Abstract
This article provides an in-depth study of two occultist journals published in France at the turn of the twentieth century, namely, La Voie and La Gnose. Although ultimately commercially unsuccessful, both journals proved to be very important in the development of the influential esotericist René Guénon (1886–1951). Through a detailed analysis of all issues, it is shown how both journals initiated their publication as house organs of a neo-Gnostic organisation (the Gnostic Church of France), but soon moved to “Eastern” themes such as East Asian religions or Islam. In conclusion, it is argued that the history of these two journals is evidence of the “logic of bricolage” employed by occultists in their quest for religious meaning in the age of European Colonialism.
1 Introduction
This article explores the evolution of two publications of the Parisian occult milieu: La Voie (The Path) and its successor La Gnose (Gnosis). As we will see in the following sections, both were largely two unsuccessful enterprises. Unlike other contemporary (and competing) journals, such as L’Initiation (Initiation) or Le Voile d’Isis (The Veil of Isis), which achieved a fairly large circulation for several decades, La Voie and La Gnose were circulated among a limited group of readers and, probably due to lack of readership, they did not survive beyond their third year of publication. This could lead one to doubt the value of an in-depth analysis of their history and evolution. However, I argue that La Voie and La Gnose represent an ideal sample for the study of the evolution of (a strand of) the French occult milieu. This is true for three reasons.
First of all, their short existence and the relatively small number of contributors to both journals create a relatively homogeneous field of inquiry. In addition, chronologically wise, the two periodicals were published in a period (La Voie 1904–1907; La Gnose 1909–1912) that was crucial in the evolution of French religious life. In 1905, the French parliament rectified the Law on the Separation of Churches and State (Loi du 9 décembre 1905 concernant la séparation des Églises et de l’État), officially thereby sanctioning state secularism and allowing every religious group (including the Gnostics studied here) to be registered as a legitimate religious association.
More importantly for that subset of French religious society represented by occultisme,1 La Voie and La Gnose were published after and before 1908, respectively. That year represented a threshold of the occult milieu, with many of its protagonists meeting in Paris at an international conference under the heading Congrès et Convent de la Maçonnerie spiritualiste (Congress and Convention of Spiritualist Masonry). As we will see in the next sections, the Congress was largely responsible for events that caused both the end of La Voie and the beginning of La Gnose.
Lastly, if not successful per se, the characters and ideas circulated in these two journals were of great importance for the creation of a later intellectual movement (Traditionalism) that enjoyed a better fortune in the decades following the events studied here.
For all these reasons, this article is conceived as a “microhistory of ideas.” Here, “microhistory” (microstoria) refers to an approach advanced by a group of Italian scholars, most notably Carlo Ginzburg (b. 1939) and Carlo Poni (b. 1927), at the end of the 1970s.2 It is described as “the intensive historical investigation of a relatively well-defined smaller object” (Magnússon and Szijártó 2013: 14). These small objects are not studied as minute erudite curiosities but as means to answer great historical questions, since “any social structure is the result of interaction and of numerous individual strategies, a fabric that can only be reconstituted from close observation” (Ginzburg 1993: 33). Also, microhistory stresses the importance of historical actors’ agency. In this sense, the choices made by the figures studied in this article are interesting regardless of the success (or lack thereof) they enjoyed. Capturing their experience is significant on two different levels. On the one hand, by zooming in on a small community of intellectuals, we can learn something about the larger trends of religious culture of Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. On the other hand, a microscale allows scholars to study people who lived in the past as active and conscious historical actors and not as mere “puppets on the hands of great underlying forces of history” (Magnússon and Szijártó 2013: 14).
All these concerns are going to be addressed in the conclusions. But first, the facts.
2 Gnostic Feuds
In November 1907, an anonymous contributor to an important French literary journal, Le Mercure de France, reviewed “three books of unequal value and importance recently published” (Anonymous 1907b: 321). All these works discussed a topic that at the beginning of the twentieth century was becoming increasingly popular, that is, Gnosticism. The anonymous reviewer was especially interested in two out of the three books reviewed “because of their opposition and official character” (ibid.) and their “official character” is already clear from a cursory look at the front pages of these publications. The first, Les enseignements secrets de la Gnose (The Secret Teachings of Gnosis), was authored by two Gnostic bishops: “Tau Théophane” of Versailles and “Tau Simon, Bishop of Tire and the Orient.” Also, the book contained “the imprimatur of Synésius, patriarch of the Gnostic Church of France” (ibid.). The second publication sounded even more official with the title Le Catéchisme gnostique à l’usage des fidèles de l’Église catholique gnostique (The Gnostic Catechism for the use of the faithful of the Gnostic Catholic Church) written by “His Episcopal Grace Johannès Bricaud, bishop-primate of the Gnostic Catholic Church” (ibid.).
The reviewer argued that these publications should be understood as manifestos for the two Gnostic organisations, about which he proves to be well informed. Le Mercure de France’s reader learned that “Mr. Bricaud has recently separated from the Church of Synésius and has founded a new Gnostic Church, to which he added the qualifier of Catholic” and that “there have been bittersweet words exchanged” between the Catholic Gnostic Church “and La Voie, the official organ of the Gnostic Church of France” (Anonymous 1907b: 321).
As stated in the Introduction, La Voie is the first of the two publications studied in this article. For now, it is worth noticing that there are at least two reasons to be puzzled about by the statement that, in November 1907, La Voie was “the official organ of the Gnostic Church of France.” Firstly, La Voie is typically considered by scholars as “notable especially for its emphasis on the occultism of the Far East (the title of the journal is a translation of ‘Dao’) and Islam” (Deveney 2020: 1). Secondly, at the time Le Mercure de France published the aforementioned review (November 1907), La Voie had not been published for half a year.3 In order to both understand how and why a ceased journal whose title alluded to the dào
The story of nineteenth-century French neo-Gnosticism began one night in 1888 when Jules Doinel (1842–1902), a French archivist involved with the occult milieu, had a vision of what he identified as the “Aeon Jesus,” who ordered him to establish a new Gnostic Church. Following this instruction, further detailed in a series of séances, Doinel founded L’Église Gnostique de France (The Gnostic Church of France) in 1890, and undertook the title “Bishop of Montségur” and “Patriarch” under the name “Tau Valentinus II.”4 Initially, the Gnostic Church largely overlapped with a larger organisation of the Parisian Occult milieu, the Martinist Order (L’Ordre Martiniste) founded by Papus (Gérard Encausse; 1865–1916).5 At the end of two turbulent years that began in 1894 with Doinel’s (temporary) abjuration of Gnosticism and his return to Catholicism,6 we find a new patriarch, the aforementioned Synésius (born Léonce Fabre des Essarts; 1848–1917), who started a reorganisation of the church, which was finally registered as a religious association on December 7, 1906. Under Synésius’ leadership, the Gnostic church gradually distanced itself from the Papusian milieu, abandoning the Martinist house organ L’Initiation in favour of La Voie – which was chosen, as seen above, as the Église Gnostique de France’s new official publication.7
3 La Voie: Elitism and Perennialism
La Voie. La Revue mensuelle de Haute Science (The Path: The Monthly Journal of High Science) appeared for the first time in April 1904. It was published on the fifteenth of each month in small (13 × 21.5 cm) and relatively inexpensive (one Franc) volumes of about one hundred pages each. This journal was the brainchild of Albert de Pouvourville (better known as “Matgioi”; 1861–1939, see Marino 2024a). According to a contemporary, de Pouvourville devoted to La Voie “the best moments of his too-short free time, which he still likes to consider as the most pleasantly idealistic effort that he has been able to carry out in these last years” (Champrenaud 1910: 35).
Poet, soldier, novelist, colonial activist as well as an active member of the Parisian occult milieu, de Pouvourville was also a Gnostic bishop (“Tau Simon: Bishop of Tyre and the Orient”) and, as editor of La Voie, he oversaw the journal’s general orientation. In addition to his editorial role, he contributed to La Voie as an important author: every issue contains at least one work by de Pouvourville as well as several updates about his public achievements.
It has to be noted that most of La Voie’s contributors were not necessarily united by a set of shared interests, but rather by their common relationship with de Pouvourville. For this reason, the journal contained articles about an incredibly vast array of topics: conservative Catholics defending the primacy of the Church; Kabbalists; Buddhists; alchemists; colonial veterans teaching socio-religious theories about Africa; mathematicians discussing geometry problems; authors advocating for the health benefits of hashish and opium; others proposing to use psychic sciences to solve issues related to aviation. Several pages were dedicated to the inevitable feuds with other occultist groups, whereas others concerned with poetry or literature. La Voie even hosted a bulletin financier (financial newsletter) that informed the occultists of the latest trends in the financial markets.8 Also, the group organised Les diners de la Voie (La Voie’s dinners), a monthly evening meeting in a Parisian restaurant reserved for the journal’s collaborators and subscribers.
The overall tone of the publication is set in the first two issues which contain a Programme (April 1904) and a note titled À nos lecteurs (To Our Readers) which explain the perennialist philosophy underlying the choice of uniting such diverse topics in a single publication. True to the journal’s motto “all doctrines are one,”9 La Voie’s contributors emphatically stated that they
firmly believe that the truth is One. […] All systems, all doctrines are necessarily summarised in a single system, a single doctrine. Also, the apparently contradictory affirmations which constitute these doctrines, differ from each other only by differences of perception, feeling, terminologies, and logic, due to the difference in race, temperaments, period, and latitude (Anonymous 1904a: 1).10
Therefore, the goal of the journal was to strip all doctrines of their “contingencies and imperfections” and reveal “the true path” made up by “the synthesis of the different paths” (Anonymous 1904a: 1).
This process of “purification” is not something accessible to everyone, and, together with perennialism, La Voie maintained a strongly elitist stance. The desired synthesis could be operated “in the readers’ spirit,” but La Voie chose to address “the most qualified minds” (Anonymous 1904a: 2) because
[the] tradition advises us to only address an elite; and we must stress that, for us, the quality (to which solely we are attached) replaces the quantity (which is indifferent to us and would hamper us) (ibid.: 3).11
The idea of addressing only a small elite was a rhetorically convenient (and fairly common) tool in the occult milieu, but, unfortunately for La Voie’s proponents, ended up becoming a reality. Small elites are good for seekers of “secret knowledge” but not for the commercial success of a journal, and La Voie was discontinued exactly three years after its birth, in May 1907. Its termination appears to have occurred abruptly, and the last issue of the journal does not contain any hint of an imminent end of further publications.
It is commonly believed that the end of La Voie occurred because of a lack of subscribers (Perlector 1990: 114). This is highly probable since it was far from uncommon for journals to cease publication due to financial issues. However, the concluding section of La Voie’s last issue contains an interesting detail that has been overlooked so far. It is a Communiqué (Statement) that announced the schism in the Gnostic Church mentioned in the previous section (the “bittersweet words” between Bricaud and La Voie). Page 90 of La Voie’s last issue (no. 36) began by laconically stating that
Mr. Joanny Bricaud – formerly Johannès – founded, in Lyon, under the extraordinary name Gnostic Catholic Church, a group of which he is undoubtedly the inspiration and protagonist. Beforehand, Mr. Joanny Bricaud had sent to the patriarch of the Gnostic Church of France his resignation from the ranks and functions with which he had been previously invested (Anonymous 1907a: 90).12
The tone of the Statement became gradually more polemical, criticising
the singular pretension of people who dream of reconciling modern Catholicism and Gnosis, their only excuse, no doubt, being that they are equally ignorant of Gnosis and Catholicism (Anonymous 1907a: 90).13
By the end of the page, the Communiqué assumes the tone of an invective against Bricaud: “it is regrettable to see how an unjustified vanity could have led a disciple of Gnostic sciences to divert the little he had been taught to selfish aims” (Anonymous 1907a: 91). Even more interestingly, the last few lines of the text seem to contain a veiled criticism of the leadership of the Gnostic Church of France (of which, it should be remembered, La Voie was the official organ) “who prematurely bestowed upon him [Bricaud] functions beyond his merits and character” (ibid.).
The statement is not signed, but it was obviously written by its editor. Hence, in addition to the disappointment for Bricaud’s desertion, it suggests de Pouvourville’s growing dissatisfaction with Gnosticism more broadly, including the organisation to which he belonged.
4 La Voie: from Gnosis to the Dao
As noted above, La Voie discussed a vast array of topics. Most of them can be classified as religious/philosophical but a non-negligible number of articles dealt with topics that we could define as “scientific.” The latter included contributions such as Essai sur l’hyperespace (Essay about Hyperspace) (Cezard 1904), La similitude et les espaces non euclidiens (Similarity and non-Euclidean Spaces) (Warrain 1906), and Médecine synthétique (Synthetic Medicine) (Clavenad 1906). However, for the scope of this article, I will focus my attention on the former, that is, the articles dealing with religious/philosophical issues. In particular, it is interesting to notice the relevance of Gnostic (or, more generally, Christian) themes to the house organ of L’Église Gnostique de France. Gnosticism was the most discussed topic in La Voie’s first issue (April 1904), with half of the articles (four out of eight) concerned with themes related to the Gnostic Church. They were mostly written by members of the Gnostic Church and signed with their episcopal names, starting from Patriarch Synésius who introduced to readers Le culte gnostique (The Gnostic Liturgy) and followed by a sort of commentary titled La voie de la sagesse (The Way of Wisdom) by an anonymous “R.A.M.” In addition to these “doctrinal” entries, La Voie also studied the history of Gnosticism, in articles such as Histoire d’une eglise (History of a Church) by Johannes and La trinité Alexandrine dans Valentin (The Alexandrian Trinity according to Valentin) by Sophronius (Louis-Sophrone Fugairon; 1846–?), who argued that modern Gnosticism can only be understood through the study of the ancient Gnostics. Sophronius also informed La Voie’s readers that “any person of either sex aged at least 21 can be received into Gnosticism by sending a request of initiation to the secretary general of the Gnostic Church in rue Pestalozzi 3, Paris” (Sophronius 1904: 81).
The second issue was similar in its thematic composition to the first one, with the most discussed topic being, once more, Christianity (three out of nine articles). A noticeable difference is the inclusion of different forms of Christianity, often studied comparatively, such as in Gnosticisme, Catholicisme et Protestantisme (Gnosticism, Catholicism, and Protestantism) by an otherwise unidentified “Enorphos” who wanted to understand “which of the three religions should be chosen by […] someone who wants to be a man of his time” (Enorphos 1904a: 152). The answer was, unsurprisingly, Gnosticism.14
If the first two issues of La Voie were what one may expect from the official organ of the Gnostic Church of France, the publication showed some signs of change from Number 3 onwards (June 1904). Not everything was changed, and two articles continued to discuss Gnostic themes. “Enorphos” persisted in his effort to demonstrate the superiority of Gnostics over modern secularists (referred in the article as libre-penseurs [freethinkers]) (Enorphos 1904b). Also, another anonymous contributor unveiled the secrets of Vintrasism,15 “a Gnosis which reveals certain mysteries of the higher Cosmos and sheds completely new and very profound views on the economy and esotericism of Christianity” (Des Esseintes 1904: 262). However, for the first time in La Voie’s existence, Gnosticism was no longer the most discussed topic in the journal, and it was matched by articles about East Asian religions. The June 1904 issue included an article on the Chinese Yìjīng
In addition to this quantitative decrease, Christianity was progressively compared to Asian religions rather than being studied on its own. In some cases, the comparison showed the affinity between “Western” and “Eastern” traditions,16 but, more often, the confrontation showed the superiority of “the Orient” over Christianity. This tendency was inaugurated as early as September 1904 with La Gnose ancienne et moderne (Ancient and Modern Gnosis), where “Gnosis” refers to the “universal tradition” (Johannès 1904: 541), and the ancient Gnostics where those who “captured all the systems of philosophy and all that China, India, Persia, Egypt and Greece had acquired in the field of science,” with their Christianity being simply “a supplement to their Gnosis (complément de la Gnose), that is to say, to the universal tradition” (ibid.: 542). Although these “ancient Gnostics” were defeated by those Christians who exclusively relied on the Bible, “modern Gnostics” (including the author) know the “modest place of the Hebrew Bible” and have rediscovered “the sacred books of the peoples of the East” owing to the work of contemporary scholars (ibid.).
The proportion of articles about Christianity and Eastern religions in La Voie
Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-01501014
This new place occupied by Christianity in La Voie was most evident in a series of articles published between May 1905 and February 1906 titled Dialogue des vivants (Dialogues of the Living) (LOR and LOC 1905). Therein, two contributors discussed “some aspects of the General Doctrine, common to the Western and the Eastern Tradition, and will show them coming from a unique primordial Wisdom, logical emanation of the Truth” (Rédaction 1905: 669). De Pouvourville (under his “Matgioi” persona) was chosen as the representative of the “Eastern Tradition,” whereas the role of defender of the “Western Tradition” was assigned to the “Western esotericist” Albert Jounet (1860–1926).17 As expected in a perennialist journal like La Voie, the two conversing authors agreed on almost everything. However, in order to achieve this result, Jounet presented a kind of “Western tradition” that considerably deviated from mainstream Christianity and conveniently coincided with the “Oriental tradition” embodied by Matgioi,18 who concluded that the Orientals had already reached the end of the spiritual path and paternalistically told his western friend: “we await you fraternally at the goal” (LOR and LOC 1905: 50).
5 La Voie’s Orient
The confidence displayed by Matgioi in his dialogue with Jounet is confirmed in the increasing relevance given by the editors of La Voie to “oriental” topics. This was not uncommon in the occult milieu. However, as noted above, La Voie stood out from its contemporary publications with its emphasis on East Asian religions. This choice was surely inspired by de Pouvourville, who, because of his experience as a colonial official in French Indochina, contributed in several ways to the diffusion of Chinese and Vietnamese themes in occultist circles. In addition to the aforementioned Dialogue des vivants, de Pouvourville discussed East Asia in virtually every issue of La Voie and his contributions were numerous and diverse. First of all, the chapters of his two most influential books about the “Far Eastern Tradition,” La Voie Métaphysique (The Metaphysical Path) and La Voie Rationelle (The Rational Path), were initially published in La Voie as stand-alone articles, and eventually printed as volumes of the book series La Bibliothèque de La Voie, published by the same publisher of the journal, Lucien Bodin (de Pouvourville 1905; 1907). In addition, de Pouvourville curated two series, Correspondance d’Extrême-Orient (Correspondence from the Far East) and Lettre de Chine (Letter from China), in which, borrowing the identity of one of his Vietnamese friends (“Nguyen Van Cang”), proposed a very fanciful representation of Asia (Marino 2024b). Lastly, with the semi-transparent pseudonym “Albert Puyoo,” he wrote orientalist poems (Laude 1990).
De Pouvourville was by no means the only La Voie author interested in East Asia, but other protagonists of French colonialism contributed to the journal. More importantly, all colonial officials writing on La Voie shared a common characteristic: they sharply criticised the Eurocentric (and ethnocentric) perspective of mainstream colonialism. Such was the case of Jules Regnault (1873–1962). Stationed in the province of Tonkin (northern Vietnam) as a surgeon, later professor of anatomy and clinician, and amateur hypnotist, Regnault rejected both European claims of superiority and easy orientalist enthusiasm (Ackerman 1996). In his main work, he wrote:
One must not be an annamophile or sinophile to the point of seeing wonders where there are none; but we must not, either, be too full of our European self-importance, imagining that everything that is done differently from us is necessarily bad. […] This last error has been so common among many superficial observers that the public in Europe still imagines the Chinese as big magots and imagines that, to guess what is being done in China, it is enough to think of the opposite of what is done in Paris (Regnault 1902: viii–ix).19
Regnault contributed to La Voie on two occasions. In October 1905, with a thirty-eight-page long piece about Hypnose, Hystérie et Sorcellerie en Indochine (Hypnosis, Hysteria, and Witchcraft in Indochina) and in July/August 1906 with Les dragons dans l’art en Extrême-Orient (Dragons in the Far-Eastern Art). Both contributions were erudite and well-documented, a testament to the intellectual quality of many French colonial savants.
Another colonial actor who participated in La Voie was Jules Silvestre (1841–1918), who, after a brilliant military career in Indochina, became the Director of Civil and Political Affairs of Tonkin between 1884 and 1886 (Dubreuil 1998).20 In Une législation métaphysique (A Metaphysical Legislation; 1904), Les Symboles et les origins (Symbols and Origins; 1905), and Les origines occultes des états asiatiques (The Occult Origin of Asian States; 1906), Silvestre described the Chinese imperial organisation as dominated by rituals deduced from the metaphysical principles of its religion.
China and Indochina were mainly presented by authors who had a direct experience of East Asia due to their experience as colonial officials, and the level of these contributions remained fairly high and in line with the savoir colonial of the time. A certain respect towards scholarship is also evident in Le Problème des concordances entre le Bouddhisme et le Christianisme. The author, a certain Léon Revel, celebrated the “new science” of comparativism as “the most full of surprises, the most versatile and the most defining of individual and collective human life” (Revel 1905: 19). He believed that a morphological comparison between the lives and teachings of Jesus and Buddha could help answer “the deep call of the human heart to which the Sages of the East seem to respond” represented by the pursuit of “a universal religious ideal and the quest for the essential substance of Religion” (ibid.: 24).
Not all “Oriental” authors were able to maintain their contributions to the relatively high scholarly standards of the authors mentioned so far. For example, a certain “D.S.N.D. Brahmine”21 wrote two long and chaotic articles about Hinduism (1905; 1906) that have been critisised by a commentator as written “not only in an approximate and adventurous French that is very reminiscent of the pidgin-English […] but also with a most bizarre syntax and logical order” (Perlector 1990: 249).
A last interesting aspect about La Voie and “Oriental religions” is the attention given to Islam. Albeit incomparable to the relevance given to China or India, Islam was also brought to the attention of La Voie’s readers, who were informed about a project for the construction of the first mosque in Paris (Anonymous 1905: 91) and the forthcoming French translation of a collection of Hadith (Anonymous 1906: 94).22 Both projects were promoted by another prominent member of French colonialism, the Egyptian ʿAli Zaky Bey,23 who had also campaigned for the recognition of the right of French Muslims to make the pilgrimage to Mecca (Chantre 2016; Zaky Bey 1904).
In the three years of La Voie’s existence, Islam was the least studied of the great Eastern religions. However, this was soon to change with La Voie’s spiritual successor: La Gnose.
6 La Gnose
As noted, La Voie suddenly stopped being published in 1907 with a Communiqué denouncing Bricaud’s defection. This choice has to be understood as Papus’ attempt to keep neo-Gnosticism under his influence after Synésius’s church has found in La Voie a non-Martinist platform. For this reason, Papus decided to establish a new Gnostic organisation alternative to the Église Gnostique de France, namely, The Catholic Gnostic Church (Église Catholique Gnostique), guided by “Jean II” (Bricaud), one of the most important Gnostic contributors of La Voie.
The tension between the two Gnostic organisations (as seen above, hinted in 1907 by the Le Mercure de France’s anonymous reviewer) reached its peak during the 1908 Spiritualist and Masonic Congress, a summit organised by Papus with the intent of establishing an international federation of esoteric and masonic rites and orders. However, contrary to the intentions of its proponents, the Masonic Congress ended up emphasising the distance between the different orientations of the Occult Paris, and, with regard to French Gnosticism, this event sharpened the distance between the two churches. In particular, it seems that Patriarch Synésius saw in the Papusian Congress an occasion for recruiting discontent Martinists. Synésius’ scouting bore fruit and some brilliant Martinists joined his Church. The group soon founded La Gnose.
The most notable new recruit, the twenty-two-year-old René Guénon (now “Tau Palingénius, bishop of Alexandria”; 1886–1951), was designated as the editor of the new publication. Guénon was considered by many as a sort of rising star of the Parisian occult milieu since he had closely cooperated with Papus in the organisation of the Masonic Congress.24 However, while he was collaborating with Papus, the ambitious Guénon was also secretly trying to recruit Martinists into a neo-Templar organisation that he led, L’Ordre du Temple Renové (The Renovated Order of the Temple). Once his plot was discovered by the Martinist leadership (1909), Guénon was expelled from the Order (Amadou 1978/1979; Laurant 1986). Guénon’s intellectual quality, as well as his personal grudge against Papus, made him the ideal candidate for the position of editor of a journal like La Gnose, which was conceived as a tool to mark the distance between Synésius’ Église Gnostique Universelle25 and the Martinist Église Catholique Gnostique.
Despite being inspired by the same group of authors who had created La Voie (de Pouvourville, Champrenaud, des Essarts, as well as other “Gnostics bishops” all wrote in La Gnose), it seems that this project was somewhat less ambitious than La Voie. La Gnose was published monthly from November 1909 to February 1912, in small (twenty to thirty pages long) and inexpensive (0.5 Francs until December 1910, one Franc thenceforth) issues.
The second page of each issue contained the Statute of the Church and set the tone of the entire publication that, like La Voie, was characterised by a strong perennialism. This orientation is demonstrated by the first paragraph of the statute which reads: “Gnosticism is a philosophical and traditional doctrine. It aims to restore the primitive religious unity” (Église gnostique chrétienne universelle 1909: 2). Unlike La Voie, La Gnose initially maintained a more inclusive approach. Responding to a question about the journal’s intended audience, the editor-in-chief “Marnes” (born Alexandre-Albéric Thomas) replied that “we address everyone and no one […]. La Gnose is for everyone” (Marnes 1910: 55).
Another intention of the journal’s editorial team can be found in the first few pages of the first issue in a communication entitled Notre programme (Our Programme), where Guénon announced that “we declare, once and for all, that we will not undertake any polemics” (1909b: 2). This promise would be short-lived. Guénon/Palingénius proved his talent as a polemicist already in the second issue of his journal (December 1909) with an article titled La Gnose et les écoles spiritualistes (Gnosis and the Spiritualist Schools), a direct attack to the “so-called spiritualist doctrines,” accusing them of promoting “only materialism transposed on another plane” (1909a: 21). It is evident how Guénon and his colleagues wanted to separate themselves from Papusian occultism and Spiritualism and present La Gnose as a publication with a more “scholarly” slant – at least if compared to competing initiatives, such as the Martinist L’Initiation, often being concerned with paranormal phenomena and fringe science. In this regard, the contributors of La Gnose initially wrote less about occultist themes and more about what we may call “history of world religions.”
As noted above, this attempt to create a more “scholarly” discourse in the Parisian occult milieu had been foreshadowed by La Voie,26 and Guénon decided to lead La Gnose to a similar path. Like La Voie, La Gnose was initially concerned with a form of “perennialist Gnosticism” but it soon turned to more “Oriental” themes.
7 La Gnose: from Gnosis to Islam
In late 1909, La Gnose began its editorial adventure as Organe officiel de l’Église gnostique universelle (Official Organ of the Universal Gnostic Church). This choice is reflected in the front cover of the journal which depicted a series of Christian symbols (a lamb, a tau cross,27 the Greek letters alpha and omega) and a sentence from the Prologue to the Gospel of John (John 1:14). All the contributors to the journal were Gnostic bishops who wrote articles pertinent to their Church. The French Gnostics declared that they wanted to make available
doctrines or theurgical practices jealously remained hidden until now […]. We will also provide various extracts from the Fathers of the Greek and Latin Churches, relating to the Gnostics [… that] still awaits a clear and precise translation (Guénon 1909a: 22).28
Despite this emphasis on the patristic tradition, the Gnosticism proposed in La Gnose was understood as “the fusion, with the doctrine of Christ, of the tradition of the Patriarchs, preserved since Ram in the mysterious Agartha, in the symbolic Tibet” (Mercuranus 1909: 10).29
Since we have seen this kind of “perennialist Gnosticism” in La Voie, it is not necessary to insist further on this aspect of La Gnose; it suffices to say that the first two issues of the journal (November and December 1909) were entirely dedicated to this kind of Gnosticism. It was in January 1910 that we find La Gnose’s first non-gnostic article. The editor, Palingénius/Guénon, wrote a piece with the title À propos d’une mission dans l’Asie centrale (About a Mission in Central Asia), in which he criticised French Sinologist Paul Pelliot (1878–1945) (Guénon 1910a). In 1910, Pelliot had just returned from an expedition in Central Asia, and his exceptional archaeological discoveries – the manuscripts in the Mògāo Caves (Mògāokū
The following month, Guénon wrote a second article about “the Far East” (Guénon 1910b), inaugurating a new phase of the journal, and, starting with the February 1910 issue, La Gnose changed its subtitle. No longer the “Official Organ of the Universal Gnostic Church,” it became the “Monthly Journal Devoted to the Study of Esoteric Sciences” (Revue mensuelle consacrée a l’étude des sciences ésotériques). From this moment on, the number of articles about Gnosticism (and/or written by Gnostic bishops) decreased steadily. By the end of 1910, only one series about Gnosticism survived: Notes sommaires sur le Gnosticisme (Summary Notes on Gnosticism) by “Mercuranus,”30 which ended in December 1910 with its twelfth part (Mercuranus 1910).
December 1910 was the turning point of La Gnose’s “Oriental” shift. If in the early 1910s, non-Gnostics articles were mainly re-propositions of La Voie’s articles about “the Far East,” Guénon’s journal found a distinctive identity with the introduction of a new contributor, “an Islamic student, Abdul-Hâdi” who “knows nothing of Christianity or Judaism, nor of the Hindu and Chinese traditions. He only knows Islam [… and virtually] all European languages and the so- called Semitic languages” (Guénon 1910c: 268). “Abdul-Hâdi” was the Sufi name of the Swedish painter Ivan Aguéli (born John Gustaf Agelii; 1869–1917). Aguéli had an adventurous life and was involved with many causes that we may today call “countercultural” (feminism, anarchism, animal rights, anti-colonialism, etc.). From 1902 onwards, Aguéli lived in Cairo, Egypt, where he was one of the first Europeans to be initiated in a Sufi Order called Shādhiliyya (Wessel 2021). In 1909, due to precarious economic conditions, he returned to France. Once in Paris, he rejoined with two of his old friends, Léon Champrenaud (1870–1925) and de Pouvourville, with whom he had first met a few years prior when the three had frequented the Martinist Order (Fotros 2021: 19; Sedgwick 2004: 63). Champrenaud and de Pouvourville thought that a character like Aguéli could be a good match for La Gnose, becoming therefore one of the journal’s most prolific contributors (second only to Guénon). Therein, he published translations of Sufi texts and several other articles about Islamic art and philosophy. These texts are not only today republished (ʿAbdul-Hâdî 1988) but have also been already studied in detail by a recent volume which reconstructed Aguéli’s life and work (Sedgwick 2021b). Thus, in the context of this article, what is important is to note how La Gnose abandoned its original Gnostic programme in favour of “Oriental” religions. This shift can be clearly seen in the following figure:
The proportion of articles about Christianity and Eastern religions in La Gnose
Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-01501014
It has to be noted that La Gnose did not become an Islamic journal after Aguéli’s arrival, but other “Orients” continued to be studied, often comparatively.31 This perennialist vocation can also be seen in the change in the journal’s cover that occurred in that year. In fact, from March 1911, the journal’s front page displayed four (intended) renderings of the term “Gnosis.”32
In September 1911, La Gnose changed its subtitle again, becoming the Revue mensuelle consacrée aux études ésotériques et métaphysiques (Monthly Journal Devoted to Esoteric and Metaphysical Studies). However, none of these changes helped the initiative, and the number of readers and contributors declined until, in February 1912, the journal abruptly ceased publication.
La Gnose’s front cover in 1909
Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-01501014
La Gnose’s front cover in 1912
Citation: Vienna Journal of East Asian Studies 16, 1 (2024) ; 10.30965/25217038-01501014
8 Conclusion: Two Fertile Failed Bricolages
A question posed in the introduction of this article still anticipates a response. What is the relevance of a tour de force in the thousands of pages that make up the collections of La Voie and La Gnose? To put it bluntly, why should anyone care today about the almost-forgotten authors and their often bizarre theories discussed here? After all, not only were both journals ultimately unsuccessful, but also the organisation that they represented, L’Église Gnostique de France, quickly declined after the 1910s.33 Today, over a century later, neo-Gnosticism still survives but it has never regained the prominence that it acquired in fin de siècle Paris.
The answer to this question was also suggested in the introduction, where I argued that every good “microhistory” (that is, “the intensive historical investigation of a relatively well-defined smaller object”; Magnússon and Szijártó 2013: 14) can be a tool to investigate greater historical questions. In this case, I believe that the facts narrated in this article illustrate two dynamics that profoundly shaped the construction of modern European religion. First of all, it seems that the contributors of La Voie and La Gnose went where most of their contemporaries were going: eastwards. Secondly, our Gnostics can be considered as “bricoleurs,” and their choices were motivated by the same “logic of bricolage” that characterises all kinds of religious exoticism.
I have repeatedly insisted on the fact that La Voie and La Gnose, albeit being both chosen as the official journals of the Gnostic Church, soon moved to more “Oriental” themes. This shift seems consistent with the phenomenon known as “The Easternization of the West” (Campbell 2007), a paradigm shift in the Euro-American religious self-understanding after its exposure to the religions and philosophy of “the East.” For Campbell, if “Westernization” was a colonisation of resources and territory that occurred because “the West” exercised military power over the “non-West,” “Easternisation” happened because “the East” was capable of colonising Western imagination and, from there, exert a decisive intellectual influence over “the West.”
Although more hermeneutically suspicious authors have criticised Campbell’s formulation (Bruce 2017; Dawson 2006; Hamilton 2002), it is undeniable that Asian (or Asian-like) tropes were and still are well visible in some specific social circles. If not “Easternisation of the West,” Campbell’s thesis can be “modified to that of the Easternisation of the Western spiritual intelligentsia” (Hamilton 2002: 248, emphasis mine). Hence, the groups of Gnostics studied in this article can be understood as belonging to that Western spiritual intelligentsia, who, at the turn of the twentieth century, felt the growing pressure of “the East” on their religious-cum-editorial choices.
It should be noted that the Easternisation thesis entails an uncomfortable feature. Cultural exchanges can occur in many ways. Yet, in the late eighteenth-century encounters between Europe and Asia, it was colonialism that triggered this meeting and the kind of “East” received by the European intelligentsia (to which the French Gnostics belonged) was not an innocent intellectual construct. On the contrary, discourses about “the mystic East” (King 1999) were part of a colonial, imperialist (and often racist) agenda, “a private realm of the imagination and the religious which modern, western man lacks but needs” (Inden 1986: 442). This is most evident in La Voie, a journal whose “turn East” was entirely led by protagonists of French colonialism in Indochina like de Pouvourville or Silvestre. We can observe the same phenomenon in La Gnose, which was nevertheless conducted from an opposite ideological stance, that is, anti-colonialism, given that, as discussed above, La Gnose’s Easternisation was led by Aguéli, a radical critic of colonialism.
How could the same phenomenon, viz. Easternisation, be brought about by both colonialists and anti-colonialists? The answer to this question can be found in the logic employed by the authors studied in this article, that is, “the logic of bricolage.” “Bricolage” is a concept originally employed by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) and more recently adopted by Véronique Altglas “to capture how cultures create something new out of what already exists” (2014a: 477; see also 2014b). This is precisely what the authors studied in this article were doing: La Voie and La Gnose were a product of religious bricoleurs who were trying to “create something new out of what already exists.” Initially, they chose Gnosticism, but they soon turned to East Asian religions (La Voie) or Islam (La Gnose).
At first, in both journals, Gnosticism was presented as one of the possible paths of a perennial tradition, and La Voie and La Gnose tried to show the concordance of “Western” and “Eastern” traditions. Scholars know this strategy very well: a successful bricolage requires all different traditions to be inserted into a worldview that sees them
as universal and primordial sources of wisdom, from which derive all religions and philosophies: this allows religious bricoleurs to disregard cultural and religious particularisms and offers them a return to the origins rather than an immersion in foreign traditions (Altgas 2014a: 485).
However, against post-modern interpretations of bricolage as a “pure random play of signifiers” (Jameson 1987: 222), the fact that La Voie and La Gnose replaced (and not simply the juxtaposed) “the West” with “the East” demonstrates how, in the minds of the Gnostic bricoleurs, these two elements sat uncomfortably next to each other. Bricoleurs constantly face the problem of bricolage’s coherence, and “bricolage entails selective and uncomfortable processes of negotiation and interpretation” (Altgas 2014a: 475, emphasis mine). The choices are not limitless, and the creation of a new religious system requires a certain level of consistency. Thus, despite La Voie and La Gnose’s perennialism, Gnosticism proved to be an unsuccessful component for the bricoleurs studied in this article. The reason for this failure is twofold.
First, with its undeniable Christian connotation,34 Gnosticism was a difficult ingredient to handle for authors who were trying to create “something new.” For the neo-Gnostics, it was not simple to remove this link despite their attempt to construct a religious identity largely antithetical to mainstream Christianity. In La Voie, Gnosticism was initially supported by a continuous comparison with East Asian religions, like in the programmatic series Dialogue des vivants which, however, suggested the primacy of “the East” over “the West.” However, if “the East” was superior to “the West,” there was no point in continuing to be Christians (even in its supposed superior form, i.e., Gnosticism) and adopting an “oriental” tradition seemed the more logical conclusion.
Second, it is necessary to stress the impact of personal experience on the intellectual choices of individuals. I believe that the biographies of our religious bricoleurs tell us a lot about the content of the “exotic” faith they chose. In our two journals, theories about Asia were proposed by people who had a direct and often positive experience of Asia, and their vibrant stories about “the East” surely proved to be much more persuasive than a newly invented Gnostic religion.
For these reasons, Gnosticism was rejected and both La Voie and La Gnose did not succeed in having a real impact at their time. However, if not immediately, these two “failed bricolages” had a long-lasting influence on European religious history. In fact, despite the ultimate demise of the Gnostic Church of France, the ideas circulated in that milieu (and printed in the journals discussed here) became a broth of culture for a new, successful, bricolage. Abandoned his episcopal robe, Tau Paligénius became René Guénon anew, the brilliant bricoleur. Learning from La Voie and La Gnose’s failures, he was able to utilise the elements present in the two journals to elaborate a new, enormously influential and fully orientophile movement, namely, Traditionalism.35
Lastly, I want to notice how the microhistory described in these pages can teach us something about the contentious discussion about “(Western) esotericism” (Asprem 2014; Bogdan and Djurdjevic 2014; Hanegraaff 2012; 2015; Pasi 2010; Strube 2021). Looking at articles such as Les Dialogue des vivants, it is undeniable that the religious thinkers studied here felt a certain tension between the wisdom of the “East” and “West,” and La Gnose and La Voie’s eventual “turn East” can be seen as representing the ultimate “Parting of East and West” (Pasi 2010) of this strand of French occultism. However, it has to be noticed that even the most orientophile thinkers, like de Pouvourville or Aguéli, insisted so much on “Oriental” religions because they believed that “they contained answers to the dilemmas then confronting religious believers in the west” (Bevir 1994: 748). In this sense, it seems to me that the distinction between “Eastern” and “Western” forms of esotericism was – at least in the cases studied here – largely rhetorical, and I believe that it would be a mistake to take for granted the (often self-serving) definitions proposed by occultists.
The age of colonialism was a time of entanglement, a moment of multilateral exchanges between Europe and the other continents in which the line between “Western” and “Eastern” identity was blurred, and, for this reason, emphatically (and uncomfortably) re-affirmed. More than a case of “Easternisation,” the microhistory of La Voie and La Gnose is thus, essentially, a story about this discomfort.
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The category of “occultism” is contested among scholars. In this article, the term and its derivates refer to a loosely connected galaxy of philosophical cum religious movements that developed in France at the turn of the twentieth century (for a portrait of the main protagonists of this milieu, see Churton 2016; for a scholarly definition of the term, see Pasi 2015).
The intellectual programme of microhistory was proclaimed by Ginzburg and Poni at a conference in Rome in January 1979, later published as a stand-alone article (Ginzburg and Poni 1979). For a more recent reflection, see Ginzburg 1993. The proponents of microhistory grouped around the periodical Quaderni storici (Historical Notebooks), and they published, between 1981 and 1991, a twenty-two-volume book series entitled Microstorie.
La Voie’s last issue was published in May 1907.
The Catholic Church promptly excommunicated both him and his organisation. The intricate history of French neo-Gnosticism has already been object of scholarly attention (James 1981; Laurant 1992; Le Forestier 1991; Winterberg 2018).
All the first twelve Gnostic bishops were chosen from Papus’ organisation (himself was consecrated in 1892 as “Tau Vincent,” Bishop of Toulouse). The first synod of the newborn church was celebrated at a Parisian bookshop at 29, rue de Trévise. It was the address of Lucien Chamuel’s bookshop, publisher of the Martinist journal L’Initiation. For a history of the early Martinist movement, see Giudice 2014; Var 2006.
In 1894, Doinel resigned from his episcopal position and returned to Catholicism. Under the pseudonym “Jean Kostka,” he published a book titled Lucifer démasqué (Lucifer Unmasked), where he violently attacked occultism, describing it as a diabolic conspiracy against Christianity. Later he came back to neo-Gnosticism, and it is uncertain whether he died Catholic or Gnostic (Bonnet 1987).
The organisation was registered at La Voie’s address (5, rue du Pont de Lodi, Paris).
For a detailed analysis of every issue of La Voie, see Perlector 1990.
This sentence was printed on the journal’s first page.
“Nous croyons fermement que la vérité est Une. […] Tous les systèmes, toutes les doctrines sont donc forcément résumables en un seul système, une seule doctrine. Et les affirmations, en apparences contraires, qui constituent ces doctrines, ne se distinguent les unes des autres que par des différences d’aperceptions, de sentiments, de terminologies, de logicismes, dues aux races, aux tempéraments, aux époques, des latitudes.”
“La tradition ne nous conseille qu’à un élite: et nous devons nous glorifier que, parmi nous, la qualité (à quoi seulement nous attachons) remplace la quantité (qui nous indiffère et nous gênerait).”
“M. Joanuy Bricaud – ci-devant Johannès – a entrepris de fonder, à Lyon, sous le vocable extraordinaire Eglise catholique gnostique, un groupement dont il serait sans doute l’inspirateur et le protagoniste. Au préalable, M. Joanny Bricaud avait envoyé au patriarche de l’Eglise gnostique de France la démission des grades et fonctions dont il avait été investi.”
“La prétention singulière de gens qui rêvent de réconcilier le catholicisme moderne et la Gnose, leur seule excuse, sans doute, étant d’ignorer également la gnose et le catholicisme.”
A notable aspect of the preference given to Gnosticism is in the racist tone of the article (many of La Voie contributors were fervently antisemitic). Enorphos believed that “[f]or the Gnostics, Jesus does not belong to the Semitic race, but he is Galilean. The Galilee was an ancient Gallic colony” (Enorphos 1904a: 162: “Pour les gnostiques Jésus n’est pas de race sémitique, il est Galiléen. Or la Galilée était une ancienne colonie gauloise”).
Vintrasism was a neo-Catholic religious movement inspired by the French peasant Eugène Vintras (1807–1875) who claimed to have received a personal millenarian revelation. The movement was not particularly successful, and it was declared “satanic” by many, but traces of it can be found in the work of several late nineteenth-century French novelists (van Luijk 2013: 205–213).
For example, Le Problème des Concordances entre le Bouddhisme et le Christianisme et ses diverses Solutions (The Problem of Concordances between Buddhism and Christianity and Its Various Solutions), where it is argued that “[t]he Christian gospels and Buddhist scriptures present symbols and allegories which have the greatest analogy between them” (Revel 1905: 29).
Jounet was a member of Lady Caithness’ (born María de Mariátegui; 1830–1895) Société théosophique d’orient et d’occident (Theosophical Society of East and West). Lady Caithness had founded her society after her initial association with Helena P. Blavatsky (1831–1891), rejecting Theosophy’s “Eastern” esotericism in favour of a kind of “Judeo-Christian” esotericism.
The kind of Christianity advocated by Jounet in the Dialogue des vivants not only includes controversial doctrines, such as the apocatastasis, but also explicitly denies the creatio ex nihilo and the humanity of Christ (LOR and LOC 1905: 46). Also, Jounet declares of not having any prejudice “for or against the theory of Reincarnation. Early Christians believed in it” (ibid.: 43).
“Il ne faut pas être annamitophile ou sinophile au point de voir des merveilles là où il n’y en a pas; mais il ne faut pas, non plus, être trop plein de sa suffisance d’Européen, s’imaginer que tout est mal qui se fait autrement que chez nous. […] Ce dernier défaut a été tellement commun chez beaucoup d’observateurs superficiels que le public se représente encore, en Europe, les Chinois comme de gros magots et s’imagine que, pour deviner ce qui se fait en Chine, il suffit de prendre l’opposé de ce qui se fait à Paris.”
Silvestre is today also remembered as a great numismatic (Joyaux 2011).
For the discussion of the identity of this Brahmin, see Perlector 1990: 77.
The book, announced with the title of Entretiens du Prophete (Talks of the Prophet), was never published.
He was the Secretary General of the Committee of Islam at the French Colonial Congress.
He was the secretary of the Bureau du Congrès Spiritualiste, a sort of organising committee: the minutes of the conference mentions Guénon five times (Congrès spirite et spiritualiste international 1888: 7, 21, 31, 104, 199).
The organisation had changed its name to mark its distance from Bricaud’s “Catholic” Gnostic Church.
Which, in turn, was inspired by another journal, La Haute Science (The High Science).
The Gnostic Church of France utilised a T-shaped cross (or “tau cross” because of its shape resembling the Greek letter tau) as its distinctive symbol. For this reason, the members of the organisation prefixed their episcopal names with the letter “T” or the word “Tau.”
“Les doctrines ou de pratiques théurgiques jalousement restées cachées jusqu’ici […] Nous donnerons également les divers extraits des Pères des Eglises grecque et latine, ayant trait aux Gnostiques [qui …] attendent encore une traduction claire et précise.”
The legends of “the Empire of Ram” and of the “kingdom of Agartha,” were created by the French philosopher Fabre d’Olivet (1767–1825) and later popularised by the occultist Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842–1909). The myths are centred around the figure of Ram, “described as an important ruler who was exiled from Europe and became the emperor of this supposed realm in Asia to which he travelled” (Winter 2024: 56).
Patrice Genty (1883–1964). He will remain one of Guénon’s closest associates throughout all his life.
Most notably, Guénon wrote a series titled La Constitution de l’être humain et son évolution posthume selon le Vedanta (The Constitution of the Human Being and Its Posthumous Evolution according to the Vedanta, Guénon 1911) which would become the core of one of his most successful books (Guénon 1925).
The four words are: jñāna (Sanskrit for “knowledge”); al-ishrāq (Arabic for “illumination”); da’at (Hebrew for “knowledge”); and dào (Chinese for “path/way”).
Post-1910 publications from the members of the organisation are rare and very formulaic. In 1917, A collaborator of La Gnose, Marie Chauvel de Chauvigny (“Sophie Esclarmonde”; 1848–1927) published a Bref exposé de la Doctrine Gnostique (Brief Presentation of Gnostic Doctrine) in which she re-proposed the same concepts presented two decades earlier by La Voie (the front cover of the book even contains the Chinese character dào which, as noted above, was a recurrent trope in the Église Gnostique). Fabre des Essarts died in 1917, and the last two patriarchs (Champrenaud 1917–1921; Genty 1921–1926) failed to revive the fortunes of the organisation, which was eventually “put to rest” by Genty in 1926.
The label “Gnosticism” and its derivates have been thoroughly scrutinised by contemporary scholarship, with important books proposing the abandonment of the very category (King 2003; Robertson 2022; Williams 1996; for a recent overview of the scholarly debate, see Burns 2018). Whatever definition one decides to adopt regarding “ancient Gnosticism,” it is undeniable that neo-Gnostic movements, such as The Gnostic Church of France, understood themselves as heir of a Christian tradition alternative to Catholicism (Winterberg 2018).
On the influence of Aguéli on the construction of Traditionalism, see Sedgwick 2021a. For the role of de Pouvourville, see Marino 2023.
