Controversies and Viewpoints Page 5

  From the Ariège to Paris

  In 1966, he declared to Marie-Thérèse de Brosses:140 ‘Were I to recount the story of my life, I would divide it into three parts which I would title in the following order: submission, rebellion, and liberty’ (Entretiens avec Raymond Abellio,141 Belfond).

  He has since begun to keep his own journals. The first volume gives a presentation of the milieu he originated from: his family came from Toulouse and his ancestors were either carters or journeymen carpenters — a peasant autarchy that characterised his forefathers. As a schoolboy, Georges Soulès (by his real name) was always the first in everything save for catechism:

  For us, the real priests of this waning society were the secular teachers, men that shared the modest destiny of clergymen but whose vocation was quite stronger; they were those for whom God had become the end and the ideal accomplishment of our humanity in motion.

  Although never a prophet in his own region, it is to Occitania that Soulès belongs above all. His mother was ‘some kind of Albigensian or Cathar142 that had descended from the uplands of the Ariège’. This is an important fact, because what the Cathars denounced as capital sin was ‘the scandal of an impersonal God that burdened with incomprehensible wrath a world that He himself had created in its actual shape and form’. The Pope was the father that they denied. ‘The martyrdom of Albi was, from the West’s perspective, nothing but the repetition of the Son’s martyrdom’.

  Having turned twenty, the young Occitan goes north to Paris. He is accepted at the local polytechnic school, ‘a place characterised by the subtlest and the greatest of social transmutations’. He then convinces himself to participate in the destruction of the old order. His taste for rigorousness guides him towards socialism. Whenever on an outing, Soulès the polytechnician purchases Le Quotidien143 and L’Humanité.144

  1931 marks the advent of the ‘X-crise’ group.145 In 1932, the Polytechnic Centre of Collectivist Studies is born, with Jules Moch and Louis Vallon. Georges Soulès becomes its first secretary, before joining the Socialist Youth movement. Inside the SFIO,146 he struggles for the revolutionary Left (whose Trotskyite and pacifistic members were hostile towards Blum) and for the Redressement socialiste147 tendency. Meetings, activism, and the first plots. In 1936, Soulès becomes a member of Jules Moch’s148 cabinet. Between 1937 and 1939, he is part of the steering committee of the French Socialist Party.

  Then comes the rise of Fascism. This turn of events unravels all analyses. Soulès thus evolves and breaks with Marxism. In 1946, he publishes, in cooperation with André Mahé, a work entitled La fin du nihilisme149 (Sorlot), a collection of conferences held in 1940–41 at the Oflag IV D in Germany, where he was imprisoned. In it, he criticises the numbing of instincts and the mistakes made by finalistic ideologies. He heralds the age of the revolutionary combatant, the perfect harmony between man and history. As written by André Mahé and Georges Soulès, ‘there has always been some sort of dualism expressed in the West’s history. And even in Europe’s own behaviour has this twofold attraction been affirmed, this temptation to which it has alternately been subjected by virile and feminine values, by the values of strength and charity’.

  They thus conclude:

  It is no longer Happiness that we seek; what we seek instead is the triumph of Will and Life.

  Having returned to Paris, Georges Soulès becomes the auxiliary of the blood and soil ‘egregores’ and, soon enough, along with Mahé, the Joint Secretary of the ‘second’ Social Revolutionary Movement (MSR), the movement which outlived Eugène Deloncle150 and was gradually drained of its former ‘balaclava-disguised’ activism.

  Following the Liberation, Georges Soulès disappears. In 1946, however, a novel entitled Heureux les pacifiques151 is published. Its hero, Robert Saveilhac, bears a strong resemblance to the vanished man. As for the author, his name is Raymond Abellio.

  Men of Knowledge and Power

  ‘It was in the 1930s, upon reading The Crusade Against the Grail by German writer Otto Rahn, that I first thought of choosing Abellio as a pseudonym. Rahn reminded his readers that Abellio had been the name of a Celtic god, or rather a Celtiberian deity, Apollo’s Phoenician avatar’. With the surname ‘Soulès’ originating from the word sol, meaning ‘sun’, ‘the forgotten presence of a solar god in a region entirely impregnated with magical blood raised the enigma to a level of almost religious mystery’.

  Not only has Mr Abellio changed his name, but he has also met a spiritual master. Former teacher Pierre de Combas (represented by Pujolhac in Heureux les pacifiques) had, as always, come at the right moment:

  He proceeded to explain to me that the world would change without my involvement and that the best means to trigger real change in it actually lay in my ability to understand myself.

  The man of knowledge thus contrasts with the man of power. And what is knowledge? ‘The thought according to which everything that exists has meaning, paired with the latter’s conquest’. Nowadays, however, wisdom must once again be steeped in secrecy. ‘Our era is too passionate to handle the presence of wise men at the head of the state’.

  Politics leads to the making of choices, and Raymond Abellio has availed himself of the freedom that allows one not to choose anymore. He states:

  Life, and particularly political existence, has taught me that no one ever “sacrifices” anything: this is true of the most devoted militant, who follows the path of destiny that seems most exhilarating for him.

  ‘I have not voted a single time since the war; for as long as thirty years. Politics is no longer any of my business, you see: I am no longer able to choose’, he now adds. (He does remark, however, that ‘Europe is currently being colonised by the US-Russian sphere of influence through the presence of international companies. The same process is being conducted by Russian Marxism on the level of intellectual research’ — as stated in an interview with Question de, issue number 4, third trimester 1974)

  Raymond Abellio’s own destiny is henceforth influenced by the Hebraic Bible, the Bhagavad-Gita,152 Keyserling,153 Berdyaev154 and phenomenology.155 The stages that his thoughts have gone through are epitomised by significant works bearing highly revelatory titles: Vers un nouveau prophétisme156 (1948), Les yeux d’Ezéchiel sont ouverts157 (1950), Assomption de l’Europe158 (1954), La fosse de Babel159 (1962), La structure absolue160 (1965), and La fin de l’ésotérisme161 (1973).

  In Assomption de l’Europe, he reaffirms his conviction:

  It is not into this world that one must nowadays put some order, but into our own thoughts. We have conducted a sufficient number of experiments in our world, and it is not in vain that we have borne the weight to such heights. The world is here, not elsewhere. […] At the most sensitive core of Europe, in the very place that it believes itself most absent from, one witnesses the accumulation of the ultimate refusal and attention which, through the mysterious reversibility of redemption, actually embody its genuine presence. […] I have been attempting to visualise what those hours of transfiguration might be like on the day when warriors shall turn into priests and, no longer having anything to defend that has not been left in ruins, discover themselves to be the wealthiest men in the world.

  Within a Soul and a Body

  At the threshold of 1971, Mr Abellio asked himself two questions: ‘Is it in my power to seize the apparent disorder afflicting my daily physical and mental life, to master it by means of the sole clarity of my spirit and to bring to light the order that it conceals? And would I always be able to clearly justify this new order, to account for it both verbally and in writing so that, enlightened through speech, actions may be even more readily mastered?’.

  It is these questions that the compendium entitled Dans une âme et un corps162 strives to answer. In it, Raymond Abellio has chronicled these past years. It is a chronicle in which daily reflections, meetings and literary reviews act as props in the building of a mind that exerts itself to encompass it all.

  Many figures surface in
it, including Marie-Thérèse de Brosses; Dominique de Roux;163 Doctor Hubert Larcher, the head of Revue métapsychique;164 Elisabeth Antébi, who authored a rather fanciful (and highly partial) inquiry into contemporary esotericism; Maryse Choisy, who was Teilhard de Chardin’s165 friend and wrote Un mois chez les filles,166 before launching the Global Alliance of Religions; in addition to some rather picturesque individuals such as the mysterious Mrs A., the tenacious propagandist of the Panharmonie167 monthly bulletin, an organ of the ‘Association for Full-Scale Individual and Collective Harmony and Complete Oecumenism, i.e. the French section of the World Spiritual Council’. Mrs A. bears a striking resemblance to baroness Cramouillard, the president of the Universal Mystical Union depicted by Mr Gabriel Matzneff168 in his novel Nous n’irons plus au Luxembourg169 (Table ronde, 1972).

  In a disorderly fashion, Raymond Abellio mentions all that he sets his heart on: Saint Augustine and the Tao, the debate between Husserl and Heidegger,170 Xavier Sallantin’s171 work on Chinese epistemology, Wittgenstein’s172 logic (‘A man who knew how to be quiet’), and the madness of Antonin Artaud.173

  He has attempted to write an essay on The Foundations of Cosmology, in cooperation with Charles Hirsch, a polytechnician of Hungarian descent and a disappointed communist. It was initially a matter of ‘systematising the use of quaternity’. Mr Abellio had already proposed replacing the ancient tripartite distinction between sovereign priests, warriors and growers with a four-caste social division: men of knowledge, men of power, managers and implementers. This time, however, the purpose is to go further. ‘We are in the process of demonstrating the identity174 of both Yijing logic and the dialectic of absolute structure, which reconcile and even unify structure and genesis’. There is an alleged connection between the sixty-four codons of the genetic code and the sixty-four hexagrams found in the Yijing, the traditional manual of Chinese divination. The quarks of nuclear physics are also to be taken into account. It would all act as a confirmation of the ‘universal combinatorial mathematics’ that Leibniz dreamt of.175

  Pursuing his approach, Abellio targets every conceivable form of triad and trinity. ‘The Christian Trinity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit has now been sterilising Western theology for twenty centuries: what is missing from it is the Mother and the Daughter’ (Abellio may have made this remark under the influence of the Kabbalah). He reproaches Nietzsche for his ‘lack of inner femininity’ and quotes the following statement made by Jesus in the Gnostic gospel of Thomas: ‘Every woman that makes herself male shall enter the kingdom of heaven’.

  The quotes abound, many of which are truly beautiful; including the words of Goethe when targeting pure ideas: ‘Planting a concept as if it were a picket’. Or this precept of the Bhagavad-Gita: ‘Perform the action that is to be performed without attaching yourself to it and while renouncing its fruit’.

  Abellio also quotes this reflection made by Meister Eckhart176 on the topic of the harmful effects of ‘negative criticism’: ‘I am often asked about what burns in hell. Authorities usually reply: “It is free individual will and self-interest”; but I say unto you: it is the “not” that is burnt out in hell’.

  The Physics of Social Entropy

  The tragedy pervading Christianity is summarised in one sentence: ‘Although democratic in its mysticism, it remains aristocratic in its gnosis and cannot manage to hold the two aspects together’.

  In La fin du nihilisme, one already encountered the following words:

  Priests have ceased to be men that live through God and have, instead, become men who live off God.

  Regarding the Church crisis, Mr Abellio writes:

  I have read that in Rome, a certain clergyman once declared, with the approval of the hierarchy, that it was necessary to strip the gesture of benediction of all magical content in the minds of the faithful. But what would then be left of it? A gentle wind? A small movement that comes and goes through the air? I say that those people’s hollowness can only arouse wrath.

  Marxism is equally contested. It is not a philosophy of history — and much less the philosophy of history — but a sort of physics. Raymond Abellio specifies:

  I call “evil” anything that encourages levelling and uniformisation both within nature and within man. There is natural entropy but also social entropy. As a science, Marxism embodies the physics of social entropy.

  Incidentally, Marxists are but men of power, a power that lacks any and all depth:

  Although born of the ingenious brain of a Jew, Marxism ceases to tolerate Jewish subtleness, the separating power of the Jews or their perpetual openness the moment it becomes the ruling dogma. I have spied upon the stubborn faces of all the Brezhnevs177 and the Kosygins178 a look akin to the one found in the eyes of obstinate mules, especially when they find themselves in a group, each making sure that he avoids looking at the others. Just as we have had the blue line of the Vosges179 , they have their own red one — the Party’s.

  By definition, the fundamental issues of artistic creation, sexuality and metaphysics evade all social instrumentalisation. Just like his Cathar ancestors, Mr Abellio expresses his interest in them by means of esotericism. And yet he rejects facility, impersonal mysticism, and the example of ‘holy women whose “I” is abolished all too quickly and whose own ecstasies seem but a copy of an ideal ecstatic state that they have supposedly heard of’. Among esoteric ‘occultists’, what he denounces is the ‘incomprehensible’ scorn that they hold for ‘the West’s scientific endeavours’ (interview with Question de, op. cit.).

  I do not use the word “event” in the plural anymore, for there is but one event, one that explains them all and clarifies them retrospectively — man’s departure from the sphere of time.

  There is a vision connected to this affirmation — that of Asia, the receptacle of genuine intellectual Marxism, now rushing into Europe once again and thus closing the circle of the East-West dialectic that has characterised the past twenty centuries:

  That is when the extremes shall conjoin in the symbiosis of the Occitan spirit and the social physics of the East. This passion and assumption of the West shall, from our era’s perspective, mark the end of the dialectic in which God became man and lead towards the adventure in which man becomes God.

  As for Raymond Abellio, he believes that he already is above time. There is a certain self-detachment that constitutes a sort of fullness. And it is in this manner that man shall ultimately take his revenge:

  One must allow neither beings nor things to take their leave of absence. For it is up to us, when the time comes, to do so ourselves. That is when death shall have less power than us, and there shall not even be a death: for we will have internally assembled and carried off all that we have loved.

  Ever since I was born, my life has been a source of profound feelings to me, like a state of agony reaching towards an unknown rebirth, a faithful reflection of Europe’s life over the past sixty years.

  A Spirit in the Darkest Night

  In the space of half a century, Raymond Abellio has successively overcome all the doctrines that he has turned to; or, to be more precise, what he has done is ‘digested’ them, for one does indeed not overcome an idea unless one ventures to its very limit, starting within. Hence the reason why every self-conscious ideology can only seek to eliminate the heretic whose mind is both vast and brilliant and who only became a disciple in order to better abolish his masters. Such is at least the logic which men of power abide by, as described by Mr Abellio himself.

  This journal was bound to end with a question that betrays dissatisfaction: ‘And here we are; the show is over and the night dark. What is left? If only one could respond and say: the truth within a soul and a body. But the body and the soul sink into slumber and only the spirit is wakeful. What is left, then? The answer is: no one’.

  One obviously only avows what one cannot pledge through vows.

  *

  Ma dernière mémoire,180 recounted by Raymond Ab
ellio. Gallimard, 226 pages.

  Dans une âme et un corps, the journal of Raymond Abellio. Gallimard, 273 pages.

  *

  Julius Evola

  ‘What I am about to state does not concern the ordinary man of today. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today’s world, even at its most problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not inwardly belong to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels, in essence, that he belongs to a different race from that of the overwhelming majority of his contemporaries’ (Ride the Tiger).

  With his barely visible aristocratic beard, emaciated face and tall stature, philosopher Julius Evola wrote for a minority of people; for the men who had remained ‘standing among the ruins’. He passed away in his Corso Vittorio Emanuele home in Rome, on 11th June, 1974; he was seventy-six years old.

  ‘It was around 15:15, just as had been predicted to him and he himself avidly desired’, declared Mr Pierre Pascal, a friend of Evola’s and a writer who has translated several of his books into French.

  Julius Evola was, in Italy, the most eminent representative of a ‘traditional’ thought that he himself traced back to Joseph de Maistre,181 Taparelli d’Azeglio182 and Solaro della Margherita.183 He had sometimes been compared to German Ernst Jünger184 and, more rightfully, to French esotericist René Guénon.185

  In the old conflict that opposed the Guelphs (i.e. the exclusive partisans of the Papacy) to the Ghibellines, for whom the Roman-Germanic Empire was, just as much as the Church itself, an institution with a supernatural character, Evola’s heart led him to side with the latter.