TWO
The French Esoteric Tradition
DELISLE DE SALES AND THE AGE OF THE EARTH
The later eighteenth century was a heady time for the French intellectual community. With the completion of Diderot’s Encyclopédie, it seemed that a new universe was opened up for research and speculation. Science was no longer a slave to biblical authority, which Delisle de Sales (1741–1816) in his Philosophie de la nature (Philosophy of Nature, 1769) called “the most repugnant of philosophical systems.”1 Although that kind of sentiment got him jailed and his work publicly burned, there was no suppressing the impetus behind it. Like those other one-man encyclopedists, Antoine Court de Gébelin and Charles Dupuis, Delisle saw it as his task to recast the whole of knowledge in Enlightenment mode, but without falling into the trap of atheism.
While Court de Gébelin hung his universal history on the peg of language and Dupuis on that of sun worship, Delisle’s interest was in the human being as a product of uncreated and eternal Nature. He writes: “It seems to me that the Supreme Being cannot create anything, just as he cannot annihilate anything, because it is absurd for nothingness to be the subject of his work or the result of his power. I think that matter has existed from all time; but its eternity, being successive, should not be confused with that of God which is not so.”2 However, this did not make the earth eternal. Delisle was not sure exactly how it had come into being, but one could calculate its age from astronomical data. Like several of our authors, he assumed that the earth’s equator had originally coincided with the ecliptic, making the polar axis perpendicular to the plane of its orbit around the sun. Under those conditions there would have been no differentiation of seasons. Since the present angle of inclination is 23½°, and astronomers like Dortous de Mairan had ascertained that it was steadily diminishing, the earth must be at least 140,000 years old: already a shocking idea to most of Delisle’s contemporaries. He even suggested that there might have been more than one such cycle of axial change, and that 100,000 cycles are no less probable than a single one.3
This leads Delisle to a meditation on human devolution and periodic catastrophe, both of which will be leitmotifs of our study.
It is probable that when our world began to be peopled by men, the ecliptic coincided with the equator; thus nature was at the height of its strength; our intelligence flourished on account of the excellence of our organs; and the men of those ages, far from being children in comparison to ourselves, were such that for all our enlightenment and pride, our fine men are nothing but children beside them.
I assume that the revolutions of the globe annihilated the greater part of the human race; the wretched survivors of this catastrophe would have felt all the more need to live in society; by gathering together they sought refuge from the menacing heavens, and there was no state of nature.4
FABRE D’OLIVET’S PHILOSOPHICAL HISTORY
Among those attracted by Delisle’s philosophy of nature was the young Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825), later to become one of the patriarchs of French occultism. Born to a well-to-do Protestant family, Fabre d’Olivet had been leading the life of a dilettante in drama, poetry, music, politics, and history. With the loss of his fortune after the French Revolution, he was reduced to literary hackwork. Delisle employed him to catalogue his library of 35,000 books,5 then Fabre d’Olivet set out to reduce the sage’s philosophy to something accessible to young ladies. The result was Lettres à Sophie sur l’histoire (Letters to Sophie on history, 1801), which was dedicated to Napoleon.
Sophie, imagined as the writer’s sister, is first plunged into the mysteries of cosmogony. She learns of the primal element of fire and the twin forces, centrifugal and centripetal, that activate it.6 She reads of how the sun emanated the earth, then, as our planet cooled, how it became covered with water. After the waters retreated, life was able to begin on the high mountains, though exactly how this happened, neither Delisle nor Fabre d’Olivet cared to explain. Humanity emerged first on the Caucasus and Atlas ranges, the latter being the original home of the Atlanteans.7 As for Plato’s Atlantis, says Fabre d’Olivet, no one agrees where it was. Some say Sweden (obviously thinking of Rudbeck); Bailly puts it in Spitzbergen and under the polar ice.8 Court de Gébelin says that its remains are in the region of Sardinia and Corsica, and Fabre d’Olivet sensibly concludes: “Although that is not quite convincing, let’s adopt it, rather than making up a new system.”9
At this point of his career, Fabre d’Olivet seems to have shared Delisle’s vague faith in a universe obedient to natural principles but designed by a noninterfering deity. This was to change quite suddenly between 1801 and 1805 as he underwent a psychological crisis, leading to a long period of retirement from public life. His biographer, Léon Cellier, has found hints that he received a visitation by a woman he had loved but who had died young, and that he practiced Mesmerism in the attempt to maintain contact with her spirit. Certainly Fabre d’Olivet’s wife, whom he married shortly after this, acted as a mesmeric medium. Others have suggested that he had access to a secret tradition (see chapter 6), perhaps through Elias Boctor, an Egyptian colleague at the Ministry of War, where he now had an office job. Whatever the cause, he emerged from his retreat as an initiate and a theosopher, independent of any sect or master, and writing of metaphysical mysteries with absolute self-confidence. Fabre d’Olivet’s subsequent work would address the esoteric wisdom latent in sacred writings such as the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, the Book of Genesis, and the newly translated Hindu scriptures, as well as speculative music and universal history. His work puts him among the most influential proponents of the philosophia perennis, the perennial philosophy that is as old as humanity and ever reborn in different guises.
Fabre d’Olivet’s universal history is summed up accurately, if ungenerously, by Auguste Viatte, the historian of French illuminism.
He aspires to reconstruct the whole history of the world, not just that of Paradise; we drift off into improbable realms. On his own authority he invents a most extravagant succession of empires and dynasties, with just a few facts provided by Delisle de Sales or the oriental epics. He goes back to the age of fables, after an alteration in the axis of the earth had caused the ruin of Atlantis. At that time, the White race was vegetating around the North Pole; the Blacks were dominating Africa and oppressing part of the Yellow race; those of the Red race who had escaped from the catastrophe were living out of sight on the highest mountains of America. We will not go into detail about the quarrels between Boreans, Sudeens, and Atlanteans, but if the reader will turn to the “Philosophic History of the Human Race,” he will find there the origins of religions, castes, the arts, and writing. He will also notice the Hindu coloring that Fabre d’Olivet gives to his hypotheses.10
The Histoire philosophique du genre humain (Philosophical history of the human race) is indeed an ambitious work, purporting to trace the influence of three metaphysical principles: Providence, whose aim is the perfection of all beings; Destiny, whose law is necessity and which links cause and effect in the natural world; and the Will of Man, which can interrupt and change Destiny and, if he chooses, align itself with Providence.
From the start, Fabre d’Olivet dismisses the literal reading of Genesis in favor of the “sacred writers of the Chinese, Hindus, Persians, Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and our ancestors the Celts . . . for all, without exception, attribute to the earth an antiquity incomparably greater than this cosmogony.”11 That antiquity allowed him to enlarge on the prehistoric evolution and encounters of the four races, distinguished by color, into which the anthropology of his time divided the human family. The first of these was the Yellow race. Fabre d’Olivet has little to say about it except that “a few hordes of wandering Tartars, ancient débris of the Yellow Race,” remained on the banks of the Yellow River to form the basis for the later Chinese Empire.12 In an earlier work he gives a hint of their past by mentioning that the Chinese language is the most ancient of all, and that its people were “separated from others by the result of a physical catastrophe which had happened to the globe.”13 That, however, cannot have been the catastrophe of Atlantis, for according to the Histoire philosophique, that affected the second, Red race. Fabre d’Olivet calls them the Austral (from Auster, the South Wind) because their homeland of Atlantis was in the south, and thus describes their fate.
This first race . . . to which, perhaps, belonged the primitive name of Atlantean, had perished utterly in the midst of a terrible deluge, which, covering the earth, had ravaged it from one pole to the other and submerged the immense and magnificent island which this race had inhabited beyond the seas. At the moment when this island had disappeared with all the peoples which inhabited it, the Austral Race held the universal empire and dominated the Sudeen which was hardly beyond a state of barbarism, and was still in the childhood of social state. The deluge which annihilated it was so violent that it left only a confused memory in the minds of the Sudeens who survived there.14
Fabre d’Olivet adds that only the Egyptians, as testified by Solon in Plato’s Atlantean texts, preserved a true account of this people and their vanished land.
After the fall of the Austral Race, it was the turn of the Sudeen or Black race. Their empire came to dominate Africa, Asia, and much of Europe, whereupon they too confusingly styled themselves “Atlanteans.” The name meant “Masters of the Universe,” for, as Fabre d’Olivet explains, “this well-known name is composed of two words atta, the master, the ancient, the father, and lant universal space.”15 The monuments of the Sudeens are to be seen in “the enormous constructions of Mahabalipuram, in the caverns of Ellora, the temples of Isthakar, the ramparts of the Caucasus, the pyramids of Memphis, [and] the excavations of Thebes in Egypt.”16
Last came the Borean or White race, whose homeland (obediently following Bailly—see chapter 1) was the Arctic region. What most distinguished them, in Fabre d’Olivet’s eyes, was their providential realization of two essential truths: the immortality of the soul, and the existence of God. With the confidence of an eyewitness, he describes the Boreans’ descent from the North, driven by overpopulation, and their long rivalry with the Sudeens.17 After centuries-long conflicts, the Sudeens were vanquished and confined to Africa, while the Boreans, now taking the name of Celts, occupied the whole of Europe.
The Celts, ruled by visionary priestesses called Voluspas, had contracted the bad habit of human sacrifice, and when a powerful Druid named Ram tried to abolish it, he was forced into exile. He and his companions went East, gathering forces and conquering as they went, and eventually reached India, then the seat of a decaying Atlantean (i.e., Sudeen) empire. Ram easily mastered the subcontinent and founded there the first Universal Empire of the Borean Race. The Greeks would later celebrate him as Dionysus; the Hindus as Rama, an avatar of Vishnu and the hero of the epic Ramayana. An even better-known monument to his achievement is the zodiac, whose twelve signs Fabre d’Olivet reads as a symbolic biography of Ram, beginning with his eponymous heraldic beast.
Fabre d’Olivet dates the founding of Ram’s empire to about 6700 BCE and the beginning of its decline to 3200 BCE. Thanks to Ram’s successor, Krishna, it survived until 2100 BCE.18 Eventually India fell to the Assyrian invaders, and its Supreme Pontiff was banished to the mountains of Tibet.19 Humanity, having refused the ways of Providence, was left in the hands of Destiny until the fifteenth century BCE, when Providence sent it three extraordinary men: Orpheus among the Thracians, Moses among the Egyptians, and Fo-Hi, later called Buddha, among the Hindus.20 Subsequent events, fascinating as they are, do not concern us here.
Fabre d’Olivet played fast and loose with the historical facts even as these were known in his own day. Until Histoire philosophique reaches historical times, it reads like fantasy fiction, with anecdotal scenes and characters unknown to history emerging to change the course of nations. Among other curiosities we learn that Ram’s rise to power was due to his having cured an epidemic of elephantiasis through mistletoe. No less surprising is the cause of the “Schism of Irshou” that eventually brought down the Universal Empire: it was the discovery that the musical system was based on two principles, not one. This led stage by stage to rival cults worshiping the male and female principles.
Where did Fabre d’Olivet get his information? Partly from wide reading, not least in Delisle de Sales’s library, and from a lively interest in current publications, especially those of the British school of Calcutta (publishers of Asiatic Researches). But the rest I can only suppose came from a vivid imagination, which he took, rightly or wrongly, to be a window into the actual past. Fabre d’Olivet’s biographer, Léon Cellier, writes of how all his works mingled scholarship with fiction or even mild fraud, as in the case of the anthology of Troubadour poetry into which he slipped some poems of his own. After a long analysis of Fabre d’Olivet’s deceits and psychology, Cellier sums up his character: “Two essential traits are a constant feature of this strange mind: the paradoxical alliance of a maniacal attention to detail with enthusiasm; and a prodigious erudition at the service of an unconfined imagination.”21
SAINT-YVES D’ALVEYDRE’S SYNARCHIC HISTORY
After Fabre d’Olivet’s death in 1825, his fantastic panorama of prehistory was shelved, along with his other works, by all but a few disciples. One of these, Virginie Faure, had known him in his final years when he was heading a mysterious quasi–Masonic order.22 Decades later she settled on the Channel Island of Jersey, home to the French exiles who had opposed Napoleon III. Thither around 1865 came the young Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves (1842–1909), recently demobilized and working as a private tutor. Through friendship with her grandson, he met the personable Madame Faure. Fluent in many languages, her memory undimmed, she opened to him her collection of books, and maybe even manuscripts, by her master.
The encounter was decisive. The reading of Fabre d’Olivet’s historical work would orient Saint-Yves to esoteric studies and become the basis for his own central project, a universal history called Mission des Juifs (Mission of the Jews), which he published in 1884. In this as in other ways, Saint-Yves seems to have replayed Fabre d’Olivet’s program with his own political and Christocentric agenda. The resemblance began with their chosen names. Just as Antoine Fabre dropped his Christian name and added his mother’s surname of d’Olivet, with its suggestion of superior birth, J. A. Saint-Yves became on his title pages “Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.” Both men wrote universal histories, esoteric expositions of the Book of Genesis, and treatises on speculative music. They were both competent musicians and composers and believed themselves to be poets and dramatists of stature. They were sure that sacred alphabets such as Hebrew and Sanskrit concealed esoteric wisdom. While neither of them traveled beyond Europe, India and its philosophy fascinated them. Both aspired to high political influence: Fabre d’Olivet claimed to have played a key role in the French Revolution and became convinced that Napoleon nurtured a personal vendetta against him, while Saint-Yves was a friend of Earl Lytton, the Viceroy of India, and through him addressed Queen Victoria. Both practiced magnetism and had a relationship with the departed spirit of a lover or wife. And incidentally, both relied on their wives for support, though Saint-Yves’ wife, a Russian aristocrat, was much richer than Madame d’Olivet, who ran a private girls’ school.
Whereas Fabre d’Olivet used world history to demonstrate the workings of his three principles, Providence, Destiny, and Will, Saint-Yves used it to support his ideal political system that he called Synarchy—the opposite of Anarchy. Later uses of the term, and indeed Saint-Yves’ own writings, make Synarchy a complicated and controversial matter, connected with conspiracy theory, accusations of fascism, globalization, and so on. In its simplest form, it represents government through the equilibrium of three separate powers, respectively controlling the Economy, Legislation (including the military), and Culture (including religion and education). It is international in scale and run by an esoterically minded elite.23 In a way, Synarchy reaffirms the ideally cooperative but separate roles of the three “twice-born” castes of Hinduism: merchants (vaishyas), warriors and princes (kshatriyas), priests and teachers (brahmins), which we will have reason to revisit later.
Saint-Yves would boast: “I have drowned the eclecticism of Fabre d’Olivet in my universalist and rational Christianity.”24 The curious thing is that such a strong-minded and self-important figure should have accepted Fabre d’Olivet’s version of prehistory wholesale, with every semblance of belief in it. This is what Saint-Yves did in the early chapters of Mission des Juifs, often quoting Histoire philosophique verbatim and in general paraphrasing it, without indicating his source. We meet again the four colored races, dominating the world in turn; the Celts and the exile of Ram the Druid; his conquests and Universal Empire in India, which, following Saint-Yves’ agenda, becomes the first Synarchic government; the origin of the zodiac; the 3,500 years of peace until 3200 BCE, when the Schism of Irshou established the worship of the female principle; the coming of Krishna, Fo-Hi, and the Egyptian mysteries; the invasions of the Assyrians and the exodus of Abraham from their territory. With this last episode, Saint-Yves diverges from Fabre d’Olivet to pursue the restitution of Synarchy by Moses, its renovation by Jesus Christ, and its fortunes in historical periods.
Saint-Yves paid dearly for his unacknowledged borrowing, for when Mission des Juifs was reviewed, he was accused of plagiarism. His feeble defense was that since Fabre d’Olivet’s work was regarded with disdain and ridicule, he did not want to attract a similar reaction.25 But the incident, coinciding as it did with a scurrilous fictionalization of his career by a jilted lover,26 put paid to his political ambitions.
I have written elsewhere about how Saint-Yves, having no interest in Atlantis as such, created his own lost land of Agarttha.27 This supposedly exists underground somewhere in Asia, and its large, technologically advanced population is ruled by a Sovereign Pontiff who unites in himself the offices of high priest and king. Saint-Yves’ account of Agarttha is deceptively called Mission de l’Inde (Mission of India). The book was already printed in 1886 when he decided to withdraw it, and all but two copies were destroyed. Consequently the Agartthian myth did not enter public consciousness until 1910, after the author’s death, when his disciple Papus obtained a copy from Saint-Yves’ stepson and arranged for its publication.
The source of Saint-Yves’ knowledge of Agarttha, setting aside possible literary influences, was his own “astral traveling.” He makes no secret of this in the book. What his motives were, both for writing and suppressing it, are hard to fathom unless we accept that in some altered state of consciousness he saw what he describes and transcribed it as faithfully as he could. He certainly did not have sufficient sense of humor to put the whole thing over as a practical joke. I do not know whether to feel sorrier for a person afflicted with such a “wild talent,” or for those (see chapter 6) who believe on his authority in Agarttha, its underground railways, its necromantic practices, and its sinister “King of the World.”
EDOUARD SCHURÉ’S GREAT INITIATES
The French occultists of the fin-de-siècle did not hesitate to follow Saint-Yves in adopting Fabre d’Olivet’s prehistoric scenario. For example, Stanislas de Guaïta (1861–1897), in his introductory book on occult science, Au seuil du mystère (On the threshold of the mystery, 1886), recommends Mission des Juifs for its updating of Fabre d’Olivet, then adds his own authority to the same story of Ram, “who conquered a third of the world, only to pacify it; then, this goal achieved, renounced the sword, the crown, the standard of the Ram, . . . and, wearing the tiara of the universal Sovereign Pontiff, raised the oriflamme of the Lamb, hieroglyph of sacerdotal authority.”28 Readers of Saint-Yves would recognize his characteristic vocabulary here.
Fabre d’Olivet’s prehistory found its most effective proponent in Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), author of the bestseller Les grands initiés (The great initiates, 1889). Its chapters treat Rama, Krishna, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus. The big news, to the uninitiated, was that Jesus was not unique but one of a series of enlightened beings, although, as Jesus was last in the line, Schuré considers his message the most relevant to our times. To anyone familiar with the Renaissance idea of the prisca theologia (the ancient theology common to Jews and Gentiles), or the Islamic prophetic cycle that includes three of these initiates (Hermes, Moses, and Jesus), the only novelty is the inclusion of the two Hindu avatars, Rama and Krishna.
In Schuré’s explanation of the origin of races we hear hints of cosmogonic theories and a definite vote in favor of multiple human origins.
The four races which cover the globe at the present time are the offspring of different earths and zones. Successive creations, slow elaborations of the earth in travail, the continents emerged from the seas at considerable intervals of time, which the ancient priests of India called interdiluvian cycles. Stretching over thousands of years, each continent gave birth to its own flora and fauna, crowned by a human race of different colour.29
Schuré follows Fabre d’Olivet’s sequence of dominant races. Like the other authors mentioned here, he found nothing to say about the Yellow race, but began with the Red (Austral) race, which occupied Plato’s Atlantis, a “southern continent now sunk beneath the waves.” He continues with the story of the White (Borean) race, the Celts, Druids, Ram, the zodiac, and so on, following Fabre d’Olivet, but with more picturesque detail that increases as the book proceeds.
If Schuré has a virtue from our point of view, it is in clarifying the status of ancient Egypt and its remains: “The first Egyptian civilization, almost as old as the very carcase of our continents, dates back to the ancient Red race. The colossal Sphinx of Gizeh, near the Great Pyramid, is its work.”30 Everything else in Egypt comes from much later, after the Black (Sudeen) race made its principal sanctuary in Upper Egypt. Later still, there was “a pacific mingling of the White and the Black races in the regions of Ethiopia and Upper Egypt, long before Aryan times.”31 It was at this point that the great initiate Hermes appeared and founded the Egyptian Mysteries.
Schuré never pretended to be a visionary or illuminate: he was a literary man with a passion for Wagner (whom he knew), and he tells the tales of his initiates as he might bring to life the adventures of Brunnhilde or Parsifal. His work suited the taste of the time, and among those who can bear its overwritten style, it has found readers ever since. Thanks to The Great Initiates, Fabre d’Olivet’s scheme became firmly embedded in French popular occultism.
To the author himself, however, it was a passing phase. With the new century Schuré moved into the ambit of Rudolf Steiner (see chapter 4), of whom he wrote, “For the first time in my life, I was certain that I was in the presence of an Initiate. I had long lived with the initiates of antiquity, whose history and development I had had to depict. And now at last one of them stood before me on the physical plane.”32 Steiner and his wife arranged for performances of Schuré’s Sacred Drama of Eleusis, and Schuré returned the compliment with his second work of universal history, L’évolution divine du Sphinx au Christ (Divine evolution from the Sphinx to Christ, 1912). In this he was as obedient to Steiner’s vision of prehistory as he had previously been to Fabre d’Olivet’s.
PAPUS AND THE CANCEROUS MOON
From Schuré the baton passed to Papus (pseudonym of Dr. Gérard Encausse, 1865–1916), who dominated the French occultist scene, driven by the ambition to join, then control, every secret society and order. At first, Papus was a keen member of the Theosophical Society, but after personal differences he became one of its worst enemies. In his much-reprinted Traité élémentaire de science occulte (Elementary treatise on occult science), Papus revealed the secret history of the earth in his own fashion. Again, each human race is the product of the evolution of a continent: the Eastern or Yellow race, of Asia; the Western or Red race, of America; the Southern or Black race, of Africa; and the Northern or White race, of Europe. Each in turn has dominated the earth.33 The theme of the uninclined axis also appears, as Papus explains that if the equator and the ecliptic coincided, the earth would be in physical harmony. But instead, the poles oscillate periodically, occupying eight successive positions relative to the equator, and this brings about the rise and fall of continents, deluges, and geological catastrophes. The immediate cause of this is the moon.
At this point, Papus blended Fabre d’Olivet’s prehistory with what he called the “high revelations” of Louis Michel (1816–1883), a peasant seer sometimes known by the name of his birthplace, Figanières.34 According to these, the earth was originally compounded from four small planets in the course of disintegration, which, once joined together, became the four continents. A fifth fragment refused to become integrated with the others and was condemned through its own will to become a satellite. Remember, Papus says, that there are peoples whose names indicate that they did not know of the moon!35 (He does not tell us which they are.) Each continent, he continues, brought forth its own human race, and each has its own history of birth, maturity, and decline: they do not all march in step. The four races are different in style but equal in their access to the Divine.
Each of these races has made, from its personal point of view, an intellectual evolution crowned by a Science and a Tradition, and confirmed by an Involution of Divinity in the said race. Moreover, each race has used particular procedures to raise itself from the instinctive state to that of divine illumination. Hence the apparent differences of the various traditions, beneath which one always finds a unity that only the initiate is able to grasp in all its integrity.36
Papus seems unsure of whether to recommend to his readers the most radical of Michel de Figanière’s revelations. Before he starts on the history of the races, he asks rhetorically:
Have the Yellow, Red, Black, and White races completed their successive evolution on the same planet, or is each terrestrial continent just the crystallization of another planet; and have the remains of four of these planets formed the Earth? . . . Is the Moon one of those continents destined to form the Earth which willfully separated from the others, thus causing the terrestrial disharmony and becoming not a normal satellite, but a real cancer to the Earth?37
Ignoring the history of the Yellow race, Papus continues from the period when the Red race was dominant. Unlike Fabre d’Olivet, he identifies its achievements with those of the megalithic builders, for he says that remnants of its colonies are to be found in the Old World in Great Britain, in Brittany, Spain, Italy (the Etruscans having been of that race), and most of all in Egypt, “where the Red race founded the Atlantean colony which, after the great catastrophe, transmitted the high truths of initiation to the other races.”38 Papus then quotes or summarizes many pages from Fabre d’Olivet on the Borean Race, its Arctic origins, its rivalry with the Sudeens, the creation of a Druid college, Ram’s career with its twelve stages symbolized by the zodiac, the coming of Moses, and so forth. Emulating Schuré, he tells of the other “great divine messengers” (a term borrowed from Michel de Figanières): Krishna, Orpheus, multiple Zoroasters and Buddhas, Lao-Tsu, Confucius, Son-Mou of Japan, Hermes Trismegistus, Esdras, Pythagoras, Numa. As the Christian era approached, there were the School of Alexandria (founded by Buddhists), the Essenes, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, “all of whom tried to reveal the great mystery that was in preparation.”39 This would be the incarnation of the Divine Word in Jesus Christ, to whom Papus, like Saint-Yves and many other French esotericists, accords an incomparably higher status.
PAUL LE COUR AND THE SACRED HEART
The French esoteric world has long had the name of Atlantis before its eyes, transfixed by Poseidon’s trident on the cover of its longest-lived periodical. The review Atlantis was founded in 1927 and is still flourishing after more than 400 issues. It was the creation of Paul Le Cour (1871–1954), a well-educated civil servant and keen outdoorsman.40 Over the years he was involved with psychical research, spiritualism, Theosophy, Earth mysteries, Platonism, astrology—in short, the whole panoply of occultisme, with a leaning toward its more serious and philosophical side.
Le Cour’s mission became more focused in the 1920s, after he came into contact with a Christian esoteric group called the Hiéron du Val d’Or. Jean-Pierre Laurant, the authority on French esotericism, calls it “the crossroads of Catholicism, esotericism, the occult sciences, and an ultra-conservative nationalism.”41 This semisecret society had been founded in 1883 by Baron Alexis de Sarachaga (1840–1918), who built an extraordinary temple-museum in the town of Paray-le-Monial. Pier Luigi Zoccatelli, another authority on Christian esotericism, describes the Hiéron’s four purposes as: (1) the demonstration of the origins of Christianity from the mythical Atlantis; (2) the reconstitution of a universal sacred tradition; (3) the preparation for the year 2000 of a political and social reign of Christ the King and the teaching of the sacred name of Aor-Agni—Light-Fire—as the key to all knowledge; (4) a secret purpose to fight against anti-Christian Freemasonry through the creation of a “Christian Freemasonry of the Great West.”42 (This alluded to the “Grand Orient,” the militantly secular branch of French Freemasonry.)
Paul Le Cour was drawn into the whole mythology of Paray-le-Monial, which had begun in 1673 when St. Margaret Mary Alacoque had a vision of Jesus taking her heart into his. This led to a popular Catholic cult of the Sacred Heart, to papal approval, and eventually to such monuments as the Sacré Coeur basilica in Montmartre, Paris, built in a spirit of nationalist renewal after the Franco-Prussian War. Although Le Cour did not share the more extreme ideals of the Hiéron, he thought that it might have some initiatic connection with the Templars,43 for whose Christian chivalry he had a great admiration. As his official biography says, “He realized little by little that through his research he was on the quest for the Primordial Tradition, the lost word revered by religions and initiatic societies, which originates from Atlantis considered as mother of Western civilization. The mythical king of the vanished continent was Poseidon, patron of knights, whose ideal qualities Le Cour extolled.”44
In 1926, Le Cour founded the Société d’Études Atlantéennes (Society of Atlantean Studies) and published his first book: À la recherche d’un monde perdu: L’Atlantide et ses traditions (In search of a lost world: Atlantis and its traditions).45 The title alluded to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past), whose penultimate volume had just appeared. The theme of Le Cour’s book is that “through iconographic symbolism and the comprehension of the names of divinities and of places, one may hope to reconstitute the great and unique tradition coming from Atlantis.”46 One of the symbols in question is the serpent, which appears to signify the primordial light that Le Cour calls Aour. A second symbol is the heart, symbol of fire, Agni. These together made up the sacred name of Aor-Agni used in the Hiéron’s devotions.
The discovery that Le Cour is most eager to share is that the serpent and the heart are carved into monuments of the megalithic period, such as the dolmens and standing stones of Brittany. As always with such discoveries, their worn state leaves much to the interpreter, and many an irregular concavity may take on the shape of a heart. The importance for Le Cour was that these symbols appeared in monuments that he believed to be Atlantean in origin, thereby rooting the relatively modern revelations of Paray-le-Monial in the deep past.
As suggestive proof of a continuing underground tradition, Le Cour borrows from Brasseur de Bourbourg a German map of 1708 in the shape of a heart, in which the place of Atlantis is filled by a wound dripping blood. Even the presence of nine drops seems to him significant, for the number nine, he reminds us, has an important role in Kabbalah! Everywhere he goes, Le Cour sees or hears momentous coincidences, his will to believe granting him a generous margin of error and historical improbability. Here is a specimen of his linguistic method, employed in a gentle diatribe against the Theosophists and their excessive admiration of India:
As for those who are currently seeking the sources of wisdom in India, they find towns there whose names come from our own West, like Agra, which is the name of a suburb of Eleusis where the Lesser Mysteries were celebrated; they will find Maya and Aor-Agni in the names of the chief divinities of the Rig-Veda: Yama and Varouna, and they might also connect the word Thibet with the word Thebes. All these names in fact belong to the sacred language of Atlantis; they are vestiges of that distant past when the Atlantean people stamped the mark of their profound knowledge onto place names, for the sake of generations far in the future. But if these researchers find in India the symbol of the serpent, they will not find the heart there, the key to the mysteries, at least not in the profound sense given it in the Western tradition.47
Perhaps it is this very looseness of interpretation that caused Le Cour, rather than pressing a personal agenda, to welcome writers of all sorts to his journal. Atlantis carried articles from members of the Académie Française, from scientists, and from all the more serious occultists of the day. A conspicuous exception was René Guénon, who had himself been involved with the Hiéron du Val d’Or but seldom mentions Le Cour without some snide remark. We will treat Guénon’s views on Atlantis in chapter 6, and in chapter 12 return to Le Cour as apostle of the Age of Aquarius.
PANDORA’S BOX
For all the errors, distortions, and plain untruths that pepper Le matin des magiciens (The Morning of the Magicians) by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, it was an exhilarating read.48 Where else in 1963 could one learn of Gurdjieff, Guénon, Charles Fort, Fulcanelli, Nazi occultism, the Hollow Earth, or the Baghdad Batteries? Its authors presented themselves as open-minded inquirers (Pauwels being a journalist, Bergier a physicist), but their work reeked of the occult.
Pauwels and Bergier’s version of Atlantis owed nothing to the French esotericists mentioned above but grew out of their fascination with Hoerbiger’s Welteislehre (WEL). As mentioned in chapter 1, this taught that the earth has captured four planetoids that have successively become its satellites, then crashed onto its surface. The present moon is its fourth. In France the WEL was promoted by Denis Saurat in L’Atlantide et le règne des géants (Atlantis and the reign of the giants, 1954) and La religion des géants et la civilisation des insectes (The religion of the giants and the civilization of insects, 1955). Saurat shared with Pauwels an acquaintance with Gurdjieff’s movement, and his influence lurks behind The Morning of the Magicians.
In conformity with the WEL, Pauwels and Bergier explain that the periods of the four moons correspond with the four geological epochs. The first humans appeared in the Secondary Epoch “thanks to miraculous processes of mutation which happen more frequently as the cosmic rays become stronger.” They were giants, and the few who survived the fall of the second moon nurtured the inferior humans of the Tertiary Epoch. Under the benevolent rule of these “gods,” Tertiary humans lived in an earthly paradise for several million years. More than 900,000 BP, the third moon began its inexorable approach to earth, and its gravity caused the seas to rise. On the highest mountains, a worldwide maritime civilization flourished. The giants, for whom lifting huge stones was child’s play, built five great megalithic cities: at Tiahuanaco in the Andes, in New Guinea, Mexico, Abyssinia, and Tibet.49
Apparently the tertiary moon took its time falling, for it was not until 150,000 BP that the catastrophe occurred.
Gravitation ceased, the belt of oceans suddenly retracted and the waters receded. The mountain tops which had been great maritime centers, were turned into swamps and isolated. The air became rarefied, and temperatures fell. Atlantis perished, not by being engulfed in the ocean, but, on the contrary, because the waters left it high and dry. . . . Though the Atlantidean civilization had attained the highest possible degree of social and technical perfection, with a unified and well-established hierarchy, it vanished in an astonishingly short space of time, and almost without leaving a trace behind it.50
The dregs of humanity were left in the mud, with a moonless sky, but in time civilization revived in the Andes center and its four subsidiary cities. A lesser civilization arose on high plateaus in the North Atlantic, between 40° and 60° latitude, which was the Atlantis of Plato. About 12,000 BP the earth acquired its fourth moon (our present one) and again suffered catastrophic changes in sea levels. The moon’s gravity sucked the water from the poles toward the equator, and this is what overwhelmed Plato’s Atlantis in a single night. Once again, civilization had to be rebuilt, and once again its only certain prospect is destruction when the Quaternary moon eventually falls to Earth.51
Pauwels and Bergier did not necessarily believe the WEL, any more than the other theories that keep their readers open-mouthed. In fact, they held it responsible for the Nazis’ vision of a Thousand-Year Reich culminating in a Götterdämmerung (twilight of the gods). However, the borderline is blurry between what one is supposed to accept from them as fact and what is merely suggestive fiction, and their scholarly apparatus is pitiful. The result was that careless writers have ever after pillaged The Morning of the Magicians for material, whose boundaries they in turn blur.
Pauwels and Bergier’s project continued with Planète, a periodical in some ways akin to Le Cour’s Atlantis. Both owed their success to a reading public bored to death with the one-dimensional world of politics and economics, and no less so with the chatter of Left Bank intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre. Both reviews disclosed a world of fantastic realities, revisionist histories, and theories that turned the received worldview on its head. But whereas Le Cour’s contributors mostly shared a spiritual outlook if not an actual grounding in esoteric traditions, Planète’s were more likely to be agnostics with an exaggerated faith in science. True, their concept of science burst the materialist paradigm, for they did not turn their backs on psychic phenomena or occult powers. Their revisionist history even hinged on accepting the reality of such powers, and on supposing that prehistoric civilizations had mastered them, probably with extraterrestrial assistance.
A successful rider of this wave was Robert Charroux (1909–1978), described on his book jackets as a sort of “Indiana Jones” figure.
Athletic champion, deep-sea diver since 1930, treasure hunter, globe-trotter, journalist, archaeologist, producer at the R.T.F. (=Le Club de l’Insolite), his curiosity has led Robert Charroux to explore the most varied regions of human history and activity, far removed from familiar paths and orthodox science. The study of Tradition and Prehistory, research trips to the lands of the most ancient civilizations, the discovery of millennia-old documents and messages—this soon made him suspect that a fantastic truth, unknown to most of mankind, could shed light on our beginnings. He then developed the hypothesis of a “parallel universe” more authentic than the one invented in classical times. Convinced that a vast mystery lies hidden from human knowledge, he strove to penetrate it, gathering the evidence, documentation, and proofs, creating a terminology for terrestrial anomalies, and wrote Histoire inconnue des hommes depuis cent mille ans [Unknown history of mankind over 100,000 years], published in 1963, followed by Le livre des secrets trahis [The book of secrets betrayed, 1964] and Le livre des maîtres du monde [The book of the masters of the world, 1967].52
Charroux’s hypothesis of a parallel universe served him as a “scientific” excuse for anything too challenging to rationality. Starting from the speculations of physicists and mathematicians, he suggests that clairvoyance and precognition might be explained through interference of that universe with this one. So might the medieval accounts of visits to the Grail kingdom, which “suggest the survival of a scientific knowledge that has deteriorated through its long history, but which was originally very complex.”53
This need for scientific explanation, or rather for technocratic fantasy, makes Charroux a firm believer in the extraterrestrial hypothesis. In the second book of his trilogy he sets out to convince us that humanoids from Venus visited the earth, settled in Hyperborea, bred with the autochthonous race, and created two principal civilizations. One was on Atlantis, just emerged from the ocean and stretching from North America as far as Tiahuanaco. The other was on the Pacific continent of Mu, which included the Gobi Desert and part of India. After a few thousand years the Venusians, revered as angels or gods by these two civilizations, had reconstituted the technology of their homeland, not least the use of nuclear energy.54
Everyone’s view of the past risks being clouded by their present, and Charroux was writing soon after the Cuban missile crisis. What was narrowly avoided in October 1962 happened between his Atlanteans and the people of Mu, leading to mutual assured destruction: “The atomic bombs of Mu devastated Atlantis and the American continent, at the same time as the Atlantean reprisal brought death and destruction to Mu.”55
A few years later, in his third volume, Charroux was more interested in the possibility of a natural cause for these early civilizations’ fall, which he dates to about 10,000 BCE. Besides nuclear war, he suggests a collision or near-collision with a comet or meteorite shower, volcanic eruptions, or a brutal wakeup call from the extraterrestrials, sending an enormous space rocket to impact North America or Mongolia.56 Whatever the cause, almost all humanity died in the consequent rain of fire and the deluge that swept all the land, up to an altitude of 2,000 meters. The survivors, very few in number, clustered on the high mountains and plateaus. In time, the new humanity emerged from five widely separated points: the Red race from the Rocky Mountains and the Andes, the Black race from Ethiopia, the Yellow race from the Himalayas, and the White race from the Iranian plateau. Of these, the Atlanteans and the children of Mu carried the heritage of the extraterrestrials with humans; the Blacks were autochthonous; and the Whites came from Hyperborea, where a small colony of “angels” may also have survived the deluge.57
Civilization suffered another setback around 3000 BCE, when a second, partial deluge occurred. Its cause was the planet Venus, formerly a comet. Following Velikovsky, Charroux assures us that there is no evidence in ancient sources that such a planet was known before this date, whereas a mass of testimony exists that can be interpreted as the comet’s arrival and close approach to the earth before settling into its planetary orbit.58
The reader may have noticed the emphasis of French Atlantology on the variously colored races. According to Charroux, Adam and Eve were black,59 and so were all their descendants until the coming of the light-skinned “Sons of God” in their spaceships. These, as we know from the Bible, desired the “Daughters of Men,” and by interbreeding with the autochthonous race gave rise to the three hybrid races: Yellow, Red, and White. Among other observations that would scarcely pass today’s censors, Charroux suggests that the Blacks will further their evolution through miscegenation with Whites, thus supplementing the efforts of the extraterrestrials to raise the general level of earthly humanity through hybridization.60
“Pandora’s Box” is an apt description of the Planète project, for the glamor of lost knowledge is irresistible. These writers have done a service by opening it up, but since they lack any scholarly responsibility and any metaphysical grounding, what flies out is uncontrolled. To the average reader, one thing is as credible as another. Recognizing the profit to be made by exploiting such appetites, there is now an entire genre of occultist sensationalism masquerading as fact.
A mild version of this was propagated by the influential French branch of AMORC (Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis; see chapter 8 for more on the Rosicrucians.) Its French Grand Master and Supreme Legate Raymond Bernard (1923–2006) boasted innumerable other titles and dignities, as well as contacts in political circles. At the end of his book Les maisons secrètes de la rose-croix (The secret houses of the rose-cross) he gives a translation of Plato’s Atlantean writings and a summary of Donnelly’s book.61 Then he discloses that he has special knowledge that he is only now ready to share.
True to the Rosicrucian myth of Unknown Superiors who go their way unnoticed by the world but occasionally appear to initiates, Bernard tells us that he met his master in a hotel in Brussels. This sage told him that it was not by chance that there was so much interest in Atlantis today. Then he revealed that some Atlanteans had escaped its destruction, and that their heirs still exist!62 Atlantis was absolutely monotheist, like Islam or Judaism, and held the sun to be the first divine manifestation. Egyptian beliefs were a degenerate remnant of it, adapted to include the Nile in its theology. Atlantis was very civilized; we have nothing comparable to its methods of transportation. It had colonies, to which it gave part of its secret wisdom. This was preserved in its supreme pyramid, reproduced in “different measure” by the Pyramid of Cheops and others. Soon its secrets will be discovered, to the great good of humanity, and will put an end to much polemic.63
Continuing, Bernard’s master tells him that the Atlanteans knew nature’s forces, especially the telluric currents, and applied them to agriculture. The pyramids served to maintain “geological harmony,” while dolmens and menhirs, too, focalized the universal energy. All these sites were attached to the supreme pyramid, as only the sages knew how the energy system worked. The Atlanteans used it as we do electricity, without completely understanding it. But then they abused it, and finally made alterations in the supreme pyramid with catastrophic results: the Deluge. The Atlantean colonies were left to themselves without proper knowledge. Each developed its own school, rites, and myths, and created local secret societies with remnants of their knowledge. Even African secret societies have fragments of this, and so did the Druids.64
Bernard says that before this meeting he had read Andrew Tomas’s book on the secrets of Atlantis. This would be Les secrets de l’Atlantide, published in Laffont’s “Bibliothèque des grandes énigmes” (Library of the great enigmas), along with Robert Charroux’s and Eric von Däniken’s works.65 Bernard adds in an aside that the book was dedicated to Roerich, who was Spencer Lewis’s legate to Tibet. The great painter Nicolas Roerich (1874–1947) was no longer in a position to accept or decline Tomas’s dedication. Nor could Roerich confirm or deny Bernard’s implication that he had really worked for Harvey Spencer Lewis, the founder of AMORC.66
After this superficial grounding in the Planète school of Atlantology, Bernard now received the key to the mystery. The master explained to him that after the fall of Atlantis, the world entered a period of obscurity, as the sages refused to reconstitute the Atlantean empire. Instead, the whole world now has to become a New Atlantis, even if it takes thousands of years over it. The choice is offered: to usher in an era of extraordinary civilization, or to suffer the end not just of a continent, but of a world. This time of choice is approaching. To general stupefaction, Atlantis will reappear! The sages have had to leave humanity to grow up by itself, as demanded by the universal plan, but they have guided this evolution, gradually giving humanity the discoveries, science, and technology acquired by the Atlanteans.67
In Raymond Bernard’s version of these familiar ideas, it is not the space gods but the Rosicrucians under one guise or another who have been steering the course of humanity. If so, I marvel at their naivety. That the sages’ idea of evolution is to give adolescent humanity the technological toys that can destroy a world suggests criminal folly on their part.
JEAN PHAURE: RETURN TO TRADITION
Paul Le Cour’s admirer Jean Phaure, whose cyclical theories will figure largely toward the end of this book, agrees. He writes:
To none of our new-style prophets does it occur that every gain in power over matter that is not the consequence of a properly disinterested spiritual progress is Satanic in nature, which is an elementary teaching of every authentic tradition. None of these propagandists obsessed by searching for the fantastic seems ever to have thought, even in passing, that the purpose of human life might be the search for Salvation, much less for Liberation.68
Jean Phaure appreciates the stirring up of the common mentality by Charroux and the Planète group, but as a Christian esotericist, he takes our spiritual nature as the primary reality, and material evolution or devolution as secondary. His own prehistory also begins in Hyperborea, as the cradle of our present humanity. Answering the obvious objections based on climate, he asks: “Might there have existed, on the scale of a small continent, a ‘micro-climate’ maintained through energy sources that are mysterious to us, because they were spiritual?”69 Phaure is certain that Hyperborea was the primordial home of Homo sapiens, because all esoteric traditions testify to a “light from the North,” and because paleontology, geology, and climatology all agree that the Arctic region once enjoyed a temperate climate. (He does not mention their timescale of millions of years vis-à-vis his of thousands.) He is less confident about the legendary continents of Lemuria and Mu, on which science fails to agree with the “occultists,” of whom he seems to know only James Churchward (see chapter 8). He accepts that Mu was a continent in the Pacific contemporary with Atlantis, and that it disappeared in the same cataclysm of the eleventh or twelfth millennium BCE.
Jean Phaure, like Charroux, distinguishes two separate deluges. One sent Atlantis to the seabed around 10,800 BCE. Another was in the fourth millennium BCE, remembered in the Greek legend of Deucalion and Pyrrha and in the biblical Noah.70 Both authors believe that the earth’s axis was once perpendicular to the ecliptic. Charroux writes: “About 10,000 years ago the North Pole was situated on Baffin Island, and the earth turned on an uninclined axis, causing equal climates at all seasons.”71 During the approach of Venus, “the Earth turned over completely, so that the South Pole came to the North, the North Pole to the South, and East and West changed places. This situation lasted for an undetermined time, perhaps only a few days.”72 Phaure writes that both tradition and science “speak not only of a time when the Earth, without seasons, turned on an axis perpendicular to this [ecliptic] plane, but also of sudden flips of the globe, the North Pole taking the place of the South and vice versa.”73
Phaure also has a theory of the origin of races, but spiritual rather than material. The descendants of the primordial couple, newly clothed in physical bodies (the “coats of skin” of Genesis 3:21), misused these by mating with prehuman species already existing on Earth. We will see in the next chapter that this is a mainstay of Theosophical prehistory, though Phaure is not sympathetic to that movement. He interprets the Sons of God not as extraterrestrials but as Homo sapiens, and the Daughters of Men as perhaps Neanderthals. This miscegenation, he thinks, could explain the appearance of races with marked bodily differences. It also provides a rationale for Plato’s statement that Atlantis declined when its inhabitants mixed their divine substance with mortal elements, until the latter prevailed. Instead of privileging one race over another, Phaure points out that we are all of mixed blood, but whether we are yellow, white, black, or red, we possess that fragment of the divine Spirit that makes us humans and not animals.74
After the great cataclysm of the eleventh millennium, Phaure says, the survivors strove to reconstruct the lost knowledge of the vanished continents. This accounts for the hiatus between the Mesolithic and Neolithic eras, and also for the similarity of megalithic structures all over the globe, without requiring a diffusionist explanation.75 Phaure despises the extraterrestrial hypothesis as a strategy for eliminating God and the primordial tradition from prehistory. Certainly there are extraterrestrial beings; perhaps some are “para-human” and may have communicated with us and continue to do so (here he mentions UFOs). Nevertheless, at our origin is the sacred and the divine: “This Primordial Revelation easily suffices to explain the original knowledge of mankind, just as the traditional science of qualified Time and Cyclology amply accounts for the successive birth and death of civilizations.”76From that point of view, material progress is nothing but a compensation for the loss of spiritual powers that could act on matter without the necessity for tools. “As humanity moves further from its spiritual source, it ‘solidifies’ and ‘materializes,’ seeking in the mastery of technical powers the memory of its lost natural powers.”77
This and many other passages in Phaure’s work echo the teachings of René Guénon, whom no account of the French current of Atlantology can ignore. Here Guénon is held over for later discussion (see chapter 6) because of his relationship with other currents to which the intervening chapters are dedicated.
Three chapters in the present book are devoted to national Atlantologies: the French, German, and British. Although one cannot call them “schools,” there are definite trends and peculiarities to each of them. The French, for all their interest in races, make no claims of their own racial superiority, as do the Germans. They do not favor mediumistic revelations, as the British have done. They make their pronouncements ex cathedra, keeping their sources to themselves, as though what they have to say about prehistory is obvious to any reasonable person. Reason does not exclude immaterial or even spiritual realities, but once these are accepted as part of the natural order of things, certain consequences follow. The same method is followed by writers as disparate in context and culture as Fabre d’Olivet and Robert Charroux. They address a public stultified by the received canon of belief (whether imposed by the church or by science) and tell them that things are not as commonly supposed; history is driven by unseen forces, and a proper view of the most ancient times reveals what these were, and are.