The Elect Priests and the Beneficent Knights

Every history of the Martinist tradition begins with two men who are less often read than their famous pupil. The first, Martinez de Pasqually, gave the tradition its doctrine and its first order. The second, Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, gave that doctrine a house in which to survive the Revolution, and, as it happens, gave the Order of the Grail a precedent it did not know it had until Edmund Ashby pointed it out. This study is written from the shelves of the Marchetti-Vale Collection, which holds the first Grand Prior's notes on both men, and it owes much to her.

Martinez de Pasqually

Very little is known for certain about Martinez de Pasqually, and he seems to have preferred it so. He was born about 1727, probably in the south of France, of a family his disciples believed to be Spanish or Portuguese; his birthplace and his early life are disputed. By the 1750s he was travelling among the Masonic lodges of France with a patent he claimed had come to him from his father, and in the 1760s he began to gather, from among the lodges of Bordeaux, Lyon, Paris and other towns, an order of his own: the Order of Knight-Masons Elect Priests of the Universe, known after the Hebrew word for priest as the Élus Coëns. By 1767 it had a governing body, the Sovereign Tribunal, at Paris.

The Élus Coëns used the outward form of Freemasonry, and their first degrees resembled those of the ordinary lodges. But they were not, in their purpose, a Masonic society. Their higher degrees led to a final class, the Réau-Croix, in which the member undertook ceremonial operations of great complexity, carried out alone or with a few companions at certain seasons, and especially about the equinoxes: the tracing of circles, the lighting of lights, the recitation of prayers and psalms and holy names, with fasting and confession beforehand. The purpose of these operations was to enter into communion with the good spirits that serve God, to drive back the influence of the fallen ones, and to receive signs, which the Élus called passes, that the operation had been accepted. Martinez required of his members the regular practice of their religion, which for most of them was Roman Catholic, and the order was in many ways more devout than daring.

In 1772 Martinez sailed to the island of Saint-Domingue to attend to a family inheritance. He died at Port-au-Prince on the twentieth of September, 1774. Without him the order lost its direction. Its temples quarrelled, dwindled and fell silent over the following decades, and the last member known to have been received in the original order is said to have died in 1868.

The Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings

Martinez left one book, and did not finish it. The Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings was written in the early 1770s, circulated in manuscript among the senior members of the order, and was not printed until 1899. It takes the form of a commentary on the first books of the Bible, and it is difficult reading: the author was not writing in his first language, and he was in a hurry. But its doctrine is the foundation of everything that was later called Martinism, and it can be summarised.

In the beginning, God emanated spiritual beings, free and glorious, to serve and to reflect him. Some of them, by their own will, turned from him; the Treatise calls this the prevarication. The material world was then made, not as a punishment but as a limit, to contain the rebellion and to give it bounds. Into this situation God emanated the first Man, Adam, as a spirit of great dignity, clothed in a body of glory, with the office of holding the fallen spirits in check and of reconciling them. But Adam too prevaricated. He sought to create by his own will, as God creates, and in doing so he fell from his first estate into a body of gross matter, and from being the minister of the universe became its prisoner. The history of the patriarchs and prophets in the Treatise is the history of the attempts of fallen humanity to recover its office, attempts which are fulfilled only in the coming of the one whom Martinez calls the Repairer. Reintegration is the restoration of every being to its first property, virtue and power: of Man to his first estate, and through Man, at the end, of all things.

The Order does not teach the Treatise in its detail, and few of its members read it. But the reader who knows the page on the Martinist Stream will recognise its shape there: that we are not what we were made to be, that we know it, and that the knowing is the beginning of the return. The Order's description of the fall as an inversion of the proper order of body, soul and spirit is a later and simpler way of saying what Martinez said in the language of his time.

A question in the oratory

Among the young men whom Martinez received into his order was an army officer named Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, who became his secretary about 1771 and whose life is the subject of the fourth study in this series. Saint-Martin assisted at the operations and admired his master to the end of his life. But the story is told, on Saint-Martin's own authority, that he once asked Martinez whether all this apparatus was truly needed in order to reach God, and that Martinez answered that one must make do with what one has. The question has never been fully answered, and the answer has never been fully refused. It divides the Martinist tradition still: between those who hold that the theurgy of the Élus Coëns is the heart of the matter, and those who hold, with Saint-Martin, that the heart is the heart of the matter. The Order stands with the second. It does not practise the operations of the Élus Coëns and has never done so.

Jean-Baptiste Willermoz

The second of the two men was in almost every way unlike the first. Jean-Baptiste Willermoz was born in Lyon in 1730, the son of a merchant, and became a prosperous merchant of silk. He was made a Freemason at twenty and was soon the Master of a lodge of his own. He was received among the Élus Coëns in 1767 and rose to the highest class of the order and to one of its senior offices, and he remained for the rest of his long life convinced of the truth of Martinez's doctrine. Where Martinez was a visionary, Willermoz was an administrator, and it was as an administrator that he preserved what he had received.

In the 1770s Willermoz and his lodge joined the Strict Observance, a German Masonic system which taught that Freemasonry was the secret continuation of the medieval Knights Templar, and which was governed, so its members were told, by unknown superiors whose names could not be revealed. The superiors never appeared, and the system was in difficulties. At a convention of its French provinces held at Lyon in 1778, Willermoz rectified it. The knightly degrees at its summit were renamed the Beneficent Knights of the Holy City, and were preceded by a degree of Squire Novice. Above them Willermoz set a secret class, the Profession, in whose instructions the doctrine of the Treatise was taught to a few, without the operations.

Wilhelmsbad, 1782

Four years later a general convention of the Strict Observance met at Wilhelmsbad, near Hanau, to decide the future of the system. Willermoz carried the day. The convention adopted the rectified system, and it declared, in effect, that the knights of the order were not the historical heirs of the Templars and should no longer claim to be. They were to be spiritual knights, bound to beneficence and to the Christian life, whose chivalry consisted in what they did and not in whom they descended from. The French Revolution scattered the lodges of the rite in France, but it was preserved in Switzerland, returned to France in the twentieth century, and is still worked in a number of countries under the name of the Rectified Scottish Rite.

What the Order owes them

The Order owes to Martinez de Pasqually, by way of Saint-Martin, its anthropology and its central word. Reintegration is his word, and the doctrine that the human being fell from a first estate of glory, and may by long and lawful work be restored to it, is his doctrine, though the Order teaches it in the language of the Way of the Heart rather than of the oratory.

It owes to Willermoz something less obvious. When the founders were drafting the Charter in 1987, there was a discussion, recorded in the Ashby papers, about whether an order that called its members knights must say something about the orders of knighthood of the past. Ashby's answer was Wilhelmsbad. The Beneficent Knights had shown, two centuries before, that an initiatic knighthood could renounce every claim to historical descent and lose nothing by it. The ninth article of the Charter, which says that the Order "claims no lineage from any order of knighthood of former ages, and its chivalry is a chivalry of the soul," is the echo of that decision. The Order did not take its degrees of Squire and Knight from Willermoz; they are the ordinary steps of medieval knighthood, and every romance of the Grail uses them. But it is glad of the precedent.

What the Order does not take from either man should also be said. It does not practise the theurgic operations of the Élus Coëns. It does not require or reward Masonic membership. It teaches no legend of Templar descent. It admits women on equal terms in every degree and office, as its Charter requires. And it has never held that the salvation of anyone depends upon receiving its ceremonies, since, as Saint-Martin was to teach, the true initiator is God.