Course XXVI - Teaching 13: Scientistic Magic

Scientistic Magic of Renaissance and of the Catherine of Médicis’s times led however to restore the Esoteric Orders.
Halls and bars of Paris, where social unrest, curiosity and also intellectual curiosity of the times is reflected, swarm with occultists of good faith and charlatans among which, fearing the ones and the others, is Eteilla Alliette, a fortune-teller and so-called disciple of the Count of Saint-Germain. In Baroness of Obericirch’s sayings, adepts, prophets and everything related to them never aroused so much attention and were so numerous. Conversations deal almost exclusively with these peculiar subjects and excite even the most serious imaginations. Nostradamus’ “Centuries” are re-published and eagerly read. According to Luchet, more than thirty Euopean Princes, over all Nordic, belong to different lodges, and one of them is the Tsar Paul of Rusia, a fervent adept of occult sciences.
Theosophists (who discard any theurgical magic) and Kabbalists (who continue traditions of high magic, perhaps in a way somewhat fantastic) are called “enlightened”. Every tendency counts on prominent personalities: Swedenborg and Lavater for the theosophists, while Dom Pernetty and Martinez de Pasqualis apparently were the most zealous preservers of Kabbalistic practices. Claude de Saint-Martin belongs successively to both tendencies.
Swedenborg, a well-known sage in his time, and a member of the most important scientific academies of Europe, and even a philosopher and mystic, describes his visions and journeys through the “Other World”, publishes his relationships with angels, and founds groups and lodges that, in due time, partially must become the Swedenborgian Church, the first spiritualist sect.
Dom Pernetty, a former Benedictine priest and enthusiastic navigator who goes round the world with Bouganville, from the North went to Berlin, and later founded in Avignon the Order of his Kabbalistic oracle: “The Holy Word”.
Lavater, a Protestant minister (that sends to the “Good Mother, the Catholic Church, all those who do not find peace in the Reformed Church”) is an enlightened being, full of kindness, beneficent with the exiled during the Revolution, and author of “Physiognomonia”, where he approached again the very old thesis that one can know the “inner man” by means of his physiognomy. His influence was immense on the great of the earth.
“I have seen” –Mirabeau describes– “Lavater’s letters to Kings under this protocol, ‘my dear, my very dear’, and I have seen the answer of those Kings admiring and obeying him, and paying respect for him, and even I have seen his followers revering him like a God on the earth”. Lavater describes a ceremony in the Church of the Enlightened, in Copenhagen, lead by Charles of Hesse, and by it one knows that the works in that lodge are not led by a Kabbalistic oracle but by a phosphorescent luminosity that, by conventional signs, responds “yes” or “no” to questions asked by the adepts, enabling them to make decisions inspired by a heavenly intervention. In 1754, Martinez de Pasqualis, a Rosicrucian, founds a particular Masonic rite: “Elus-Cohen” (“The Chosen Cohen”), whose most well-known lodges were those of the Philaleteans (alchemists), of the enlightened, in Avignon, and of the Academy of True Masons, in Montpellier.