Chapter 4: Chapter Two: Triumphant Error

I.

Pythagoras’ struggle against pagan mentality.
His efforts to reconstitute the Proto-Synthesis

Philosophical Paganism—result of that mental regression whose course we’ve traced in the child becoming lettered, and which dominates present-day Europe—already enslaved minds in Pythagoras’ time. Against it, the great Initiate and the Orders he founded on Orphic Synthesis’s plans strove in vain to serve as social therapists amid the remnants of Ionian and Phoenician Third Orders that had corrupted the spirit and overturned that organization of ancient Greece and Italy—Celto-Slavic and Pelasgian—of which we’ve spoken earlier.

These lay theologians who stand apart—Pythagoras and Aristotle especially—loom against their era’s banal backdrop as men of another race and Cycle. Emerging from metropolitan Temples of Polytheism, they strove to counter a double perpetual scourge: civil Revolution and its military corrective, War. In his Epistles to the Romans, Saint Paul marvelously defines the mediocrity of the third mental and moral caste, and one might think these philosophers foresaw it.

History proves all too sadly how refractory these milieus remained to these men’s action, to all hierarchical spirit, to all sociology—and how only the second mental race, that of military Staffs, could bind them to its enforced peace.

This admirable Pythagoras who introduced into Greek the word Philosophy—was he himself a philosopher in our sense of the term: Philosophy as Having one’s own wisdom? A religious man, yes; an Order-founder, granted; the Saint Benedict of nearly divine Orpheus, certainly—but a philosopher? That says both too much and too little.

The Orphic confraternity leaders then directing Greece and Italy had for centuries been called theologians and prophets. Before Pythagoras, Numa had been their envoy to the nascent Roman anarchy—a king elected by an Etruscan Sacred College according to patriarchal rites. The Mediterranean masters of the great Samian bore the same character: Epimenides, Pherecydes of Syros, Aristeas of Proconnesus—all theologians and prophets, the second a thaumaturge, the third a priest. His Italian predecessor Xenophanes—spiritual father of the Eleatics, also a theologian—openly combatted Ionian Paganism and even their polytheism, as well as that of the Phoenicians.

All the more reason that the hierophants who instructed Pythagoras were not philosophers: Themistoclea, high priestess of Delphi; Abaris, priest of the solar Word among the Hyperboreans; Aristeas, already named; Zalmoxis, chief of the Thracian Sacerdotes; Aglaophamus, high priest of Lesbetra; etc., etc.

I’ve cited here only the chiefs of proto-Greece’s Temples—the Orphic, the Slavic—links of all Celto-Slavic and Pelasgian Federations tracing back to the patriarchal Church that Manu and Moses designate under the names of Kush and Rama.

But let us follow Pythagoras into the initiatory metropolises of Africa and Asia. His sacerdotal teachers are: at Sais, the prophet of Oshi; at On, Heliopolis, in the temple where Moses—under the name Oshar-Siph—had been prophet of Oshi-Rish and initiator of Orpheus, it is the prophet Hôn-Ophi. At Babylon it is Nazareth (and this name is suggestive, the prophet Daniel the Nazarene being then Grand Master of the Mages’ Sacred College). In Persia it is the chief of the Neo-Zoroastrians, the Guebre Zarathustra. In Nepal—also visited by Lao-Tzu—it is the first pandit of Brahma’s Sacred College since Krishna, and prior to him, of IShVa-Ra.

Let us pause here to note several important stages of ancient religious Unity. It comprised several superimposed Syntheses and Alliances, as follows:

1. 1. The Universal one of IShVa-Ra;
2. 2. The Indian one of the brown and golden races—that of Bharat of IShVa-Ra;
3. 3. The conquering Aryan one—of Pavan, of the Scythian Hanuman of Rama;
4. 4. The system of Nared connected to the Proto-Synthesis;
5. 5. The Brahmanic concordat one—that of Krishna, source of the Abrahamism of the Kashidim (the latter being a branch of the Iyotishikas of Kashi, Cashi). The Egyptian concordat system follows the Puranikas of Tirohita.

This superposition of pre- and post-diluvian systems, their Cycles and doctrines, is nearly impossible to grasp due to the inversion of the Seal of AMaTh,

which—accomplished by Krishna nearly 3,000 years before Pythagoras—entailed that of the Utterance of the Word BRA-ShI’Th, its SheMa, and its SePheR. Yet with the Archeometer, it becomes relatively easy to orient oneself, and the aforementioned superposition emerges quite distinctly.

Moses calls the Proto-Synthesis and the first alliance: Adam, in Vedic AD-Am, Unity-Universality; and it multiplies into as many ethnic Churches as Moses—drawing from Egyptians, Chaldeans, Brahmins, Magi, the Far East’s Kuo Tzu Chien, and the Votanides of the Far West—records Patriarchs down to Noah.

Then begins the Deutero-Synthesis and the second universal Alliance. Were we to cite here all historical documents of these two Catholic Churches, this book would scarcely suffice. Moses—who had them all before his eyes—records among other things, with his customary precision, what pertains still today more than ever to the vanguards of the white race in Asia, in Nepal and Persia. Here is the translation of his words—profoundly mysterious and veiled with great art, for their essence is very simple, very concrete above all, devoid of metaphor or philosophy.

Bereshith, ch. vi, v. 1, 2, 3, 4.

1. — “As the Church of Patriarch Adam became corrupted through the multiplication of races and their mixing upon the visible Face (PhaNa-I) of the spiritual Earth (ADaMaH), it followed that many confraternities of Virgins formed therein.

2. — “The sons of the celestial Alhim loved these daughters of Adam. They took as spiritual wives, as inspired ones, as Nashim, those whose spirits their Love had most ravished: (B’Ha-ROu, inversion of Ba-ROu-aH).

4. — “For the Nephilim henceforth existed upon the astral Earth of these Ya-Mim, Epochs and luminous Waves of Ya. Indeed, ever since the sons of Alhim haunted the virgin confraternities of Adam’s Church, the Ghiberean Alliance—the great Borealian one—was born of this Inspiration, having founded in remotest antiquity the Anosh-Ya, the virile corporation of Ya, the sacred General Staff of Ha-Shem, of the celestial Shema of divine Glory.»

Such is the ancient Alliance called Aryan today, founded by a reaction of inspired Virgins against universal decadence. As head of Orders, Pythagoras would not neglect to restore to true feminism its full Mission, its legitimate share of influence.

Beyond this aforementioned Alliance, yet many centuries later, we must mention that which dates from Patriarch Kush before the Nimrodic Revolution. The Oriental metropolises—whose Sacred Colleges corresponded with all other centers more or less attached to the Ancient Order—were: the capital of Jana-Cadesha, Mithilâ, for the section of divine and human sciences called Puranic, or sacred

Humanities; and Kashi, for the section of so-called positive or iyothic sciences—because Astronomy extended to cosmic physiology was regarded as the Synthesis of these Sciences.

From these historical stages date—long before Moses—the sacerdotal relations of India with the Orient and Far East on one hand, and with Northern Asia and Europe including Greece and Italy on the other. Finally, with Egypt and Ethiopia. From Kashi—today Benares—came the College of the Kashidim (literally: given by Kashi), the Chaldeans. There too, the Magi of ancient Iran would complete their higher iyothic studies. But since the first Zoroaster and his repudiation of the Devas’ cult—which he deemed contrary to ancient Orthodoxy—they abstained from Mithilâ, the great Puranic college frequented by Egyptian, Colchidian, Delphian and other priests.

Pythagoras was thus a religious man, a devout pilgrim of patriarchal Unity and University, a faithful adherent to their double Revelation and double criterion—which we shall examine later: Life and Science. Life—eternal life—for without this, Thanatism being the finality of all beings would be their Principle, which is absurd. Science—not man’s science, but that which before him was already inscribed in all facts, from the infinitely great to the infinitely small. Finally, the Biology of the invisible Universe and the Physiology of the visible Universe.

Moreover, let us hear him through his disciples, and he will tell us whether the criteria of Truth are objective or subjective, real or metaphysical, living or dead, universal or individual.

”Human reason has, in itself, only conjectural value. Science and Wisdom belong solely to Divinity, and we can only apprehend them according to our degree of receptivity.”

These words reported by Proclus bear the scent of incense, the altars of the Word, its one and universal Christianity, its unbroken Revelation from the first Patriarchs to those of our time.

Let us begin with the Altars of the Word.

It is historically certain that Pythagoras reconstructed—thanks to Temple documentation—one of Orpheus’ books: “The Hieratic Word”. He dedicated it to the memory of this Slavic prophet, renovator of patriarchal Greece and Italy. It is equally certain that Egyptian priests preserved—under the name Thoith—books from the Proto-Synthesis, the antediluvian one of the Word; and under the name Thoth, those of the Deutero-Synthesis, the postdiluvian one. Beyond doubt, the substance of these books was common to the religious Universities of Europe, Africa, Asia and even America—until the philosophico-political revolution that in 3,100 BC shattered this Holy Alliance and forced it to veil itself. Undeniably, among the myrionymous titles of the Word scattered through these two Syntheses, appears from earliest antiquity its direct or inverted holy Name: in Ethiopian ShOu-I, in Zend IOSh, in Chaldean

IShO, in Vedic IShVa, in Sanskrit ISOua, in Chinese ShOul and SOul. It is the IéShU, King of the Patriarchs in our litanies. This same name is that of Moses, written as the Infanta Thermouthis gave it to him: M’OShI, consecrated to OShI.

The Kabbalists are therefore right when they say by traditional routine: the Name of God is in that of Moses; but they cannot prove it: the proof lies in what precedes.

We shall return in detail to all these points; but what we note here proves that the fulcrum taken by Pythagoras upon the Word in the Temples of Europe and Asia is religious, not philosophical. It belongs to the one, universal, and unbroken Revelation of the patriarchal Church and Churches. By the same token, Pythagoras could not but have repudiated Ionian Paganism—its atheistic polytheism, its mental anarchy, its antisocial politics. And in this, he merely followed the footsteps of Numa and Xenophanes in the West, Lao-Tzu in China, Daniel in Chaldea, Zaratas in Persia. More still, it was the Invisible Itself that would have commanded him thus.

His biographers—Greek and Alexandrian—indeed say that he received the grace of his first Theophany, if not his vocation, in Crete around the year 550 or 553. He had then reached and even passed his thirtieth year. He was thus in one of the ritual conditions imposed by the patriarchal Churches for the second birth—the spiritual one—for the opening of physiological senses in divine Biology, for entering through the Gate of Death into the experience of Immortality.

The Incarnate Word, fulfilling His own Law in all things as Creative Word, would observe this rite during His retreat in the wilderness.

It was thus that Pythagoras would have seen Heaven and Hell for the first time, and—in the latter’s most dreadful Circles—the two coryphaei of Paganism, the two Magi of Mediterranean Ionianism: Hesiod and Homer, whose admirable songs had lulled his elegant youth in his father’s house, the wealthy banker of Samos. Distraught, scarcely daring to believe his eyes, he beheld these spirits prey to the Spirit of Darkness, to the rabble of Demons, to their black and red light. — “Why?” he cried to them. And they answered: “Alas! for having defiled Gods and men—the Gods by giving them Atheism as master, by slandering them, by showing them as vicious as we; men by deifying their vices.”

Here then is a sharply defined antinomy, captured in vivo, of Pythagoras’ first choice. On one side, Orpheus the prophet and the divine Word piously veiled in its celestial Majesty; on the other, human verbiage in the seductive nakedness of all its art borrowed from sacred Art, of its pantheism where all is God except God Himself, of its Theosophism where all is divinely true except Truth—the Amath, the Seal of the eternal Word and of the Word Itself.

Orphism, a thousand years before Pythagoras, had been in Europe one of the supreme efforts of the Templar Alliance against the invasion of the Asiatic Revolution—its rhetoricians, its sophists, its profiteers, its supplanting and enslaving politicians.

In the time of Moses and Orpheus, Crete of the hundred Cities had been reaffiliated to the Holy Alliance of the Temples of Manu and Menes. The Curetes were a sacerdotal mission of the Kurus celebrated in Hindu poems. The Minoa of Minos had seen them retie one of the Gordian Knots—symbols of the Orphic Orcos and Orcus, of the oath of alliance in God. Philosophy and politics easily sever these sacred knots, to the misfortune of peoples; Religion alone can remake them for their peace.

These names—Minoa, Minos, Menes, Manu—mean in the language of Bereshith: Ma-Noah, the Rule, the Orthodoxy of Noah. Meanwhile, O-Ripheus—the Ribhu of the Vedantas, son of the Sarmatian kings of Thrace—renewed the same bond in the Slavic and Pelasgian sanctuary of Delphi. It is the Egyptian Daliph, the Sanskrit Dalipha. In Devanagari, Dalapha or Dalapa expresses one of these holy places, neutralized, and also one of these sacred treasures of the Alliance. The same applies to Dodona, one of the Dyomnas of the Vedic Danu and the Dodonim of Moses.

The Noachide Grand Mastership, renewing the Adamic one, has sown such Dalaphas along its sacerdotal march from one end of the planet to the other.

In Europe, syrinxes of this kind existed from the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, and the catalog of these subterranean libraries was possessed only by metropolitan Sovereign Pontiffs. Colchis too had its Dalipha, which motivated the Orphic expedition of the Argonauts. This latter name designates one of the ancient epochs of the so-called Arga or Arka Alliance. Its supervisory council was called Argus, the dog of Pan, of Phanes, and of the Great Pan.

Orpheus had thus been charged with being in Europe the renovator of the Celto-Slavic and Pelasgian Amphictyony, dating from Krishna, regarding the cult of the Gods, the Devas, the Alhim—pagan fruit of the Revolution of Asiatic bourgeoisies.

Behind this neo-concordat, he had safeguarded the ancient orthodoxy^[*] of the OSI-oi, whose name the Pontiffs of Delphi always preserved. He had also bound to the sacred peace in Colchis, Greece, Tauris, Italy, and even in Spain and Gaul, the revolutionary invaders repelled century after century upon Europe by the Eastern dike of the Magi and then the kings of Persia. His teachings—engraved in the Deva language, then in Doric on copper plates—were guarded in each central city by autochthonous families who, even in Athens, still enjoyed great prerogatives in Pythagoras’ time. All the more did these customs endure in Greece and Italy.

The destroyed work of Orpheus was, as we have said, reconstituted by Pythagoras who—the better to seal the impersonality of his thought, the submission of his own

reason to supreme Reason, disdaining to pluck the easy laurels of the Ionians—wrote nothing or destroyed his own works, entrusting their essence solely to his disciples’ memory. This disdain for all doctrine, for all individual success—joined with many other signs—makes Pythagoras a unique Greek; it brings him as close to patriarchal Sacerdotes as it distances him from philosophers.

This manner of understanding him is the Christian one, the true one, that which we have developed in our first “Mission.”

II.

The Successors of Pythagoras — The Golden Verses

Pythagoras—for the above reasons and perhaps others still, these imposed by Templar Initiations—having left no documentation other than the increasingly uncertain memory of his disciples, his higher Teaching remains in reserve beneath an impenetrated yet not impenetrable veil.

Three manuscripts purchased by Plato fortunately escaped this cruel discipline. As an Oedipus and a Sophocles worthy of such a Sphinx, the author of Timaeus is thus, in date as in rank, the first commentator of the very notes, if not the summaries of Pythagoras.

The title that the friend of Archytas and Timaeus of Locri gives to his admirable dialogue indicates its filiation. Given the circumstances, the Order doubtless did not wish Plato to display himself further as a follower of Pythagoras. Independent supports were necessary for this Order; the envious bourgeoisie that had decimated and dispersed it continued to hate it as a threat to its usurpations. It sensed behind it and its Founder the sacred Synthesis resurrected by the royal son of Oeagrus—to whom Pythagoras, concerning Europe, attributed, like all else, his cosmological theology transmitted to us by the Timaeus.

Among the fragmentary relics of the Italic School’s teachings, one of the best known is certainly the Golden Verses, written by Lysis in the 5^th century BC, which formulate the exotericism, the primary teaching of the dispersed semi-Orphic Order of Pythagoreans.

These verses, indeed, are the catechism of the Great Pan—but not of Pantheism.

Pan is one of the cosmic names of the Word, the cosmic Shepherd of the Stars, of the Powers that guide them, of the Souls that inhabit them. This word comes from the Sanskrit Pana, the Tutelary. This symbol also expresses, from the earthly perspective, the universal Alliance of Temples in this same Word, of which Argus signifies the Surveillance. What precedes illuminates what follows.

The first two verses are a Creed, and this creed, in its opposition of terms, is analogous to Moses’ two hierograms: ALHIM the Gods or the Powers of God, and IHOH the absolute Being. And while the Egyptian says: “Hear, O Israel, God, thy gods, the absolute Being, One,” Orpheus disciple of Moses, Pythagoras renovator of Orpheus, Lysis redactor of Pythagoras say:

Render lawful homage to the gods of nations,
And keep thine oath to their legitimate God.

All ancient cults derive, indeed, more or less faithfully, from one same universal source: the primordial Revelation, the Proto-Synthesis or Christian Religion of the Patriarchs: “Religio vera,” says Saint Augustine—and this culminating fact, keystone of the Science of Comparative Religions, undermines all anti-Christian systems that today preside over the dual degree of classical teachings and their consequence: Higher Studies.

In the Empire of the Patriarchs, before Krishna, the act of faith was: “Om, Sas, Tat, IShOua-Ra, Hamo!”—Om, Sas, Tat; to IeShU-King, Glory! Thus it glorified the Word under the name conforming to the Alliance. Since Krishna it became: “Om, Sas, Tat, BRAH-Ma, Hamo!” IShVa expressed the Being existing by Himself, BRA-H-Ma expresses His image reflected in the boundless Waves of Time, His creative energy at work in the substance and for the subsistence of Beings.

By reading the first Slokas of the Manava-Dharma-Sastra, one will understand that what precedes is its key. Thus indeed did Vyasa Krishna, in recasting the Laws of Manu, indicate the filiation of the Hindu Deutero-Synthesis—that of Noah, Ma-Noah—to the Proto-Synthesis of the first Patriarchs, the Universal, the Adamic of Eden, the Christian-Catholic.

Fifteen hundred years after Krishna, eight hundred after A-BRA-HaM, Moses—reducing all to primordial Unity—subordinates the ALHIM, not to BRA-H-Ma, but to BRA-ShITH, the Word of the genesic Hexad: “BRA-ShITH BRA ALHIM,” and the name of IHOH is uttered only in the fulfillment of the seventh cosmic IOM. The creed he imposes upon the Indo-Egyptian pariahs whom he makes a Shemitic people is: “SheMwa IShRAL! IHOH ALHI(M)NO, IHOH AHD.” — Hear, O Israel! God thy gods; the absolute Being, One.

For the Jew—though not for Moses nor the Prophets—Israel is himself alone; for the sons of Japheth, it is Humanity in its Zodiac or universal Organism. In the Veda, Israel read in the European manner is the inversion of RASHI, the Zodiac; L is the monolithic symbol of Indra, the divinized astral Heaven.

After Moses, Pythagoras and Lysis.

The various ethnic cults derived from the universal religion granted only to the elect, and only at their thirtieth year—as we have seen for the Samian epoch—the formidable Revelation of the Invisible, the reintegration of human existence into absolute Life, through and within that state of rapture as little known to modern Europeans as the validity of all other religious mysteries. Even in the more or less pure initiations of the three branches of the Deutero-Synthesis, the twice-born of the Gospel, the Dwija of the patriarchal Thorahs, brought back from the other World into this one the three fundamental certainties: the Existence of God, of His Word, and of His Powers; the Immortality of the Soul—in other words, of human Existence; and finally, its Accountability before the Tribunal of that same Word and those same Powers: the Osiris of Amenti, said the Egyptian priests; the Mahadeva Ishvara, said the Aryan priests. It was to this great Judge, in whose name is enclosed that of Jesus, that the Initiate swore the Oath during his double birth: the Orcos, the Orcus of the Orphics, of patriarchal Greece and Italy. And this name, Orcus, also designated the great Judge, the Lord of the Vedic Triloka.

It is upon this triple certainty that the first universal Social State was founded, and every time one has attempted or shall attempt to strip it of this triple sacred foundation, one has returned or shall return to the Spirit of the Beast, to its law of war and Anarchy, and to all the chastisements of the invisible World.

Lysis did not fail to record this Orcos in his second verse, which, joined to the first, is thus explained: “Respect the diversity of Cults, the Power and role of the Nome, and be faithful to the Orcos—that is, to the united and universal Religion that has received thy oath.”

III.

Ancient and Modern False Pythagoreanism
The Three Mental Races

Despite this reservation of utmost importance—yet accessible only to minds of the two higher degrees—the Verses of Lysis, by virtue of this deliberate yet perilous level of primary teaching, could not but

lead toward a pagan philosophism with pantheistic tendencies those who made them their philosophical and religious code.

This is what happened to most of their commentators, to most of those who claimed—and in good faith could believe themselves—to be true Pythagoreans.

Among these commentators, three merit attention: Hierocles, Dacier, Fabre d’Olivet; for none better than they can clearly demonstrate this deviation from Pythagoras’ true Doctrine—universal and eternal Christianity—toward Paganism, nor more precisely synthesize for devotees of Pagan Studies the three conclusions these Studies entail regarding Christianity and Christendom:

• 1^st Conclusion: the Eclectic, Marcus Aurelius type;
• 2^nd — the Concordatarian, Constantine type;
• 3^rd — the pure Pagan, Julian the Apostate type.

These characteristics aim only to facilitate discerning the corresponding races of minds. To clarify, we shall call black, Paganism; white, theological Christianity inseparable from its true form which is Catholicism. Consequently, we shall name mulatto the Eclectic race, quadroon the Concordatarian, negro the pure Pagan: Nigra sed pulchra, naturally. For if we reserve, like Pythagoras, our faith for a fourth—the wholly white veiled one who is Wisdom itself—all the more reason to strew flowers upon the three Graces to whom we deny the apple.

These three conclusions interest us only in their relations with Christianity. From this perspective, the first type is Marcus Aurelius. It is the liberalism of Monsieur Prudhomme: it is good to lean on bayonets, but bad to sit on them. Yet this liberal remains a persecutor in the name of the Empire’s teaching Reason and of State Reason. But times have changed since Constantine. The bayonets gradually pass to Christianity, and Philosophy sheathes its claws because bishops now show talons that vigorously defend the faithful.

The second conclusion merits the name Concordat between theological autonomy and that same Philosophy. On both sides the claws are retracted, ready to emerge occasionally as political directions veer right or left.

The third conclusion is Julian the Apostate’s; fully left-wing. This very Parisian figure in life—he said “my dear Lutetia”—played a considerable role in the 18^th-century Encyclopedia and its charming consequences as political as they were antisocial.

Let us return to the first, which, having become Alexandrian Eclecticism fifteen centuries ago, was revised by an admirable professor of official philosophy: Hierocles. At bottom, it is but the Greco-Roman Imperial, the teaching Reason of philosophers wedding the State Reason of the Pantheon and even Hagia Sophia, from Augustus to the Augustuli. More or less imbued, knowingly or not, with the double Christianity before and after the Incarnation of the Word, it misapprehends the divine essence and human scope, believing it can either eliminate or subordinate them to its criterion and methods.

Chosen to pacify a terrible pagan-scholastic and ecclesiastical civil war, Hierocles is worthy of the Byzantine emperor’s selection. One senses in the gentle beauty and depth of his teachings that the concordat period is dawning. He is an Orphic theologian like all Pythagoreans. He is no philosopher in the ordinary sense. Surely Pythagoras remains, after Orpheus, the greatest unifier that Slavic-Pelasgian then Greco-Roman polytheism ever produced; but from the Academy’s founder to Hierocles, the initial Pythagorean tendency persists the more as individual systems dissolve their mists, forming one last ecstatic glory at the setting Moon of Temple Doxis.

We can follow Hierocles in thought to Alexandria, in the Bruchium surviving Serapeum’s destruction. Traditions on Pythagoras there lie scattered across forty authors and sixty volumes. Hypatia’s successor after a long interregnum ended by Saint Cyril’s death, the elegant white-haired master in his white robe had as friends all those innumerable books piled shelf upon shelf. In such a soul, such an intellect, these more or less contradictory treasures gravitate by a sort of attraction toward lost Unity, toward the Lyre’s perfect harmony. What meditations in this man over nearly half a century; what discourse with the mysterious initiates of the League of philosophers and priests of gods irremediably vanquished by the Church after vainly trying to crush it under the Emperors’ secular arm.

Alas! the degenerate mysteries of his age had given him no real Epiphany like so many Christians still received—else Pythagoras would have said: Go to Jesus!—but he kept upon the profane chair a simple and very real majesty of teaching. Not the shadow, not merely of an expression but of a soul’s movement indicating any resentment against Christianity’s triumph; as a Pythagorean he grieves not at all for Paganism’s rout—perhaps quite the opposite—and with all his Hellenic soul he would kiss the Cross had it been planted on Olympus rather than Golgotha.

Darkness gathers ever thicker, and from all horizons the Barbarian deluge submerges this civilization, decadent daughter of a mother once far fairer and purer, immortalized by all peoples’ sacred Books. Thus Hierocles wills not only to restore to Pythagorean ancestral Unity a teaching anarchy already harmonized since Plotinus, but to make this idealized and re-religionized Hellenism rival the Gospel, surviving luminous despite that Light of lights.

He would have his charming Phoebe be elder sister to that dazzling Apollo, her last smile still illuminating coming generations, kneeling their intellect before the past glories of his purest race. Hence his commentaries, quickened unwittingly by Evangelists and Fathers, bear an accent of farewell, a majesty of national Soul’s last sigh rendered to Humanity’s Soul. It is a social bequest that hands like Phidias’ raise toward the incomparable Testament of our Lord Jesus Christ; something beautiful, piously gathered, almost divine; a Testament too, of transfigured Hellas artistically fixed at its immortal perspective, with Orpheus for Moses, Pythagoras for Elijah, Lysis for Elisha.

It is with this noble race of minds, so well represented by Hierocles, that the second became neo-concordatarian especially after 1648—yet without scientifically dominating it through the invincible power of its reserves and Principle. This second race is the Thomist^[*], then the opportunist of Loyola^[*], the Lutheran of the Augsburg Confession, the Calvinist passing through the Greek and other national Orthodoxies and through the Anglican—all of which we classify as sisters and cousins to the Roman Church from this perspective of common interests.

In his modest role as translator, the good Dacier most worthily represents this second race, and he holds far greater importance than his self-effacement, humility, and especially his shabby garb might suggest. What garb! What a sack of interminable frayed periods, what style!… yes, but what conscience and what beautiful Christian light in this poor lantern that honored the Academy. It was said of him and his wife that theirs was the marriage of Greek and Latin—a love match and how prolific! Dacier is the prolific source of translations^[*]. A whole swarm of scholars has mined him without exhausting his vein.

But there is more than this in the work that concerns us. Beyond his ever-so-sagacious erudition, beyond his genuine worth as philologist and scholiast, he is a cold-blooded enthusiast. How he loves his Hierocles! How he knows to add, without seeming to, precious stones to his rosary! How serious his Christian studies—which his admiration for Hierocles’ commentaries never makes him forget! With what discreet care he seeks to forewarn studious youth against the derailment sweeping away masters and pupils alike. Hence scattered through his notes one finds his own conclusions redirecting the pagan Renaissance toward the patriotic Renaissance, precisely to the Concordat’s point.

In this he takes great care not to mistake the historical hour. He sets not his watch by the stars of Scholasticism nor by the Moon of the Summa. He turns, if not to the theological Sun, at least to those of its worshippers who, after the Apostles, came nearest to it. He is a good Catholic, an honest Christian of primary Religious Instruction,

of Catechization. This degree of religious education is purely theological; but the two others of like nature—the secondary degree and the higher degree—have been lacking since Constantine.

This genuine sagacity was also, as early as the 14^th century, one of Petrarch’s merits. Doubtless Saint Thomas Aquinas remains, with good reason, the master theologian of the Clergy; but the Clerisy requires nothing less than the Grand Master himself—Saint Augustine, that Father who, of all, came closest in comprehension to the Supreme Mastership: that of the Creator Word and the Incarnate Word, that of the double Christianity before and after the Incarnation. But what a difference between Dacier’s faith and Petrarch’s! Petrarch embodies the fidelity of Catholic literati enamored of pagan intellect, giving it all their reason while reserving their heart for Christian sentiment. It is adultery minus the final act. Dacier, on the contrary, far more steadfast in his dual pagan and Christian erudition, does not surrender all his reason to Philosophy’s allure. Moreover, the monomania of glory, atavism, the necropolitan patriotism of the Roman Republic and Empire, the muffled frenzy of pagan possession in self-love and all instincts—these are effortlessly repelled and never touch the good Dacier’s morals.

As we have never shared the widespread inclination to rush to the victors’ aid, we take pride in adding that among these conclusions, the one closest to the Queen of Intelligences—the immaculate Perfect—is today’s noble vanquished: the Concordatarian, in the mental and governmental sense of the word. Pagan in mind—yes, therein lies her atavistic weakness, her classical flaw, and in this alone she resembles her two Atreid sisters, bearing only their tiny black lunula upon the pearly white of her nails. But she is Christian at heart, and this suffices to ensure that this living fire shall once more transform into divine cerebral light.

Moreover—and here as sacerdotal—she is the sole depository of sacred Tradition and the Promise. As such, she is the eternally venerable mother of all Christians, the safeguard of Christendom, while today’s pagan Europe suspects neither what she owes her nor what she has yet to receive from her.

In Fabre d’Olivet, finally, we encounter classical anti-Christianity—the pontificating secularism of philosophers and literati opposing Greco-Latin secondary and higher Teachings to the primary religious Instruction of the Catechism, pagan Philosophy to the Theology of Concordatarians.

One already glimpses this race, quite refined in the person of Fabre d’Olivet, the Neo-Pythagorean of the 18^th century, among the foul Apostolic Secretaries (whom we shall discuss elsewhere) who were exploiting the Papacy as early as the first half of the

19^th century. His truest modern counterpart is the poor Pythagorean Giordano Bruno, unseated from Catholicism by Humanism to fall first into Protestantism, then rebound beyond Revelation’s Christianity, finally plunging headlong into Pythagoreanism. They gave him Pythagoras’ fate—a pyre—when perhaps a cold shower and kind words might have sufficed to return him to Jesus Christ. As for Fabre d’Olivet, he stabbed himself. One does not renounce Christianity with impunity; this brand of Humanism is Julian the Apostate’s—a veritable infernal possession. Fabre d’Olivet suffered this possession; but he has this curious trait among others: he deliberately raises altar against altar. He is the most systematic spirit of Freemasonry at that time, which towered a hundred cubits above today’s. Among the lay Pontiffs who mistook erudition for a tiara, many could be cited, and not the least: Court de Gébelin, Boulanger, Dupuis, Volney; in Germany, Schelling and many others, friends of Lysis’ commentator. Let us not forget La Reveillère-Lepeaux, the famed theophant, the illustrious theophilanthrope now known to none, who likewise pontificated with somnambulists for his Pythias.

It is certain that Fabre d’Olivet founded a neo-Greek cult of this sort, which fortunately did not outlive him. Having died in 1824 while I was born in 1842, I could hardly speak of it directly, and the sole person who might have knowingly informed me cloaked the subject in sorrow. But a manuscript communicated to me by Monsieur Rosen in 1885 proves that the greatest service to this great classic’s memory is to leave his cult where it belongs—in history’s oubliettes. This detracts nothing from the value of his Commentaries, that fine, painstaking mosaic of citations wherein he presents as novel his anti-Christian conclusion on secondary and higher Studies.

Before leaving Lysis, we must voice the strongest reservations regarding the Golden Verses’ final lines—those concerning the intellectual Superman dear to pagan mentality, the philosophical Homunculus self-administering the honors of deification. Jamblichus, far better informed than we are today, charitably warns us that this apotheosis belongs to Empedocles. This illustrious philosopher—we shall refrain from calling him a philomaniac—is the Nietzsche of the 15^th century before our own. The Brotherhood, finding him too compromising, had discreetly shown him the door. But believing his day of glory had arrived, he continued his parade outdoors. Robed in purple, with disheveled hair and a Pythia’s crown, he sang verses through the streets proclaiming his own divinity—verses that unwittingly evoke the Cantatas of the Goddess Reason and the Theophilanthropes in Paris cathedral.

Among the Immortals, become a God yourself.

Just that!… Municipal councillor, deputy, senator, minister, prime minister, president of the Republic—a mannequin in palaces, a statue in

crossroads, all at the expense of social economy—might pass; but a God!… These Greeks, prototypes of our Jourdains and their Philosophy professors, doubted nothing, least of all themselves.

Yet how distant their mania for public glory, their craving for opinion, their ambition were from Pythagoras’ thought and character!

To summarize and resolve any doubts regarding our view of the three Races: all our Faith, as we’ve said and repeat, goes to the pure White above the Colored, to the autonomous Theologal excluding all mixture. Yet the second—Concordat Theology—still commands our respect. What we criticize in Christian Theology is any flirtation involving mutual obligations with paganism, with that more or less mixed black-and-white. Never forget: the latter is antisocial, mediocratic, supplanting, enslaving. It proffers this World’s goods—or rather its World’s—always obligatorily yet never gratuitously. A peddler and, alas! a mountebank of patriarchal Antiquity, it delivers only adulterated goods. It is philosophy’s and politics’ huckster. Its mindset invariably conceals governmental aims—utterly unorthodox: Roman or Greek Republic, Roman or Byzantine Caesarism, with Teaching Reason and State Reason—invariably antisocial. Its dominion may tolerate sentimental Christianity in hearts, but banishes it from brains. Only the union of both can master our era and restore the negro to his rightful place.

The negro is Mephistopheles—Faust being but his puppet. The Concordat, even mental, is the jewels scene whatever its pander-music. We tenderly respect our favorite of the three classical Graces without hating the others we’d convert. But we’ve shown Marguerite how such tales, reenacting Constantine’s, always end wretchedly with some Tartempion. “It is priestly adultery,” declare the Prophets sternly to governing Jews turned Concordat Theologians. The resulting Race brought Judah, like Ezra’s era, many blows from Jehovah—including Islam and the Mongols, itching to resume their Sabbath worse than ever. These moxas^[*] and scorching irons seem salutary compared to Christendom’s interior ills, past and future, wrought by that Race’s improvidence.

”Is it because this Race is sacerdotal?” The black-and-whites yap: “Yes!” We say: It is not sacerdotal enough!

”Is it because it’s theological?” Julian the Apostate’s Demons grunt: “Yes!” We say: Because it’s Concordat Theology.