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THE CARDINAL MYSTERIES AND THE GOLDEN MASS

The following article appeared in La Flèche No. 10, February 15, 1932. It is obvious that Naglowska wrote it, but, as often, she simply signed it “La Flèche.”

Mystery is not the thing that one will never know; it is that which one does not know today.

Man can learn everything, if he truly perseveres, but most often he lacks perseverance, and he gives up, preferring the comfortable life.

He insults—to justify his laziness—all knowledge that is given only on the condition that one become wedded to it, sacrificing oneself, and he proclaims that there is nothing behind the sacred veil of the altar. Obviously, there is nothing for his fecklessness . . .

Today four principal mysteries limit, while troubling it, human life. They are: the mystery of birth, the mystery of marriage, the mystery of divorce, and the mystery of the second marriage. The individuals, men and women, who currently populate the earth—with some rare exceptions—know neither what these four things mean (these four cardinal points of the horizon that limit human vision), nor the path that one must take to know them. Today’s men and women are blind, they do not admit the existence of the light, because it is uncomfortable for them to recognize that something larger than them moves them and penetrates them, and it is repugnant to them to understand that they themselves are only the very humble servants of this Great Thing that pushes them to act without their thinking about it, or knowing why.

Man no longer knows—though he has known it at other times!—that he is the slave of a divine force, that the Divinity itself does combat in him. It is because he no longer knows it, that he is incurable, that is to say doomed to death.

The combat of two divine forces, which goes on in the ignorant man throughout all his life, is what causes his death, for not having taken the part of one or the other of the two Adversaries, no Victory, no immortality, can be his. The force that animated him—his life—returns into the reservoir of the general force of the species, and begins a new effort elsewhere. But this is not a new incarnation of the same individual soul, as the orientalists believe, it is a new attempt, after recasting the ounce of metal poorly used into the large ingot.

The mystery of birth is the mystery of this new attempt. That is why, in the strong eras of history, when the Light of the Just shines on earth in the form of a true religion, recognized and respected, the parents joyously greet the appearance of the newborn, for they know that thus a new man comes into the world to defend the cause of the Just. . . . And the mother gives a name to her child to orient the Will that animates him toward a quality chosen by her.

Currently, ignorant humanity has lost the sense of the names. The baptism of the unaware little being, which should fortify him from the beginning of his trip on the earth, is now nothing but a sad comedy, for even the priests do not know their ministry. . . . Oh! it’s not the fault of the wickedness of the people, it belongs to the times, to the inevitable night of time between two different days. Our century is that of the disappearance of the Light, and we live in the Shadow that prepares the new day. Happily the Dawn is near!

One will know soon, for it is thus that the New Lesson is presented, that the poorly born man can correct himself by marriage. You cannot return to your mother’s womb to come out again with another name, but you can again plunge into the woman who accepts you with love, to draw from her the Light that you are lacking.

This is the second mystery that humanity will understand when the period of suffering, which begins now, shall have passed. The magical contact of purifying love will become again a wholesome rite, which will heal the individuals spared by the storm. One will then say, in presenting the young husband to the assembly of the pure: “Here is a new man among you.”

But shameful debauchery will be forbidden, and every woman who does not wish to understand under what conditions love is holy will be banished from the renewed society.

Certainly all men and women will not be up to the strictest standards, but the inferiors will recognize the worth of the superiors and will thus benefit from their glory.

To the prideful ears of the perverse of today, what we are saying is a slap, but the Dawn takes no notice of the grimaces of fools, and the Sun pursues its ascending path in spite of the offense taken by the pale.

Do not ask us to tell you at this moment in what way marriage is holy. You will not understand it without a previous education of your body and your spirit. Besides, there is no use in getting ahead of the times. Today nothing is holy, because everything is unwell.

Today divorce is a senseless rupture, which prepares the way for another not less stupid. Today divorce has no goal of occult progress, that is why no one understands this formula: divorce is the third mystery, whose exploration will be offered to people of the third era, when marriage has renewed them. There is no need for virgins in the hierarchies, but for heroes voluntarily renouncing the pleasure that they know. And the hero does not leave the woman because he hates her, but, on the contrary, because he loves her. In the blessed days, which are coming, the mystical warrior will leave his hearth, his woman, and his child when the marriage has corrected in him all the bad orientations of his forces. Stronger than before, because more upright and better concentrated in himself, he will submit himself to the great test of the conscious and willing restraint of his primordial instinct.

Not all will be able to attain this height, and many men will have to stay at the level of marriage. But all will bow before him who is able and thus will participate in his glory. The admiration of the weak one for the strong is what binds him to the latter, it is the bridge by means of which the great one pours out upon the lesser the benefic fluid of his strength. It is not the strong one who gains when the weak one admires him, it is the lesser one who grows.

Today all of that is incomprehensible for the people of the crowd, but soon these principles will dominate customs. The suffering that is announced shall pass, and then the Great Word shall be understood. For the moment one pronounces it in a low voice and in the protective secrecy of the shadows.

Indeed, it is at midnight, at the darkest hour, that the first of the chosen (the men and women spared beforehand) shall soon celebrate the Golden Mass, that new and solemn rite that is the crowning of the “second marriage,” the sanctification of love, whose value is collective and real in the sense that it symbolizes, by the true realization, the rose blossomed on the cross: sublime love realized for the redemption of all.

For the Golden Mass, which will unite seven men to three women, duly purified of the vanity of personal appetites and chosen from among those rare ones who are not afraid when one says to them: you will not eat and you will not drink until I come again—will bring to the world the possibility of a new understanding, thanks to which the reconstruction of the human Temple will be able to commence.

The Golden Mass will sanctify the new marriage of the Just with Humanity, after the atrocious divorce of which we have been the victims.