45

TO MR. GUÉNON: WE TAKE UP YOUR CHALLENGE!

This article, a response to René Guénon, appeared on the front page of La Flèche No. 13, June 15, 1932. Naglowska signed it with her own name.

Mr. Guénon, the illustrious collaborator of Veil of Isis (Chacornac, 11, quai Saint-Michel, Paris), categorizes our doctrine as “suspect.”

Naturally, being illustrious and not considering us to be such, Mr. Guénon does not explain to his readers in what the danger represented by La Flèche consists according to him, and sends us a ricocheting rock in this ambiguous, rhetorical form:

. . . Concerning La Flèche, we have ascertained that the article already reproduced by the Notebooks of the Order (October number) had already been published in the anti-Masonic work to which we made allusion earlier [namely the book by J. Marquès-Rivière with which “La Flèche” occupied herself in our no. 11—Editor of La Flèche], but this time, instead of clearly indicating its provenance, it was described only as “extract of a small-circulation review pertaining to a very closed Luciferian group of Caucasian origin.”^*28 It is no doubt necessary to magnify the importance of the adversary and envelop him in mystery to give oneself a reason to exist; but frankly, are the anti-Masons who employ such procedures well qualified to censure the charlatanism of certain pseudo-esotericists?

We retain the last few words of this passage, manifestly aimed at us: pseudo-esotericists, and we suppose, until there is proof to the contrary, that the illustrious Mr. Guénon is seeking to distance the readers of La Flèche, because, according to him, one cannot find on our pages anything but “pseudo-esotericism.”

But would Mr. Guénon be capable of telling us how true esotericism is to be recognized, and why, if such an “-ism” exists, it is necessary to crystalize it there forever?

Could he think, the illustrious Guénon, that every new idea is dangerous simply because it is new, or because it does not agree with his own teaching?

You see, Mr. Guénon, it seems to us that the world is big enough to contain the Veil of Isis and La Flèche, without one of these publications being a threat to the other; as far as polemics go, they are not useful except when one holds them within the correct framework of the combat of ideas. That is also the test by which true strength of spirit is measured.

We have declared since our first issue that for us the key of all religious mysteries, as well as the principle of all cosmic laws presiding over the unfolding of human history, is found in the life of the evolution of Sex, which is the Root, the Heart, of the Spirit.

All our doctrine is based upon this truth, which we have openly proclaimed without worrying about the hatreds that it could stir up.

We have done it, and we are still doing it because we are aware that humanity has entered into the dark period (predicted by all the Prophets and the Mages of olden times) during which, in conformity with what was foreseen in the Holy Scriptures, the Woman (a woman) must give birth spiritually, rendering to the Man in the form of a new light, that which the latter hid in her since the first day, namely: the mirror reflecting the face of God, which the man could no longer contemplate directly since he had poured out in Eve the spiritual energy, crystallized at the moment of the first coitus.

The Man having caused his fall by abandonment in the woman of the possibility of direct knowledge, no individual of the male sex—even weakened or inverted—can decipher divine truth today, either by intellectual means or by ascesis, which is only a preparation, a period of transitory purification.

For the law of birth by woman, having been established following the Fall from the Father, it is only by woman that the new man can be reborn into the Light, that is to say, re-acquire the capacity for direct knowledge of the absolute.

Within the precise dogma that we thus formulate, there is no malice, nor any ulterior motive harmful to humanity.

By this dogma we are introducing a new thought into the world that invites every man who is desirous of truly penetrating into the spiritual spheres to accomplish with a priestess of the new religion the sacred rite of magical love that returns to the man his lost powers.

If Mr. Guénon is an honest contradictor he will respond to that without banal witticisms and without equivocal allusions unworthy of his talent.