The Elementary Treatise on Occult Science, by Papus

Pap u s

Papus (1865–1916), whose mundane name was Gérard Encausse, was a highly influential figure in the wave of occultism that swept through Europe at the turn of the century. The founder of several occult orders, including the extant Martinist Order, Papus was also a prolific writer who made great efforts to bring occult science to a wider audience. Best known in North America for The Tarot of the Bohemians, Papus has a great deal more to offer us with regard to the science of things hidden.

Mar k Anth ony Mikitu k

Mark Anthony Mikituk (France) is a translator and English teacher living in the South of France. He previously collaborated with John Michael Greer on a translation of Éliphas Lévi’s The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic (TarcherPerigee 2017).

Joh n Mi chael Gre er

One of the most respected writers and teachers in the occult field today, John Michael Greer has written more than fifty books on esoteric traditions, nature spirituality, and the future of industrial society. An initiate in Druidic, Hermetic, and Masonic lineages, he served for twelve years as Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America (AODA). He lives in Rhode Island, USA, with his wife, Sara. He can be found online at www.EcoSophia.net.

Co nta ct Us

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Elementary Treatise of Occult Science: Understanding the Theories and Symbols Used by the Ancients, the Alchemists, the Astrologers, the Freemasons, and the Kabbalists © 2018 by Mark Anthony Mikituk. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First Edition First Printing, 2018 Originally published as Traité élémentaire de science occulte mettant chacun à même de comprendre et d’expliquer les théories et les symboles employés par les anciens, par les alchimistes, les astrologues, les E.·. de la V.·., les kabbalistes, 5th edition, by Chamuel, 1898.

Cover design by Kevin R. Brown Interior illustrations by Llewellyn Art Department and James Clark on pages 153 and 245 Llewellyn Publishing is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Papus, 1865–1916, author.

Title: Elementary treatise of occult science : understanding the theories and symbols used by the ancients, the alchemists, the astrologers, the freemasons & the kabbalists / by Papus (Dr. Gerard Encausse) ; translated

by Mark Anthony Mikituk ; foreword by John Michael Greer.

Other titles: Traité élémentaire de science occulte. English Description: First Edition. | Woodbury : Llewellyn Worldwide, Ltd., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035837 | ISBN 9780738754970 (alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Occultism.

Classification: LCC BF1412 .E5513 2018 | DDC 130—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2018035837 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public.

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Any internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific location will continue to be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to authors’ websites and other sources.

Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America

Also by Pap u s

The Absolute Key to Occult Science Astrology for Initiates The Divinatory Tarot The Qabalah: Secret Traditions of the West The Tarot of the Bohemians

Also Translate d by Mark Anth ony Mikitu k The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic by Éliphas Lévi

Als o by Joh n Mi chael Gre er Atlantis The Celtic Golden Dawn The Coelbren Alphabet Encyclopedia of Natural Magic The Golden Dawn (7th edition editor) Monsters The New Encyclopedia of the Occult The Secret of the Temple Secrets of the Lost Symbol The UFO Phenomenon

For my daughter, June.

May this book be a spring that leads to your summer.

Contents Foreword by John Michael Greer....................................................................................................... xi Translator’s Note by Mark Anthony Mikituk......................................................................................xv Introduction: The Tri-Unity • Correspondences and Analogy • The Astral............................................... 1

PART ONE: THEORY

Chapter One: The Ancient Science • The Visible Manifestation of the Invisible • Definition of Occult Science.......................................................................................................5

Chapter Two: The Method of the Ancient Science • Analogy • The Three Worlds • The Ternary • The Theosophical Operations • The Cyclical Laws...........................................17

Chapter Three: Universal Life • The Great Secret of the Sanctuary • The Astral Light (Universal Energy) • Involution and Evolution • Man According to Pythagoras............35

PART TWO: REALIZATION

Chapter Four: The Expression of Ideas • The Signs • The Origin of Language • Symbolic Stories and Their Interpretation • Hermes’s Emerald Tablet and Its Explanation • The Telesma • Alchemy • Explanation of Hermetic Texts • Qualitative Geometry • Proper Names and Their Utility...............................................................................................51

Chapter Five: The Analytical Expression of Ideas • Analogical Tables • Magic • Ten Suggestions from Isis Unveiled by H. P. Blavatsky • Agrippa’s Magical Table of the Quaternary • Astrology • Adaptation of the Ternary.........................................................73

Chapter Six: The Integrative Expression of Ideas • The Pentacles • The Serpent and Its Significance • The Method of Explaining the Pentacles • The Cross • The Triangle • The Seal of Solomon • Cagliostro’s Device • (yhvh) • Hermes’s 21st Key • The Three Primitive Languages • The Sphinx and Its Significance • The Pyramids • The Pentagram • The Right-Angle Triangle and the Chinese Book of Tchen-Pey...............................................93

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PART THREE: ADAPTATION

Introduction to Part Three.............................................................................................................. 117

Chapter Seven: The Earth and Its Secret History......................................................................... 121 Chapter Eight: The White Race and the Formation of Its Tradition........................................... 141 Summary of Chapter Eight............................................................................................................. 179

Chapter Nine: The Constitution of Man...................................................................................... 181 Chapter Ten: The Astral Plane...................................................................................................... 205 Chapter Eleven: Occult Science and Contemporary Science....................................................... 229 Appendix I: Explication of the Alchemical Hieroglyph of Notre Dame de Paris by Cambriel..................... 243 Appendix II: The Esotericism of the Pater Noster............................................................................... 247 Appendix III: How I Became a Mystic: Notes on an Intellectual Autobiography..................................... 257 Bibliographical Notes..................................................................................................................... 263 Index........................................................................................................................................... 273

FOR E WOR D

by John Michael Greer

Paris in the Belle Epoque—the years between the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1917—was the acknowledged center of European culture, a bubbling cauldron of innovative ideas and new visions in literature and the arts, in the sciences, and in every branch of scholarship. It was also one of the great centers of Western occultism.1 Éliphas Lévi, whose best-selling Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic) kickstarted the revival of the Western world’s occult traditions when it appeared in 1855, was still alive in the first few years of the period; by his death in 1875, Paris had a thriving occult subculture that overlapped extensively with the literary and artistic world of the time.

It was in this world that Gérard Encausse found his footing as a young man. The son of a French physician and his Spanish Romani wife, he was born in 1865 in Corogna, Spain, and relocated to Paris with his parents while still a boy. In 1885 he took up the study of occultism and adopted the pen name Papus, the name of a spirit of medicine listed in the back of Lévi’s famous book.

In 1888 Papus, as we may as well call him, burst onto the Paris occult scene in a big way. In that year he helped launch both L’initiation, the premier occult journal of the time, and a lively weekly paper of occult news and opinion, Le voile d’Isis (The Veil of Isis). He also founded the Groupe Indépendant d’Études Ésotériques (Independent Group of Esoteric Studies), an influential society for occult study. That same year, he also found time to publish his first book—the one you’re holding in your hands at this moment.

Thereafter, his plump and smiling presence was everywhere in French occultism. He joined the Ordre de la Rose+Croix Kabbalistique (Order of the Kabbalistic Rose+Cross), the leading French magical order of the time, and refounded the Martinist Order, a traditition of Christian occultism that remains thriving today. He accomplished prodigies, organizing conferences and lectures, spreading the teachings of occultism throughout Europe, and writing a series of books that became required reading for most 1. Tobias Churton’s lively and readable Occult Paris: The Lost Magic of the Belle Epoque (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2016) is an accessible introduction to the occultism of that era.

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European occultists. He kept busy in this way until his death of tuberculosis in 1916, two years after the outbreak of the First World War brought down the curtain on the Belle Epoque.

 Some writers are known for a single book, others for a body of work that develops over the course of a literary career. Papus belongs to the second category. His life’s mission was the popularization of the occult traditions of the West, and he used his books to pursue that goal from a variety of different angles.

Whether he was explaining the inner structure of the tarot deck in Le tarot des bohémiens (The Tarot of the Bohemians), setting out the mystical traditions of Jewish Kabbalism in La Kabbale (The Kabbalah), or introducing the entire body of occult tradition—the theme of the book you’re reading now—he always had a close eye on the needs and expectations of his audience. His books are conversations rather than lectures, meant to engage the reader and invite interaction between current ideas and the occult teachings of the past.

They are also conversations in another sense. Unlike some occult authors then as now, Papus was never ashamed to acknowledge how much he had learned from other authors. All his books, including this one, include lengthy quotations from other works on occultism. At the time, that made them useful as an introduction to occult literature; today, it makes them invaluable, for many of the books he quotes at length are rare today, and only a few of them have ever been translated into English.

Other factors make Elementary Treatise of Occult Science, first published in 1888, a valuable resource today. One of them is that two of the primary themes he brought into this book’s conversation remain live issues today. His first concern, which occupies much of the early portion of this book, was to confront the superstitious faith in progress that leads so many people—in our time as in his—to assume that the past contains nothing of value for the present.

His angle of attack here was radical in the context of his own time, and even more so in ours. A minority of scholars in the nineteenth century pointed out that there’s evidence to suggest that at least some of the scientific achievements of their day had already been known in ancient times—that electricity, steam power, and many of the other achievements on which the Western world prided itself were rediscoveries rather than discoveries. That claim was shocking in Papus’s time; nowadays, it’s intellectual heresy of the most extreme sort, and nobody with the least claim to respectability so much as mentions the scholars Papus names. Their work remains and should be judged on its own merits—and Papus carefully cites all his sources, here and elsewhere.

The second core theme Papus explores in Elementary Treatise of Occult Science is the difference between modern ways of handling information and the methods that were used for the same purpose in the ancient and medieval worlds. Much of the reason that the discoveries and achievements of the ancient world have been so thoroughly ignored in modern times, he suggests, is that most modern people don’t understand the ancient use of symbolism, fable, and analogy as a core means for communicating

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truths. The ancients did not share the modern belief that knowledge should be available to all; they didn’t write books for dummies or complete idiots, as we do. They wrote for those who were willing to make an effort to understand and had the patience and intelligence to look past surface forms to grasp the underlying meaning.

The skills needed to interpret symbolism, fable, and analogy had dropped out of common use in Papus’s time, and so he devotes many pages to instructing readers in those skills and walking them through the process of extracting meaning from the symbolic legacies of the past. Since the symbolic mode of thinking remains just as unfashionable in our time as it was in his, this is among the most useful aspects of this book, a course of instruction in the skills needed to extract wisdom from the whole panoply of ancient myth, medieval legend, and esoteric symbolism.

The third primary theme of the book is somewhat less relevant to modern conditions, and it includes ideas that will raise many readers’ hackles. When Papus wrote, scientists across the Western world took it for granted that the human species was divided into four races marked by different skin colors—white, black, red, and yellow, in the usual classification of the time—and insisted that these were not just convenient categories for a diversity of ethnic groups but actual biological realities.

We now know that there is no such thing as a “white race,” or for that matter any of the others. It’s as absurd to use skin color as a basic human division as it would be to postulate a “white breed” of dog that lumps together Great Pyrenees with teacup poodles and to insist that the “white breed” has certain essential characteristics that set its members apart from black dogs, brown dogs, and so on. In Papus’s time, though, the science of genetics was in its infancy and anthropology wasn’t much past its toddler years. The research that would send the theory of separate human races into the dustbin of abandoned theories hadn’t yet been done. Furthermore, powerful cultural and economic interests in the Western countries defended racial theories as a way to justify European colonial projects; in hindsight, it’s easy to see that this was propaganda, but that level of clarity about the assumptions of a culture and an age is hard to achieve from within. Plenty of ideas we treat as self-evident will seem just as absurd to our descendants.

Be that as it may, Papus wrote at a time when the idea of distinct human races with different essential characteristics was all but universally accepted by scientists and laypersons alike. What’s more, these ideas were just as widespread in the occultism of his time as they were in the broader culture. H. P. Blavatsky’s vast writings on occultism framed her system of Theosophy in an alternative history of the world in which the rise and fall of a series of “root races” played a central role. Racial ideas also have an important role in Thomas Burgoyne’s The Light of Egypt, Max Heindel’s The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, and many other occult textbooks of the time.

In an important sense, though, Papus stands apart from the occult mainstream of his time. While many other late nineteenth-century occultists brought the conventional racial notions of their time into their teachings, he stood those notions on their heads. In his version of the hidden history of the world, white

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people are the Johnny-come-latelies of the planet, the last of the races to achieve civilization. His account talks about the immense cultural, scientific, and intellectual achievements of the yellow, red, and black races in their heydays. What’s more, the structure of history he presents implies that the white race, after its turn ruling the world, will decline and another race will supplant it. Thus, Papus accepted the racial discourse of his contemporaries only to relativize it, replacing the then-popular claim of white superiority with a narrative in which every race has an equal role in a historical cycle that governs them all.

Beyond its historical interest as an early challenge to the conventional racial narratives of late nineteenth century European culture, this aspect of Papus’s book has a more significant value to the modern student: like the ancient and medieval narratives he takes apart in earlier portions of the book, the imaginary history of the world Papus presents is meant to be read and interpreted symbolically. Like his great predecessor Éliphas Lévi, Papus loved to use in his own writings the symbolic modes of communications he wrote about, and he constantly wove multiple levels of meaning into his discourse using the same techniques he displays on a succession of traditional texts. As a general rule, in fact, it’s never safe to approach any occult text with the assumption that its surface meaning is the only one that matters, and with Papus, such a simplistic approach is guaranteed to miss his subtler points. Apply the skills Papus teaches to the literature of the occult, and a great deal of unexpected insight and subtle lore becomes available.

 Several of Papus’s works on occultism have been available to readers in the English-speaking world since the early twentieth century, but his major works on occult philosophy have remained untranslated until the present. It was therefore an honor as well as a pleasure to be asked to assist Mark Anthony Mikituk in preparing this translation. Mark and I had already worked together on a recent translation of Éliphas Lévi’s Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic; readers of that project will already know to expect a meticulous and readable text. Mark and I also wish to thank Elysia Gallo and Lauryn Heineman of Llewellyn Publications for their genial and efficient assistance in bringing this project into print.

TRA NSL ATOR’S NOT E

by Mark Anthony Mikituk

The reader will quickly notice that one of the main particularities of Papus’s Elementary Treatise is the large number of citations of both ancient authors and writers contemporary to Papus contained within.

These often rather long quotes, from a wide variety of sources, made my job as a translator more complicated, but I believe they also add a great deal of value to the work from the point of view of the student who is interested in the occult in general, as well as its history and development. I would therefore like to take some time discussing how I went about translating these citations in addition to providing an explanation for how the footnotes were treated. Finally, I have added a few historical comments of my own in supplement to what Mr. Greer has already provided in the foreword.

It should also be noted here that Papus’s Elementary Treatise has gone through twenty-three editions in France, nine of which were printed during his lifetime. Papus had the habit of adding, subtracting, and otherwise supplementing his treatise from edition to edition, and some of the changes are rather substantial. The last major changes he made occurred in the seventh edition; however, we chose to translate the fifth edition, published in 1898, in part because there is a rare and interesting text in it that was removed in the seventh. We also felt that the seventh was a bit overladen with supererogatory additions, which would have made for an overly large, and more expensive, publication.

With regard to any quotes from authors who originally wrote in English, I of course simply went back to the original source and reproduced the actual wording rather than translate a translation. Papus also cites a certain number of French authors, either contemporary to him or from the previous century.

In these cases, whether that author has been translated previously into English or not (in most cases there is no English translation), I provided my own translation without reference to any previous English translation.

Papus’s quotes of ancient authors presented an additional difficulty, in part because I have very little knowledge of the classic languages and therefore did not go back and compare them to the original sources. Some of these ancient sources—of which there are often several English translations, none exactly the same as another—will be familiar to the reader. Two sources in particular come to mind

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here: the Emerald Tablet and the Pistis Sophia. For both of these texts, and for others where the original ancient source has been widely translated into English, I at the very least consulted the various English versions available. For the Emerald Tablet, minor changes to my original translation of Papus’s French version were made so that it would be more in concordance with what would be familiar to the reader.

These types of adjustment never changed the overall meaning found in the French version provided by Papus, and where Papus really does use a word not to be found in the various English translations available, I kept Papus’s term. With regard to the Pistis Sophia, however, I ended up deciding not to make any changes when compared to the available English versions, both because Papus was quoting from a wellknown French translation of the work and because the differences were more substantial. The reader may therefore find some significant disparities between G. R. S. Mead’s translation, for example, and my own, which, as I mentioned, is a translation of a still widely respected French version of the work.

Finally, before moving on to my historical comments, some mention should be made about how the footnotes were treated. Papus wrote a substantial number of his own footnotes, which we have kept in this English translation. In order to distinguish his notes from our own, all of ours are preceded by the abbreviation [TN], for translator’s note. It should also be mentioned that we have taken the trouble to supplement Papus’s Treatise with an annotated bibliography that is substantially more detailed than most. We have not included every author that Papus mentions (that would have made for another book!), but have included the large majority of his contemporaries who are quoted in the treatise. Rather than the typical bibliography, our preference was to provide the reader with a short biography of each author mentioned along with a list of their major works and whether any of their works might be found in English.

 Mr. Greer has already pointed out that Papus was a major second-generation leader in the nineteenthand early twentieth-century occult revival in France. The fact that Papus provides so many citations, especially in regard to those from other authors of his time, gives the reader a unique window into the period. Papus’s Elementary Treatise in fact allows the reader the great opportunity of delving into what has come before from a much wider point of view than that of a single author.

Since much of what can be considered occult study, especially of the historical variety, involves the seeking out and reevaluation of knowledge that has previously been “lost,” and because of the particular historical value of Papus’s Elementary Treatise, I feel it is germane to spend some time discussing more generally both the idea of rediscovering “lost knowledge” and the inevitable reevaluation of that material once it is “found,” which I imagine to be the two activities that this work will most likely inspire in the reader.

In order to properly evaluate this potential rediscovery of “lost knowledge,” one must first attempt to answer the question of what has been lost. The question does not only apply to what knowledge we

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may have lost more recently, which might be found in Papus’s Elementary Treatise, but to all of human history, from the story of Genesis onward, and it is a question that Papus himself inevitably attempts to answer in his own fashion, based on what information was available and accepted in his time. It is also the very same question an individual might ask of themselves with regard to their own particular past: What have you lost? I would like to suggest that the answer to this question is the same in all the above cases: what has actually been lost is the knowledge and experience of alternate forms of consciousness, which we now have difficulty accessing because they have been lost.

The second question to be answered is why this knowledge has been lost. Why do we have so much difficulty recovering, or rediscovering, a form of consciousness that once upon a time, in our own life, or in the life of all of humanity, came so easily and naturally? If our subject is indeed consciousness and its various forms, then the answer must be because the structure of our minds, either individually or collectively, has changed. And if such is the case, then in some ways the exact same consciousness we once had can probably never be reexperienced in exactly the same way that it once was, at least not without a great deal of effort. It can most likely only be experienced through the lens of our current mental structures and from the viewpoint of our history as we currently remember it.

 With regard to the collective conscious state in Papus’s era, two very important differences in comparison to our current state should be noted and taken into consideration when evaluating whatever “lost knowledge” Papus might provide us with. The first important difference to note is that Papus wrote during, and was directly involved in, what art and literary historians call the symbolist movement in France, but which could just as easily be considered the last prewar hurrah of the Romantic era, which had technically ended the generation previous. The key to both Romanticism and symbolism is the rejection of purely materialist enlightenment ideals and a reemphasis upon that which is unseen. What Romantics and the later symbolists felt and experienced at that time, much more directly and generally than most of us today, was the very real existence and experience of the realms of the spirit and of deep emotion.

For both, the refusal to consider the unseen and the world of emotions was a refusal to consider the world as it truly is, and it was in part this very form of Romantic consciousness which led to the occult revival during that time. The Romantic mindset is not one of clear material facts but of emotional, spiritual, and symbolic ones, and one should be wary today of taking certain historical “facts” as they are presented by Papus as being important in and of themselves, rather than being important for the hidden spiritual symbolism behind them.

The Romantic period and later symbolist movement seem to represent an intellectual era that we have almost willfully erased from our collective memories, despite the fact that they are so very recent. One of the indirect causes of that erasure, the Great War and subsequent rise of fascism, is the second important difference with our contemporary worldview that should be kept in mind when reading Papus’s work.

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Although the fact that Papus wrote a generation before fascism even began to raise its ugly head should be obvious, it can still be difficult at times not to reinterpret what he wrote in terms of a consciousness which was simply nonexistent in his time. It therefore bears repeating that however repulsed we may be by anything that smacks of racial theory today, the fascist ideal of the “superior white race” could not possibly be what Papus had in mind. In fact, a careful and respectful reader will quickly note that in Papus’s history of the races there is not a one which is considered superior to another.

In the end, I suppose that what I would like to suggest here is that if we are to have any chance at all of entering Papus’s world and recovering a part of the forgotten treasures that he might reveal to us, we may wish to refrain from immediately spray-painting the place with our own contemporary mores … at least not without first taking into consideration what might have been different then.

 I would like to thank John Michael Greer for his thoughtful and informative foreword as well as his additional comments and annotations. I would also like to thank Elysia Gallo at Llewellyn, who was a wonderful source of advice and cheerfully suggested improvements for both the translation itself and the eventual annotations to the translation. I do believe this translation is significantly better for having seen Elysia’s hand, but of course any errors still to be found within are mine.

INT R OD UCT I ON

The Tri-Unity • Correspondences and Analogy • The Astral

History tells us that the greatest thinkers of antiquity that the Occident has seen completed their educations with the Egyptian mysteries.

The Science taught by the guardians of these mysteries is known under various names: occult science, Hermeticism, Occultism, Esotericism, etc., etc.

Identical everywhere in its principles, this code of instruction constitutes the traditional Science of the Mages, which we commonly call Occultism.

This science dealt with the theory and practice of a large number of phenomena of which only a small part comprises our contemporary practices in the domain of magnetism, or so-called spiritualist evocations. We should note that these practices, contained within the study of Psychurgy, form only a small part of occult science, which includes three other important branches: Theurgy, Magic, and Alchemy.

The study of Occultism is of prime importance from two points of view: it shines a new light on the past and allows the historian to reexamine antiquity under a still little-known form. In addition, its examination provides the contemporary researcher with an overarching system of assertions which can be studied by science and with ideas about still little-known forces, forces of Nature or of Man, to be verified through observation.

The use of analogy, the characteristic method of Occultism, and its application to our contemporary sciences or to our modern conceptions of Art and Sociology allows us to throw a completely new light on the most apparently insoluble problems.

However, Occultism does not pretend to provide the only possible solution to the problems it addresses. It is an instrument, a means of study, and only a leap of pride could allow its adepts to claim that they possess the absolute Truth regarding any particular point. Occultism is a philosophical system which provides a solution to questions which we often ask ourselves. Is that solution the unique expression of the Truth? Only experimentation and observation can determine the answer.

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In order to avoid any errors of interpretation, Occultism should be divided into two main aspects: 1) An immutable aspect which forms the foundation of the tradition and which we can easily find in the writings of the Hermeticists, whatever their era and their origin.

2) An aspect which is personal to the author and which is constituted of commentaries and special applications.2 The immutable aspect can be divided into three points: 1) The existence of the Tri-Unity as the fundamental law of action on all the planes of the Universe.3 2) The existence of Correspondences which interconnect all parts of the visible and invisible Universe.4 3) The existence of an invisible world, the exact double of and a perpetual factor in the visible world.5 The possibility given to every intelligence to manifest its potentialities in real-world applications is the effective cause of Progress in research, the origin of the diverse schools, and the proof of the ability which every author has to keep his personality whole, whatever field of action he chooses.

2. It is by intentionally confounding these two aspects that the detractors of Occultism have always found their arguments.

3. Man cannot conceive of the Unity before analyzing the three planes of manifestation of that Unity; of the divine Trinity in most cosmogonies, the human Trinity (Mind-Soul-Body) of Hermeticism, Trinities which are synthesized in the unitary conception of God and of Man. 4. It is in this manner that we go back up, through the use of analogy, from facts to laws and from laws to principles. The doctrine of correspondences implies analogy and requires its use.

5. It is here that we find the esoteric teachings of the astral world, the occult forces of nature and of man, and the invisible beings which people Space.

CH A P T E R ONE

The Ancient Science • The Visible Manifestation of the Invisible • Definition of Occult Science

Nowadays, we have perhaps too much of a tendency to confuse Science with the sciences. The one is as immutable in its principles as the others vary according to the caprices of men; what was scientific a century ago, in physics for example, is now close to passing into the realm of myth 6 because the knowledge of particular subjects constitutes the domain of the sciences, a domain in which, I repeat, the masters are changing at every instant.

Everyone knows that these particular subjects are precisely those upon which modern scholars have carried out their studies. They have done so well that we apply the real progress achieved in a multitude of special branches to Science. The defect in this concept appears however when one tries to connect everything together, to genuinely form Science into a synthesis, a total expression of eternal Truth.

This idea of a synthesis which encompasses, with a few immutable laws, the enormous mass of detailed knowledge accumulated over these past two centuries, seems to the researchers of our era to be lost in a future so distant that all that they can hope for is that their descendants might one day see it emerge above the horizon of human knowledge.

We will appear very bold in claiming that this synthesis existed, that its laws are so true that they accurately apply to modern discoveries, theoretically speaking, and that the Egyptian initiates, contemporaries of Moses and Orpheus, possessed them in their entirety.

To say that Science existed in antiquity is to be accused by most serious minds of being a sophist or naive, however I will try to prove my paradoxical pretension, and I beg my contradictors to lend me just a little more of their attention.

First of all, I will be asked, where can we find some trace of this so-called ancient science? What knowledge does it contain? What practical discoveries has it produced? How does one learn of this famous synthesis of which you speak?

6. Phlogistics, for example. [TN] Phlogistics was the study of a fire-like element called phlogiston hypothesized to exist before the eighteenth century. By Papus’s time, phlogistics was of course already a dead science.

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All things considered, it is not the lack of materials which stops us from reconstituting this ancient science. Debris of old monuments, symbols, hieroglyphs, numerous initiatory rites, and manuscripts all crowd about to aid us in our researches.

But while some are indecipherable without a key, which few people bother trying to possess, the antiquity of the others (rites and manuscripts) is far from being admitted by contemporary scholars, who date them at the very latest as contemporary with the School of Alexandria.

We must therefore search out more solid foundations which we will find in the works of writers who substantially predate the School of Alexandria, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Pliny, Livy, etc., etc. This time none shall be able to quibble about the antiquity of the texts.

It is certainly not an easy thing to research this ancient science piece by piece among the old authors, and we owe a great deal to those who took on and completed this colossal work. Among the most praiseworthy we should cite Dutens,7 Fabre d’Olivet,8 and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre.9 Let us open Dutens’ book, and we shall see the effects produced by the ancient science; let us read Fabre d’Olivet and Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, and we shall penetrate the temples from whence shines a civilization whose productions will astonish the so-called civilized moderns.

I can only summarize these authors in this chapter, and it is they who must be consulted to verify the claims I will make for which they provide the necessary proofs.

In Astronomy the ancients were aware of the movement of the Earth around the Sun,10 the theory of the plurality of worlds,11 the law of gravity,12 the tides caused by lunar influence,13 the constitution of the Milky Way, and above all, the law which was rediscovered by Newton. On this subject, I cannot resist the pleasure of citing two highly significant passages from Dutens. One, regarding universal attraction, is from Plutarch; the other, on the law of squares, is from Pythagoras: Plutarch, who knew of almost all the brilliant truths in Astronomy, also had some understanding of the reciprocal force which causes planets to gravitate to one another, “and, after having attempted to explain the reason for the attraction of terrestrial bodies to the Earth, he looks for the source in the reciprocal attraction between all bodies, which is what causes all terrestrial bodies to gravitate toward the Earth, in the same way that the sun and the moon cause all bodies which 7. Louis Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes [Origin of the Discoveries Attributed to Moderns], 2 volumes (1825).

8. Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, Les vers dorés de Pythagore [The Golden Verses of Pythagoras] and Histoire philosophique du genre humain [Philosophical History of Humankind].

9. Alexandre Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La mission des juifs [The Mission of the Jews] (1884), ch. 4.

10. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, ch. 9.

11. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, ch. 7.

12. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, ch. 6.

13. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, ch. 15.

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pertain to them to gravitate to them, and, through an attractive force, hold them in their particular sphere.”

He then applies these particular phenomena to other more general ones, and, based on what occurs on our globe, he deduces, by using the same principle, all that which must occur with regard to celestial bodies both individually and the relations they must have with each other.

He speaks again in another section about this inherent force within bodies, that is to say in the earth and in other planets, which causes subordinate bodies to be attracted to them.14 A musical string, said Pythagoras, produces the same sound as another string which is twice as long, when the tension or force with which the second one is stretched is four times as strong; and the gravity of a planet is four times as strong as another which is at twice the distance. In general, for a musical string to be in unison with a shorter string of the same type, its tension must be increased in the same proportion as the square of its greater length, and in order for the gravity of a planet to become equal to that of another planet which is closer to the sun, the gravitational force must be increased in the proportion of the square of its greater distance from the sun. Thus, if we imagine musical strings which stretch from the sun to each planet, in order for these strings to be in unison, one must increase or decrease their tension in the same proportion which would be necessary to render the gravity of the planets equal.15 It is from the similarity of these relationships that Pythagoras derived his doctrine of the harmony of the spheres.

These are general discoveries that genius alone might suffice to uncover, but can we demonstrate that the ancients made experimental discoveries which are the glories of the nineteenth century, and proofs of Progress which leads us onward?

Since we are dealing with Astronomy, consult Aristotle, Archimedes, Ovid, and most of all Strabon, whom Dutens quotes,16 and you shall see appear before you the telescope, concave mirrors,17 magnifying glasses used as microscopes,18 the refraction of light, the discovery of the isochronism of the vibrations of a pendulum,19 etc.

You shall no doubt be surprised to see instruments we commonly believe to be so modern to have been known by the ancients, but you will still allow me the possibility.

14. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, p. 160. De facie in orbe lunae (Plutarch).

15. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, pp. 167–68. Loi du carré des distances [The Law of the Square of Distances] (Pythagoras).

16. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, ch. 10.

17. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, vol. 2, ch. 8.

18. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, vol. 2, ch. 9.

19. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, vol. 1, ch. 7.

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I have not yet spoken about the most important questions: Can steam, electricity, photography, and all of our chemistry be found in the ancient sciences?

Agathias lived in the sixth century of our era. At that time he wrote a book which was reprinted in 1660.20 You will find on pages 150 and 151 of his book a complete description of the way in which Anthemius of Tralles 21 used steam as a motive force in order to displace an entire roof. Everything is there: the manner of positioning the water, how to block the exits in order to produce steam at high pressure, how to control the fire, etc., etc.

Saint-Yves d’Alveydre also quotes this fact in his work 22 where he demonstrates that science had already been known for a long time by that era.

Our electricians would look very sorry for themselves standing before those Egyptian priests and their initiates (Greeks and Romans) who manipulated lightning as we use heat and made it descend and strike at will. It is Saint-Yves who shows us the working of this secret which constituted one of the most occult practices of the sanctuary.

In the Ecclesiastical History by Sozomen 23 (book IX, chp. VI), we can observe the Etruscan priesthood successfully defending the city of Narnia against Alaric, with lightning strikes. 24 Livy 25 and Pliny 26 describe to us the death of Tullus Hostilius 27 who, wishing to evoke electrical forces according to a manuscript by Numa, died by lightning strike for lack of knowing how to prepare for the backlash.

We know that the majority of the mysteries of the Egyptian priests were but a veil they used to hide the sciences and that to be initiated into their mysteries was to be taught the sciences which they cultivated. It is they who gave Jupiter the name Elicius or Jupiter electric, considering him to be lightning personified, and who allowed himself to be attracted to earth by virtue of certain mysterious formulas and practices; because Jupiter Elicius signifies nothing other than that Jupiter is susceptible to attraction, Elicius being derived from elicere,28 according to Ovid and Varro.29

20. Agathias, De rebus justinis (Paris: 1660). [TN] Most probably De imperio et rebus gestis Justiniani.

21. [TN] Sixth-century geometer and architect from Constantinople best known for having designed the Hagia Sophia.

22. Agathias, De rebus justinis, ch. 4.

23. [TN] Salminius Hermias Sozomenus, fifth-century Christian historian.

24. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La mission des juifs [The Mission of the Jews], ch. 4.

25. Livy, Ab urbe condita libri [The History of Rome], bk. 1, ch. 31.

26. Pliny, Natural History, bk. 2, ch. 53, and bk. 28, ch. 4.

27. [TN] Mythical third king of Rome (673–42 BCE) who supposedly died from a lightning strike due to his having incorrectly conducted a sacrificial ceremony in honor of Jupiter Elicius.

28. [TN] Latin, “to call.”

29. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes [Origin of the Discoveries Attributed to Moderns], vol. 1, p. 275.

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Eliciunt coelo te, Jupiter; unde minores Nunc quoque te celebrant, Eliciumque vocant. 30 Is that clear enough?

Chapter IV of the Mission of the Jews tells us even more: The manuscript of a monk from Athos called Panselenus reveals, according to ancient Ionian authors, the application of chemistry in photography. This fact was brought to light with regard to the Niépce and Daguerre process.31 The dark room, the optical instruments, the sensitization of the metallic plates are all described throughout.

As to the chemistry of the ancients, I have strong reason to believe, based on my knowledge of alchemy, that it was substantially superior both theoretically and practically to our modern chemistry. But as one should cite facts and not opinions, listen again to Dutens.32 The ancient Egyptians knew how to work metals, gilding, the dying of silk in colors, glass-work, the manner in which to artificially hatch eggs, to extract medicinal oils from plants and to prepare opium, how to make beer, cane sugar, which they called honey of the reeds, and many unguents; they knew how to distill and knew the alkaloids and the acids.

Here is the opinion of Saint-Yves, which reinforces that of Dutens: In Plutarch (Life of Alexander, chp. XXXIX), in Herodotus, in Seneca (Natural Questions, book III, chp.

XXV), in Quintus Curtius (book X, last chapter), in Pliny (Natural History, book XXX, chp. XVI), in Pausanias (Arcad., chp. XXV), we can find our acids, our bases, our salts, alcohol, ether, in a word, the definite traces of an organic and inorganic chemistry whose authors no longer had or did not wish to provide the key.

But there remains another question: that of cannons and gunpowder.

Porphyry, in his book on the Administration of the Empire, describes the artillery of Constantine Porphyrogenitus.

Valerianus, in his Life of Alexander, shows us the bronze cannons of the Indians.

In Ctesias 33 we rediscover the famous Greek fire, a mixture of saltpeter, sulfur and a hydrocarbon employed well before Ninus in Chaldea, in Iran, employed in the Indies under the name of 30. Ovid, Fasti, bk. 3, verses 327 and 328. [TN] “They call thee from the heavens, Jupiter; whence those below, when they worship you, name you ‘the Called.’”

31. [TN] Also known as the daguerreotype process, the first publicly available photographic process invented by Louis Daguerre in 1839 with the aid of another French inventor named Nicéphore Niépce.

32. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes, vol. 2, ch. 3.

33. [TN] Fifth-century BCE physician, geographer, and historian.

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Bharawa Fire. This name, which alludes to the priesthood of the red race, the first legislator of the blacks of India, indicates an immense antiquity all on its own.

Herodotus, Justin, Pausanias speak of mines which are destroyed under a flaming rain of stones and projectiles by the Persian and the Celtic invaders of Delphi.

Servius, Valerius Flaccus, Julius the African, Marcus Graecus describe the use of gunpowder in the ancient traditions; the last of these authors even gives the same proportions we use today. 34 In another branch of knowledge, we see the so-called discoveries of modern medicine, blood circulation, anthropology and general biology among others, which were perfectly known in antiquity,35 and most of all by Hippocrates.

If pushed, one might accept your claims, you could tell me, because for each of our new discoveries, one can always find someone who will demonstrate that some old author spoke about it more or less; but does he have some type of experience which we do not possess anymore, some physical or chemical phenomenon whose reproduction would be impossible today?

Here again there are a host of things I could cite; but, so as not to tire you for much longer, I shall only name Democritus 36 and his discoveries which have been lost to us; among others, the artificial production of precious stones; the Egyptian discovery of the art of rendering glass malleable, that of conserving mummies, of rendering a painting imperishable by soaking a canvas coated with several varnishes in a single solution from which it comes out covered in various colors, not to mention the products employed by the Romans in their architecture.

Why is all this so poorly known?

Perhaps because of the habit that the authors of classical history have of copying each other without preoccupying themselves with works unrelated to the question which interests them, perhaps because of the public’s habit of only believing in those journals which only follow what is said in encyclopedias which are written up God knows how; perhaps … but why waste our time looking for causes whose knowledge is of no aid? The facts are such, and that suffices. The ancient science has proved its existence many times over, and one must either believe or deny forevermore the testimony of men.

What we now need to know is where they learned this science, and to that end. The Mission of the Jews will again be useful to us here (page 79): Elementary education and instruction was, in accordance with the art of child-rearing, provided by the Family.

34. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La mission des juifs [The Mission of the Jews].

35. Dutens, Origine des découvertes attributes aux modernes [Origin of the Discoveries Attributed to Moderns], vol. 2, ch. 1; SaintYves d’Alveydre, La mission des juifs, ch. 4.

36. [TN] Greek fifth-century BCE pre-Socratic materialist philosopher, considered by some to be the father of science.

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This art was of a religious nature and followed the ancient cult of the Ancestors and of the Sexes in the home, as well as many other sciences which are not useful to mention here.

Professional education and instruction was given by what the ancient Italians called the gens and that the Chinese called the jin, in a word, by the tribe, in the ancient and very poorly known meaning of this expression.

A more complete education, analogous to our secondary education, was provided to adults through the works of the temples and was called the Minor Mysteries.

Those who had acquired, sometimes after many years, the natural and human knowledge of the Minor Mysteries took on the title of the Son of Woman, the Hero, the Son of Man, and possessed certain social powers, such as Therapist in all the branches, Mediator before government, Magistrate of arbitration, etc …, etc …, The teachings of the Great Mysteries were transmitted through an entire hierarchy of the sciences and arts, the possession of which gave the initiate the title of the Son of the Gods, or the Son of God, depending on whether the temple was metropolitan or not, and in addition gave the initiate certain social Powers, called priestly and royal.

Thus it was in the Temple that they kept this science for whose existence we first searched and that we shall now pursue ever more closely. We have arrived at those mysteries which everyone talks about, but which so few know.

But to be admitted into these initiations did one need to be of a particular class? Was a part of the nation’s population forced to rot in ignorance, to be exploited by the recruited initiates of a closed caste?

Not in the least: any man, of any rank, could present himself for initiation, and, since my affirmation will not suffice for some, I refer you to the work of Saint-Yves for a general description, and I cite a highly knowledgeable author with regard to these questions, Fabre d’Olivet, in order to elucidate this particular point: The ancient religions, and that of the Egyptians most of all, were full of mysteries. Their fabric was made up of a whole host of images and symbols: what an admirable fabric! the sacred work of an uninterrupted sequence of divine humans, who, reading the book of Nature and the book of Divinity turn by turn, translated the ineffable language into human language. Those whose stupid stare fell upon those images, those symbols, those holy allegories, seeing nothing more, rotted, it is true, in their ignorance; but their ignorance was voluntary. From the moment they wished to arise above it, they had but to speak. All the sanctuaries were open, and if they had the necessary constancy and virtue, nothing stopped them from marching from understanding to understanding, from revelation to revelation, until the most sublime of discoveries. They could, while still alive and human, descend down among the dead, rise up to the Gods, and penetrate all of elementary nature. Because religion embraced all those things, and nothing of religion was unknown to the

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sovereign pontiff. He of the famed Egyptian Thebes, for example, did not arrive at this culminating point of the sacred doctrine until he had passed all the inferior grades, had learned all the science there was to learn in each grade, and had demonstrated himself to be worthy of the highest grade .…

They did not dispense the mysteries easily, because the mysteries were important; they did not profane the knowledge of Divinity, because that knowledge existed; and to conserve the truth for the many, they did not vainly give it away to everyone. 37 What then was the age of these mysteries?

What was their origin?

We find them at the foundation of all the great ancient civilizations, whichever race they belonged to. For Egypt alone, whose initiations educated the greatest Hebrew, Greek, and Roman men, we can go back ten thousand years, which demonstrates how false the classical chronologies are.

Here are the proofs of that assertion: Is the question with regard to Egypt?

Plato, initiate of its mysteries, tells us to no effect that ten thousand years before Menes,38 there existed a complete civilization for which he held the proof before his eyes; Herodotus uselessly affirms to us the same fact while adding, with regard to Osiris (God of the ancient Synthesis and the ancient Universal Alliance), that vows seal his lips and that he trembles to even say a word; Diodorus futilely certifies that he was told by Egyptian priests that, well before Menes, they had proof of a complete social state having survived ten thousand years until Horus; Manetho,39 an Egyptian priest, futilely traces, based only on Menes, a conscientious chronology bringing us six thousand eight hundred and eighty years back from the present year; He uselessly informs us that before this Egyptian ruler, many immense cycles of civilizations succeeded each other on earth and in Egypt itself; All these august testimonies, to which we can add those of Berossus,40 and all the libraries of India, of Tibet, and of China, are useless and unacceptable to the deplorable spirit of sectarianism and obscurantism which takes on the mask of Theology. 41

37. Fabre d’Olivet, La langue hébraique restituée [The Hebrew Language Restored], vol. 2, p. 7.

38. [TN] A-first dynasty pharaoh from approximately 5000 BCE; therefore, Papus is suggesting a date that is 17,000 years in the past.

39. [TN] Third-century BCE Egyptian priest, author of Aegyptiaca, a history of Egypt complete with kings lists.

40. [TN] Third-century Babylonian historian and astronomer.

41. Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, La mission des juifs [The Mission of the Jews], p. 95.

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Having arrived at this place in our research, let us cast an eye together upon the points we have made and see what conclusions we are permitted to come to.

We first determined the existence in antiquity of a science just as powerful in its effects as ours, and we showed that the ignorance of moderns in regard to this came from the nonchalance with which they studied the ancients.

We then saw that this science was kept in the temples, the centers of higher education and civilization.

Finally we were able to learn that no one was excluded from this initiation whose origins are lost in the darkness of the primitive cycles.

Three types of trials were placed at the start of any instruction: physical trials, moral trials and intellectual trials. Iamblichus, Porphyry, and Apuleius among the ancients, and Lenoir,42 Christian,43 Delaage 44 among the moderns, describe these trials in detail, and I believe it is not useful to speak more of them here. What comes out of all this is that before all of science there was the hidden science.

Even a superficial study of the scientific writings that the ancients left to us allows one to observe that although their knowledge allowed for the same results as ours, it nevertheless differed greatly in the method and the theory.

To know what was taught in the temples, we must look for the vestiges of these teachings in the materials we possess and which were for the most part conserved by the alchemists. We are not worried by the more or less apocryphal origins (according to modern scholars) of these writings. They exist, and that should suffice. If we are able to discover a method which explains the symbolic language of the alchemists and the ancient symbolic stories of the Golden Fleece, the War of Troy, and the Sphinx at the same time, we can fearlessly affirm that we hold a piece of the ancient science in our hands.

Let us first look at how the moderns treat a natural phenomenon in order to better understand the ancient method by contrast.

What would you say of a man who describes a book to you as follows: The book which you have provided me with for examination is lying on the fireplace at two meters and forty-nine centimeters from where I stand, it weighs five hundred forty-five grams eight hundred milligrams, it is made up of three hundred forty-two small sheets of paper upon which there exists two hundred eighteen thousand one hundred eighty printed characters which required the use of one hundred ninety grams of black ink.

That is the experimental description of the phenomenon.

42. La Franc-maçonnerie rendue a sa veritable origine [Freemasonry Restored to Its True Origin] (1814).

43. Histoire de la magie, de monde surnaturel et de la fatalitĂŠ a travers les temps et les peuples [The History of Magic, of the Supernatural World, and of Destiny across Time and Peoples] (1863).

44. La science du vrai [The Science of Truth] (Paris: Dentu, 1884).

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If this example shocks you, open the books of modern science and see if they do not use the exact same method such as the description of the Sun or Saturn by an astronomer who delineates the position, weight, volume, and density of celestial bodies, or the description of the solar spectrum by a physicist who counts the number of rays!

What is of interest to you in the book is not its material or physical aspect, but what the author had wished to express by these signs, what is hidden beneath their form—its metaphysical aspect, so to speak.

This example suffices to show the difference between the ancient methods and the modern ones.

The former, in the examination of a phenomenon, is always concerned with a general study of the question, the latter remains confined a priori to the domain of physical events.

In order to demonstrate that such is definitely the spirit of the ancient method, I cite this highly significant passage from Fabre d’Olivet regarding the two manners in which history is written.45 Because one must well remember that the allegorical history of times past, written in another spirit than the positive history which succeeded it, does not resemble it in any way, and it is because we have confounded them that we have made such grave errors. It is a very important observation that I again make here. This history, entrusted to the collective memory of men, or conserved among the sacerdotal archives of the temples in loose pieces of poetry, only considered things from a moral point of view, never preoccupied itself with individuals, and observed the masses in action—that is to say the peoples, the corporations, the sects, the doctrines, even the arts and the sciences, like so many individual beings which it designated by a generic name.

It is certainly not because the masses could not have a leader who directed its movements. But that leader, regarded as an instrument of some spirit, was neglected by a history which was only concerned with the spirit. A leader succeeded another leader, without allegorical history making the slightest mention of it. The experiences of everyone were accumulated upon the head of one person. It was the moral object whose workings were examined, whose birth, progress, and fall were described. The succession of objects replaced that of individuals. Positive history, which has become our history, follows an entirely different method where individuals are all its concern: it notes the dates, facts which the other history disdained, with scrupulous exactitude. The moderns would ridicule this allegorical method of the ancients, if they thought it possible, just as I am sure that the ancients would ridicule the methods of the moderns, if they had been able to foresee that

45. I apologize to the reader for all the citations with which I have overloaded this treatise, but I am obliged at each step of the way to support myself upon solid foundations. What I claim is so improbable to many, and I have no idea why, that this amount of proof will barely suffice to combat the incredulity of prejudice.

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possibility in the future. How can one approve of what one does not know? We approve only of what we like; we always believe that we know all that which we should like. 46 Let us now go back to that printed book which served to establish our first comparison, while properly noting that there are two ways of considering it: Through what we see, the characters, the paper, the ink, that is to say through the material signs which are but a representation of something higher, and through this something which we cannot physically see: the author’s ideas.

That which we see expresses that which we do not see.

The visible is a manifestation of the invisible. This principle, true for this phenomenon in particular, is also true for all other phenomena of nature, as we shall see next.

We now see even more clearly the fundamental difference between the science of the ancients and the science of the moderns.

The former is concerned with the visible only to discover the invisible which it represents.

The latter is concerned with phenomena for themselves without worrying about metaphysical relationships.

The science of the ancients is the science of the hidden, of the esoteric.

Let us come closer to these willfully obscured data with which the ancients covered up their scientific symbols, and we will be able to establish an acceptable definition of the science of antiquity, which is: The hidden science—Scientia occulta.

The science of the hidden—Scientia occultati.

The science which hides what it has discovered—Scientia occultans.

Such is the triple definition of: OCCULT SCIENCE

46. Fabre d’Olivet, Les vers dorés de Pythagore [The Golden Verses of Pythagoras], pp. 26–27.

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