Martinez de Pasqually

The teaching

Taught from his Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings and his letters to his pupils.

The first emanation

Pasqually teaches that before time God emanated from Himself spiritual beings, to praise Him and to share in His works. They were not made from outside Him but came forth from Him, free, each with its own power and its own place in His order, and their freedom is the root of everything that follows.

The fall of the spirits

Some of these spirits, led by the first among them, wished to create as God creates, by their own power, and so to be His equals. This is the first prevarication, the first crime in the universe. God did not destroy them; He confined them. He made the physical universe as a place of limits, where their evil is held within fixed bounds and their power restrained, and matter, which seems so solid, is that boundary given form, made from three essences, which the treatise calls mercury, sulphur and salt.

Man the minor

Then God emanated man, whom the treatise calls the minor, and clothed him in a body of glory, not of flesh. He set him at the centre of creation with power over all beings, to hold the fallen spirits in check and to call them back to their Maker: man was to be the mediator between God and the fallen, a god of the earth under God.

Adam's prevarication

The first man fell as the spirits had fallen. Listening to the fallen ones, he wished to work by his own will as God works, and what came of his working was no being of light but a form of darkness, a body without life. In punishment he was himself clothed in a body of matter, the form that men now have, and cast down among the things he was meant to rule; and his posterity is born into that condition, spirits imprisoned in flesh, in the same world as the spirits they were meant to govern.

Reintegration

The end of all things is reintegration: the return of every being, man first and through him the rest, to its first property, virtue and power, spiritual and divine. Man cannot climb back by his own strength. He is helped by the good spirits, by the Repairer who came to restore him, and by a true worship handed down from Adam's son Seth through the righteous of every age, Enoch, Noah, Abraham and Moses among them. The Elect Cohens, whose name means priests, take that worship up again: their rites are the priestly service by which man resumes his office and works for the reconciliation of all.

The operations

The highest members work rites the letters call operations. They are done at set times, above all near the equinoxes, in a room prepared for them, with circles and signs traced on the floor, lights set in their places, the names of spirits and long invocations, the operator alone and often lying prostrate. They are prepared for by prayer, by rules of diet and by continence, which the letters lay down; anyone whose health a fast could harm keeps none, and the rites are taught here as the order's own and not as a practice.

The sign that a work has been accepted is a pass: a light, a form, a sound or a gleam that crosses the room, which the operator notes and reports to his master. What the operators hope for above all they call the Thing: the coming of the good spirit, or of the Repairer, in a form that can be seen. His pupil Saint-Martin later kept the doctrine and left the rites for what he called the inner way, the way of the heart.