In the final decades of the eighteenth century and the opening years of the nineteenth, a remarkable circle of men - high-grade Masons, Martinist initiates, mystics, and princes - conducted an extraordinary correspondence on the deepest questions of esoteric life. Episodes of the Esoteric Life, 1780-1824 gathers the most significant of those letters, most of them previously unpublished, and presents them with the commentary of a scholar who was himself an initiate of the tradition he was documenting.
Gérard van Rijnberk (1875-1953) - Professor of Physiology at the University of Amsterdam, editor of the Dutch Journal of Medicine for thirty-three years, and Martinist initiate - spent decades in archives across Europe recovering the private correspondence of Jean-Baptiste Willermoz of Lyon and Prince Charles de Hesse-Cassel, together with letters exchanged among their contemporaries: Lavater, Jung-Stilling, the Comte de Saint-Germain, the founder of the Asiatic Brethren, and dozens of others. First published in a limited edition of one thousand copies in 1948, the work has long been recognized within French esoteric circles as an indispensable primary source. This is its first complete translation into English.
The book is in two parts. Part One examines the esoteric ideas and practices of the Willermoz-Hesse circle: the occult purpose of Freemasonry as understood from within; animal magnetism and somnambulistic lucidity; private oracles and the luminous oracle of Prince Charles; mediumistic and automatic writing; doctrines of the afterlife; the Kabbalistic doctrine of reincarnation as elaborated by Prince Charles; spirit conjurations; and the nine unpublished Doctrine notebooks of Willermoz, which represent the most complete expression of his Martinist theology. Part Two turns to three enigmatic figures whose lives intersected with the circle: the Marquise de la Croix, a convinced Spiritist half a century before Spiritism existed; Bernard Müller, the self-styled John the Baptist II whose chiliastic claims and alchemical pretensions occupied Prince Charles's correspondence for more than a decade; and the Count of Saint-Germain, whose final years at Eckernförde are here documented in greater detail than anywhere else in the existing literature.
Van Rijnberk writes throughout as a scientist who is also a believer - bringing to the material neither credulity nor dismissiveness, but the steady, measured attention of a man who understands both the world the documents come from and the world they describe. His work remains, more than seventy years after its first publication, the most intimate and authoritative account of the inner life of the late Enlightenment esoteric tradition - the tradition from which modern Martinism, the Rectified Scottish Rite, and the continuing practice of the Élus Coëns all directly descend.
Complete with a translator's introduction, fully translated biographical dictionary, and archival source list, this edition makes available for the first time to English-speaking students of Martinism and related traditions a work that has shaped the understanding of the tradition's own history for generations of French-speaking practitioners.
