Still Running Off at the Keyboard

IS MARTINISM A FORM OF CATHOLICISM, OR A FORM OF JUDAISM, OR A MELDING OF BOTH ?

Guy Patton has a paper online titled "Sauniere and the Occult". Sauniere, a Catholic priest whose parish at Rennes-le-Chateau figures in the Priory of Sion mystery, is said in this paper to have been a Martinist associated with both the Sacred Heart movement and the Synarchist movement. According to Patton there is a record of Sauniere's attendance at three meetings of a Martinist lodge in Lyons.

Here we are told of Martinez de Pasqually's book TRAITE DE LA REINTEGRATION, or the theory of Reintegration, the

central belief being that Man can return to the divine state that he was assumed to have possessed before the 'Fall'; that is, he can become closer to God. The system of ritual designed to achieve Reintegration employed a specific style of magic called "theurgy". Theurgy was the merging of personal Will with God's Will and was called in authentic Martinism "the Inner Way" or the "the Way of the Heart." It was believed that the creative power of Man was a gift from God, the ultimate Creator; and that Man can acquire the ability to will something to happen or to manifest. But as a Theurgist, the initiate would invoke God's Will to bring about a manifestation or happening. Thus Man becomes an agent of God's Will.

Saint-Martin rejected some of Pasqually's magical rites, which employed the intercession of spirit beings..."

We are told that the Martinism of Pasqually and Louis Claude de Saint Martin "underwent a major revival in the form of the new Ordre Martiniste" with a "Grand Council based in Paris [that] included such notable occultists as, Papus (Gerard Encausse), Stanislas de Guaita, Sedir, Maurice Barres, Georges Montieres and Josephin Peladan." And we are told that "Encausse spent a great deal of time...studying the Qabalah, the Tarot, the sciences of magic and alchemy, and the writings of Eliphas Levi."

We are told of the spiritual seances in which these men engaged, of the penetration into the Russian court, of the Protocals of the Elders of Zion and how they came to be associated with Judaism, and of de Guaita's world of Black Magicians, including the Abbe Boullan. We are told that "Peladan considered himself to be more Catholic than the apparently liberal voices in the Vatican" and that Peladan's patron...was the Count Antoine de la Rochefoucauld, who had been intimately linked with the appearance of a Sacred Heart vision" and subsequently "set up a review and appointed a known Satanist, Jules Bois, as editor" of his review.

Patton claims that

despite his reputation for sexual and other bizarre practices, Boullan is best known for his "Law of Sacred Regeneration", which is more or less identical to the theory of Reintegration found at the heart of Martinism. ...at their heart, Martinism, the Gnostic Church and the Luciferian tradition share common beliefs: beliefs that may not necessarily be in conflict with a loose interpretation of Catholic dogma...The conflict arose not in the teachings but in the methods.

Crossovers abound.

First of all, among the monks practicing interreligious dialogue is a fondness for heart doctrine. Is this the Martinist concept? Is this statement by Fr. Thomas Keating a Martinist concept?

Given that Kabbalah and Martinism go hand in hand, the Jewish mystical concept of "repairing the world", which is called "Tikkun" is similar to the Martinist concept of Reintegration. You can read kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria's concept of Tikkun here. It concerns man's obligation to save himself and his world.

The worldview of Kabbalah is not compatible with the worldview of Roman Catholicism, though it is apparently compatible with Gnostic Catholicism.

Leon Cristiani speaks of the Abbe Boullan in his book EVIDENCE OF SATAN IN THE MODERN WORLD. He writes:

This chapter will be devoted to some recent examples of Luciferianism, of which the first example is provided by the Abbe Boullan.

Jean-Antoine Boullan was born on 18th February 1824 at Saint Porchaire (Charente-Maritime), and died at Lyons on 4th January 1893. Little is known about his career, except that he was ordained priest round about 1848. He frequented occult writers and spent his life in circles composed, as he himself said in his 'Confession', of 'women who were either mad or demonic, according to whichever way you look at it.' One of these women was, incidentally, epileptic. In the same Confession he himself admits that he 'had no aptitude' for the spiritual direction of women.

It seems much more likely that he was directed by them. He was, however, intelligent. But he was governed by a curiosity verging on morbidity, and a sensuality bordering on obsession. He explined his feelings in the following way: 'My sins,' he writes, 'had a threefold source and origin and foundation: in the first placer, the weakness and fragility of my corrupt nature; the illusions of the Devil, all too effective in deceiving and leading me astray; and finally, my own form of understanding which led me into many things deserving of blame and reproof.'

Such a confession has all the hall-marks of sincerity....

He was summoned to appear before an ecclesiastical court in Rome, and was held in the prisons of the Holy Office, from which he was delivered by the Piedmontese invasion in 1870.

The Abbe Boullan condemned all who had attacked him, to the pains of Hell, either eternally or temporarily, to imprisonment in the Tower of Babel, and to the payment of his own debts. His conduct became so outrageous that even the followers of Vintras excluded him from their circle.

The story of this unfortunate, wayward priest, the victim of occultism and eroticism, would be merely one of fairly banal misfortune if he had not been part of a specific trend, and if there had been no aftermath.

His share in this trend sheds a distressing light on a whole world of sinister manifestations and intrigues. The occultism of Eliphas Levi, the 'illuminism' of Vintras, that reincarnation of Elijah, the Theosophy of Mme Blavatsky, the creations of Guaita, then of Sar Peladan, under the name of Rosicrucianism. Perhaps it even includes on a still larger scale, the mysterious rites of 'catholic' freemasonry--set up in opposition to the atheism of the French Grand Orient. But these are only a few of the esoteric doctrines and practices which ferment beneath the surface of modern society, and which can reasonably be said to be one of the forms of present-day satanism. (pp. l85-l87)