The Unknown Superiors

The Grand Chancellor keeps the Rolls of the Order, and the keeper of a roll acquires, over the years, a professional interest in lists of names: who received whom, when, and on whose word. The history of Martinism after the death of Saint-Martin is very largely a history of such lists. Some of them are well attested. Some of them are not. All of them were kept by people who believed that something precious had been handed to them and that it was their duty to hand it on. This study tells how the Martinist Order came to be founded in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century, how it divided after the death of its founder, and why the Order of the Grail, which venerates Saint-Martin and has received much from his way, has never sought a place in any of its chains.

After Saint-Martin

When Saint-Martin died in 1803 he left books, letters and friends, and no institution. His friends went on reading him and one another, in France, in Switzerland, in Germany and above all in Russia, where a Russian prince who had known him in Paris is said to have carried his teaching home, and where it mingled with the Rosicrucian circle gathered in Moscow around the publisher Nikolai Novikov, until the Empress Catherine imprisoned Novikov in 1792 and scattered his friends. In France the name Martinist was used loosely and confusingly for the followers of Martinez de Pasqually and of Saint-Martin alike, as it had been even in their lifetimes. The last temples of the Élus Coëns fell silent. The Rectified lodges of Willermoz survived in Switzerland. And a few families, it was later said, kept a quiet tradition of reading and prayer that went back to Saint-Martin's circle, and passed it on by word of mouth.

Paris in the 1880s

Paris in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was full of seekers. The Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875, had turned the eyes of many Europeans toward India and Tibet, and there was a reaction, especially in France, in favour of a Western and Christian esotericism. Its leading figure was a young man named Gérard Encausse, born in 1865 at La Coruña in Spain to a Spanish mother and a French father, and raised in Paris. As a medical student he spent his free hours in the national library reading the Kabbalah, the Tarot, alchemy and the works of the French occultist Éliphas Lévi, and he took from one of Lévi's books the name of an ancient genius of healing, Papus, which means physician. Under that name he wrote some dozens of books and founded, in 1888, a monthly review called L'Initiation.

Papus said that he had received the Martinist initiation in 1882 from Henri Delaage, a writer on mystical subjects who died that same year, and whose maternal grandfather was said to have received it from Saint-Martin himself. In 1888 he met another young man, Augustin Chaboseau, who told him that he too had received such an initiation, in 1886, from his aunt, Amélie de Boisse-Mortemart, by a different line that also led back to Saint-Martin. The two young men exchanged what they had received, in order, as they said, to consolidate their lines, and resolved to found an order.

The Supreme Council of 1891

The first announcement of the Martinist Order appeared in L'Initiation in 1889, and in 1891 it was placed under a Supreme Council of twelve, with Papus as its president. Among its members were Chaboseau, the poet Stanislas de Guaita, the young Paul Sédir, the novelist Maurice Barrès and Joséphin Péladan. The same circle had founded, in 1888, the Kabbalistic Order of the Rose-Cross, which was intended as a kind of inner school beyond the Martinist degrees. The Martinist Order worked three degrees, Associate, Initiate and Unknown Superior, and it described itself as an order of Christian and spiritual knighthood. Papus wrote that it was above all "a school of moral knighthood," which sought to develop the spirituality of its members by study, by devotion and by mutual help.

The Order spread with remarkable speed. Its early rituals describe the method in a homely image: the Order grows as a living tissue grows, by the division of cells, each cell in time becoming the mother of others. Any member who had received the degree of Unknown Superior might gather a small group and pass it on. Within a decade there were groups in Belgium, Italy, Switzerland, Spain, Russia and the Americas. A member of this Order will notice that the image of the cell is not far from our own conviction that an Oratory may be formed wherever three can gather. The difference, as will appear, lies in what is handed on.

The chains examined

The chains of names on which the Martinist Order rested were published, and have been studied by its friends and its critics ever since. Chaboseau's runs from Saint-Martin through an abbé who died in 1820 and four further persons to his aunt and to himself. Papus's runs from Saint-Martin to the chemist Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Delaage's grandfather, and from Chaptal to Delaage. But Chaptal died in 1832, when Delaage was seven, and the published chain itself leaves the link between them unnamed. No document has ever been found to show that Saint-Martin led or founded an order of any kind, and all statements to the contrary rest, in the end, on the word of Papus.

The two founders were, it seems, more candid about this than some of their successors. Chaboseau's son found among his father's papers a note describing his initiation as the oral transmission of a particular teaching and of a certain understanding of the laws of the universe and of the spiritual life, which in no case could be regarded as an initiation in ritual form. Papus is reported to have said that what he received from Delaage amounted to a few letters and a few points. Historians of the movement, some of them Martinists themselves, have concluded that the ritual Order of 1891 was a new creation, inspired by Saint-Martin, drawing on the Élus Coëns, on the Rectified Rite and on the Masonic rites of the day, and resting on a personal transmission that may have been real but was certainly slender.

I do not write this to diminish Papus, whom I admire. To exchange initiations is a generous act. It does not lengthen either chain, but it binds two people in a common purpose, and that is no small thing. And the slenderness of the chain did not make what Papus built unreal. Thousands of people found in the Martinist Order a school of prayer and of conduct that changed their lives, and many still do.

The good doctor

It is worth remembering, too, how Papus lived. In the poor district of Paris where he practised he was known as the good doctor, because he treated those who could not pay without asking them to. When war came in 1914 he volunteered, although he was nearly fifty, and served as a medical officer with an ambulance at the front. There he fell seriously ill, and he died on the twenty-fifth of October, 1916, in the hospital of La Charité in Paris, where he had begun his career as a physician. Whatever may be said about his lists of names, the Fame of the Rose Cross asked its brethren to heal the sick without payment, and Papus did.

Division

With Papus died the unity of his Order. His successor lived only two years. Those who came after disagreed about almost everything: whether members must be Freemasons, whether women might be received, which of several claimants was the lawful head, which documents were authentic. Rival bodies formed in Paris and in Lyon, and one took up the political dreams of a writer who had imagined Europe governed by a secret council of initiates. In 1931 three surviving members of the Supreme Council of 1891 attempted to restore the Order as they had first known it. The Second World War fell upon all of them alike: the occupying powers suppressed every such society, Martinists died in the camps, and at Lyon the head of one branch was taken from his house and shot in 1944.

Since the war the Martinist bodies have multiplied. There are now a great many of them in many countries, under many names, each with its own chain of transmission, some cooperating, some not. Many of them are sincere and serious, and some of their members have written to this Order over the years with great courtesy. The Order makes no judgment among them and is affiliated with none of them.

Why the Order keeps no chain

Helene Marchetti-Vale received the Martinist work in her twenties, within one of the historic bodies of the Tradition, and taught it for many years before she came to Harrowmere. When the founders drafted the Charter in 1987 she was asked whether the Order should seek a Martinist filiation, so that its Knights and Dames might be called Unknown Superiors in the eyes of the Martinist world. Her answer, recorded in the Rolls, was that she had brought to the Order the Way of the Heart and not a pedigree, and that if Saint-Martin was right, the only initiator who mattered was God, who keeps no lists. The Charter accordingly claims for the Order nothing but what its Wardens received and passed on, and the Order has never conferred the Martinist degrees or used their titles.

The ideal of the Unknown Superior the Order does keep, in its own fashion: as the ideal of the unknown servant, who guides and helps without being known, and who would be embarrassed to be called superior to anyone. The page on the Martinist Stream describes it. As for chains, the Rolls of this Order record promises, not pedigrees. A lineage is a chain of hands, and hands may fail. A Rule is a chain of days, and each day it may be taken up again.