever, and her priests and priestesses, to take in money today to do good tomorrow, as they claim, talk nonsense and preach foolishness, putting the adepts to sleep in a blessed inertia whose chief element is self-satisfaction. One doe s not ask any real effort of the people who approach the altars, any recognition of their inferiority, any realization of their fall. The great consolation of Karma takes care of everything: you are weak today, you will be strong in a future life; you are all poor now, you will be rich at another time, in another body, beneath other skies; you can be neither priest nor prince, because you lack the qualities, you will have what it takes for these dignities in another existence when your Karma has run out. Because of this, and each one aiming only for the final goal of a king’s throne, each theosopher feels himself the equal of all, and by anticipation already the future King of Kings. That behind all this there should be something to realize in the matter of the definitive reintegration of all in the All, and a whole long gravitation around the Invisible, that is easily cut down in brains now calmed concerning the main thing, which is their self-love. The bottom line is that justice has been rendered to all and each is “great,” since all will be, someday. It’s only a question of time, and long live Theosophy!

But the great Blavatsky, if she came back today to her disciples, would have reason to be frightened. She had taken enormous pains to announce everywhere the end of one era and the upcoming beginning of a new slice of history. She had sown to harvest today fruits that, in the meantime, should have ripened, but to be sure, it is not among the theosophers that she would have to look to find them. As always, the roses have bloomed outside of the chapel, and he who would now like to form the sheaf of the chosen must begin again the wearisome voyages to reunite what time has scattered.

Still, the chosen are there and the sheaf will be formed, we do not hesitate to proclaim it loudly. We know that they are there, and we know that they will group themselves, attracted to each other by an unknown force that will not ask them for their consent, because the good must finally be separated from the bad.

Those, the good, will understand what we are writing, and perhaps even beyond what the letters can express. It is for them that we say what follows:

The translation of the charter of the Third Term of the Trinity into human life is a new realization of sexual love. It is no longer two bodies that take each other to make merry, but two beings of different sexes who approach each other with a special religiosity and according to a particular rite to cause the divine spark of knowledge to shine forth from their contact.

This operation, this rite is of such nature that it leaves no place for the regard of self-love. He who fails, fails cleanly, visibly, indisputably, and he who succeeds, succeeds similarly precisely, without any possible shadow of misunderstanding.

The one who is victorious in the test, comes out of it spiritually fortified and as if illuminated, and the new faculties added from then on to his intelligence and his will cannot be denied by any observer. The hierarchy of worth is thus established in a peremptory way, and the obedience of the inferior to the superior becomes natural.

This is the basis of the new pyramid that we are preaching, and whose inevitable construction we foresee. The society that will be organized on the ruins of that which is decomposing today will be formed by its new people, regenerated by the new fire of love, and the work that they accomplish will necessarily be good and efficacious.

What disturbs certain sorrowful spirits today, when one talks to them about these things, is the idea that at the wide lower levels of the new Pyramid, one will have to expect a whole army of shadowy beings, lacking in intelligence, whose incapacity itself will reduce to the role of simple slaves. But don’t we know that the materially unhappy fate of human societies comes precisely from the policy exercised with regard to the incapable? Don’t we know that everything gets muddled and obscured when, in order not to offend a person of little capability we entrust to him anyway the role of governor? It is because the last century exercised this policy to excess that we are now in a general chaos from which all suffer.

The new era will not know the demoralizing catering to everything that is unworthy.

The new era will not be based on the false idea that each one must be flattered and adulated apart from his merit.

Besides, with the divine light shining into the world, every man will concern himself much less with himself than with the Eternal Truth, which will again become a living factor in life, and every woman will know that her role is not to be a little queen next to a meager brook, but a priestess illuminated by vivifying love.

When women know that, when their sacred mission is taught to them from a young age, the current plague of immorality will disappear naturally. No woman, unless she is a monster, will be able to give herself to prostitution, and one will no longer do in secret the abominable things that one does now, for one will know, as one knows that one is upon the earth, that the comedy of love without love and magic is a crime that nature cannot forgive, even if people are indulgent.

For as we have said in our preceding numbers, the era of the translation of the charter of the Third Term of the Trinity is the era of redemption, the epoch of the definitive utilization of the good energies and the parallel condemnation of the refractory forces.

Everything that does not serve the rectification according to the divine will for the reorientation toward God of the energy entrusted to humans, will be cast into the lower realms and that is the hell predicted by the prophets: a hell on earth and with the punished in flesh and blood in the full light of the sun.

It is unfortunate that one cannot persuade each one of this while there is still time, and death can still be avoided and replaced by life.

It is still more unfortunate to know the way and not be able to lead all humanity on this path to save it. But how does one cure those who do not recognize that they are ill? How does one call to God those who do not believe in his reality and how does one keep from drowning those who do not see the floodwaters leaving their overflowed banks in menacing tides?

The sufferings of humanity will be fearsome because its ill will is without limit.

[The chapter continues now, in La Flèche No. 5.]

Our friend and collaborator Auguste Apôtre finished his last article, in La Flèche No. 4, by saying:

It is the West that knows the Truth, it is from the West that our salvation will come to us.

We are in perfect agreement with him, and today we will lay out the reasons that cause us to affirm that the path that has led humanity toward the translation of the charter of the Third Term of the Trinity on earth, whose principal characteristic is the realization of gnostic love, of the love that causes divine knowledge to shine forth from the contact of two bodies, has been Christianity such as we know it through its history.

We emphasize these last words in order to separate ourselves cleanly from those who make a distinction between the word of Christ and the theological teaching given by the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Catholic Church (called Greek), in pretending that the truth was in the mouth of the Christ but that it has been unrecognized by the Church.

No, we argue that the two Churches that we have just mentioned have given to the world what they were supposed to give and that Saint Peter as well as Saint Andrew built the house of God on earth exactly as they should have, for Jesus said to John: “You, follow me,” and then immediately to Peter: “Don’t concern yourself with what this one will do.”^*5

Peter and Andrew, the protectors of the Roman Church and the Byzantine Church (Russian in particular) did not occupy themselves with what John was doing, in the course of the past nineteen centuries, and they did well not to. For their duty was to lead all of humanity to the threshold of the third temple, the temple that we will build now, and whose secret has been entrusted by the Man-God precisely to John.

It is in the just accomplishment of this task of universal character, catholic, that the merit of Christianity resides, such as we know it through its history, and we repeat again that no religion—we do well to say no—has spread through the world a doctrine and (magical) practices better suited to the goal of the universal elevation of humanity toward those spiritual regions that confer upon humans the capacity to make sublime the vital force hidden in the organ of which they are ashamed because they abuse it scandalously, and to make divine that which is carnal.

The Church has never unveiled its true magical action for the profane, because it was not yet time and because it was necessary—as we have already said—to first introduce to humanity the ideal of virginity to accustom humans, down through the centuries, to conceive of something other than procreation, ideal of the First Term symbolized by the Rod (concerning this, reread our articles in numbers 1 and 2 of La Flèche), whose religion, or translation on the earth, was Judaism.

But at present, and without an official proclamation of the Church even being necessary, one clearly sees leaving the bosom of the latter certain elite spirits (not those who are known, but those that one meets by chance on the roads) who, in the face of the ideas coming from the Indies, have the right to say: “Stop right there! Don’t come to confound our work, putting old things back on the table that cannot serve the present reconstruction.”

For today it is no longer a matter of offering the means of individual perfection to humans—work of the Orient—but of building a new religion or moral organization as the basis of a new civilization, capable of leading the human collectivity toward the celestial regions: work and goal of the West.

And it is precisely in that that the triangle, to which we belong like masons to the work, is distinguished from the “wisdom” of the Orient.

Our triangle—the Jewish and Christian religions and the one that we shall establish shortly—has put forth since its first period the principle of the purification of the collectivity by the common and hierarchically coordinated effort of all. Since Moses, and only from the time of Moses, the world has known the meaning of the sanctity of a nation that collectively makes a continuing effort for perfection with the goal of the realization of the Ideal Man, of the Messiah who will change all things, because all things shall become new through Him.^*6

Christianity has rendered this principle universal, it has catholicized it, while going beyond the limits of nationalism, which it has replaced by the idea of the brotherhood of all men, and it has invited all humanity to the future realization of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. But the fundamental idea stayed the same: the salvation, the regeneration, will come into the world through the First, and this First will be forged by all. It is by the effort of Humanity, understood as an entity, by the Church, that all the preparatory things will be accomplished.

And today those things are accomplished. The churches have done what they had to do. The hour has sounded. The King of kings arrives.

Useless is the effort of those who, getting drunk on oriental extravagances, wish to point people to individual paths. Those small roads, narrow and tortuous, do not lead to the main road, and those who are not there will not reach it in time. As we have already said, repeating what is written, there will be a destruction en masse of all the unjust, of all those who have not accepted in their heart and realized in their body the two preceding stages: the strengthening by the Rod and the purification by the Cross.

They will not return to the earth to take up again the path of evolution but will be cast into involution, and they will descend by stages into the lower kingdoms: animal, vegetable, mineral, from which a return is definitely problematic.

Today it is a matter of everyone standing up and raising their eyes toward the same Star. Those who don’t will perish.

It is written in the Holy Scriptures that at the end of times an order will be given to the protector of the Temple: “Check the building and do not allow anything to subsist except that which is holy; the rest must be cast down immediately.”

We are at the end of times, and the guardians of the Temple are checking its walls.

When the triage is finished, when the good are separated from the unworthy, the Third Temple, the one where the symbol will be replaced by life, will be founded in the very heart of the present Temple. It is thus that the Religion of Suffering will become the Religion of Glory.