A fairytale village – part 2

Jeanne d’Arc, as represented by Saint-Sulpician inspired artists. But who were these beings from elsewhere who haunted the Bois-Chenu?

The Rouen judges lengthily interrogated Jeanne d’Arc on the fairytale phenomena in Domremy.  Here is what she answered on this subject, on Saturday 24 February 1431, during the third audience, to Maitre Jean Beaupere, Assessor at the Tribunal:

“Fairly close to Domremy, there is a certain tree which is called the Arbre des Dames, and others call it the Arbre des Fees.  Nearby, there is a fountain.  And I have heard that people sick with fever drink from this fountain and go to fetch its water to recover their health.  And this, I have seen myself;  but I don’t know whether they are cured or not.  I have heard that the sick, when they can get up, go to the tree to roll around.  It is a great tree, called fau, from whence comes the beautiful may.  It belonged, it is said, to My Lord Pierre de Bourlemont, Knight.  Sometimes, I went to roll there with the other girls, and made flower hats for this tree for the image of Notre-Dame-de-Domremy.  Several times, I heard said by the old people, not of my lineage, that the Lady Fairies lived there.  And I heard it said to a woman, named Jeanne, the wife of Mayor Aubery, from my part of the country, who was my godmother, that she had seen the Lady Fairies.  But I myself do not know whether that is true or not.  I have never seen a fairy at the tree, as far as I know.”

The judge asks:

“And have you seen any elsewhere?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve seen flower hats being put on the branches of the tree by young unmarried girls, and myself have sometime put some on with the other girls.  And sometimes we took them away, and sometimes we left them.  Since knowing that I had to come to France, I played a few games or rolled around, and the least that I could.  And I don’t know whether, since I have understood, I have danced near the tree.  Sometimes I could well have danced with the children;  but I didn’t sing there any more than I danced.”

So, Jeanne, known as Jeannette at Domremy, went to sing and dance under the Fairy Tree with her little friends.

***

During the same sitting of the Tribunal, she gave the following precision:

“My brother recounted that it was being said at Domremy:  ‘The Jeanne took her facts from the Fairy Tree.’  It’s false.  I told him the opposite.”

***

To tell the story of Jeanne d’Arc, it is always best to cite her own words.  Here is what she said about the voices:

“When I was thirteen, I had a voice from God to help me to govern myself.  And the first time, I was very much afraid…”

And she adds this sentence where in a few simple words she paints the decor of this marvellous instant:

“And the voice came, around noon, in Summer, in my father’s garden.

“I heard the voice on my right, on the church side.  I rarely heard it without seeing a light.  This light is from the side where the voice makes itself heard…”

During the trial, a judge having asked her whether she had the help of her voices in the Tribunal room, she answered:

“If I were in a wood, I would well hear the voice coming to me…”

However, it would be wrong to conclude that she heard her voices only under trees.  They appear to have manifested themselves in vastly diverse places.  She never said that the presence of trees was a condition, if not indispensable, at least favourable, to her hearing the voices.

***

A fairy godmother. What could have given birth to these timeless stories?

In 1455, the trial of Jeanne d’Arc’s rehabilitation opened.  On this occasion, the Tribunal asked the Civil Provost of Vaucouleurs, Jean Dalie, to go to Domremy to question the people who had known the Pucelle [unmarried girl, usually considered a virgin].  A Rogatory Commission which was accompanied by a list of questions in which the Ninth Article concerned the Fairy Tree.  Here are a few answers:

From Jean Moreau, farmer, seventy years old (he was forty-three in 1429 when Jeanne left her village):

“The Fairy Tree?  I have heard it said by the women that marvellous beings that we call “fairies” used to go to dance under this tree.  But it is said that since we go there to read the Gospel according to Saint John, they don’t come back there any more.”

From Beatrice, widow of Estelleni, eighty years old (sixty-three in 1429):

“The Fairy Tree, I have been there myself with the Ladies and Lords of Domremy to roll beneath it, because it is a very beautiful tree.  It is beside a big track by which we go to Neufchateau.  It was said that, in the ancient times, the Lady-Fairies came under there;  but now they no longer come, because of their sins.”

From Jeannette, widow of Tiercelin, sixty years old (thirty-three in 1429):

“The tree in question is called the Fairy Tree because, in the ancient times, it is said, a lord called Sir Pierre Granier, Knight of Bourlemont, went to meet under the tree a lady called Fee [Fay or Fairy] and talk with her;  I heard it read in a book.  Girls and boys of Domremy go there each year on the Sunday of loetare or Sunday of the Fountains, to roll, eat and dance…”

From Hauviette, wife of Gerard, farmer, forty-five years old (eighteen in 1429):

“Since forever, that tree, we call it the Fairy Tree.  It was said in the ancient times, that ladies called fairies came there…  Myself, I’ve been there with Jeanne the Pucelle [Joan of Arc], my friend, and the others, on the Sunday of the Fountains;  we ate, we had fun…”

Finally, from Gerardin d’Epinal, farmer, sixty years old (thirty-three in 1429), this exquisite comparison:

“It is beautiful like a lily, that tree!  Its leaves and its branches fall all around right down to the ground.  Jeannette went there with the other girls…”

***

People believed in fairies, in a general way, throughout the whole of Europe practically up until the XVIIIth Century, and in certain places up until the end of the XIXth Century…

Historians of mentalities doctly explain that fairies come, for their name, from the antique fata, and from the three Parques (in all the tales, they are present at the birth of children to whom they dispense faults and qualities), and content themselves with adding that they constitute the most persistent vestiges left by paganism…

Certain modern mythologists are not far from thinking that the explanation of this myth will come to us, not from Historians of mentalities, but from scholars.

Now, American and Russian Physicists, among others, estime that interferences between our universe and an invisible world, which is however just as real as ours, are possible.  They add that at certain epochs, “beings” coming from this “elsewhere” were able to intervene in the destiny of men…

Which could have given birth to tales of fairies.

***

Should we then believe that Jeanne d’Arc, who thought that she was in communication with Saint Catherine, Saint Margaret and Saint [the Archangel] Michael, was in fact in contact with “mysterious unknown beings” visiting this world, and in whom today’s Physicists believe?

Guy Breton, whose work I have translated, says that we are all free to think what we like.  All that he knows, is that the most marvellous and most extraordinary being in the History of France, that person who has her equivalent in no other country, at no other epoch, was born precisely in a little village where, for a century, young men and young girls go to roll around under a Fairy Tree…

***

UFOs in History

A celestial phenomenon observed in Paris on 10 February 1875, from 5:25 to 6:10 in the evening.

People often say “at the UFO epoch” when referring to the second half of the XXth Century…  In the same way that they say “at the time of the Inquisition” to designate certain periods in the past.  “Practices inherited from the Middle Ages”, someone will declare while denouncing some of today’s horrors.  As if cruelty were not of all times.  As if the apparition of the first UFOs only went back to the days immediately following the Second World War…

“In the night of 12 October 1621, around eight o’clock at night, the Moon being in its last quarter, the air started to lighten in the East.  For roughly an hour and a half, the sky became as light and clear as in the most beautiful mornings of Summer.  This gave great astonishment to the inhabitants of Lyon.  And the greatest part of them were looking up, because of this brightness, when they noticed in the sky some very strange things and these things were not natural…

“Above the big Place de Bellecour, they saw appearing a sort of great mountain, on which there was the form of a castle in a round shape and from this round-shaped castle, which was moving in the air with prodigious bounds, flashes of lightning were coming out, and it seemed to float on the whole of the Port du Rhone quarter, on Saint-Michel and above the Saone River.

“Around the Place des Terreaux, there was seen by more than four hundred people, this same day, a round star which was moving, and which was very luminous and as if surrounded by flashes of lightning…

“Over the city of Nimes there was seen at the same time, and principally in the following night of 13 October, around ten o’clock at night, just above the amphitheatre, a sort of brightly shining sun which was dancing, surounded by luminous torches, and this flamboyant sun seemed to want to travel straight onto the Roman tower, that is called La Tour Magne.  And this greatly astonished all of the inhabitants of the city.

“On the city of Montpellier, from ten o’clock in the evening to three o’clock in the morning, was seen a very luminous star which was moving above some houses, and from this star lances of fire were coming out, and all the people were outside and were observing this with great astoundment.”…

A few years earlier, and without predudice to the Mediterranean people’s gift for embellishment, three strange boats appeared off Genes.  According to the numerous testimonies of the epoch, they were a type of floating carriage, perfectly spherical, surrounded and as if haloed by long filaments of fire “the same as the tongues of dragons”.  The power of suggestion of these engines must have been considerable, since several witnesses, such as the son of Sieur de Loro and the brother of Signor Bagatello as well as several women, died from emotion.  So much so that, the next day 16 August, the Bishop of Genes had a solemn Te Deum said in the cathedral…

In the Maya temple at Palenque, Mexico, there is this famous sculpted stone where some see a man at the controls of an engine propulsed by reaction.

New apparition:  in the month of January 1609, above Angers this time, the whole city rushed into the street to see torches of fire moving in the sky.  They resembled “fat thistles all ardent” surrounded by immense red and blue lights.  After a few minutes of slow navigation the “things” concentrate their flight above the Saint Maurice and Saint Pierre churches.  The inhabitants, terrorised, see in this a sign from Heaven and rush all together into these two churches thinking that if the city was going to be attacked by these “things”, the holy places at least would be preserved…

Let us go back a few years more in time, but still staying in this rich period, into the XVIth Century which saw, it seems, a veritable epidemic of flying objects…

At the beginning of Winter 1578, on 21 December, right in the middle of the day, there is seen to appear in the Geneva sky a “star” the size of the Moon and which was moving very fast.  The star in question is trailing behind it “a great abundance of fire”.  One of the testimonies, reported in a book published by the Parisian Editor Jean Pinart in 1579, gives the precision that the “star” had left behind it in the sky three great black arcs which resembled smoke and that, around Geneva, several fields had been burnt…

One month later, a new prodigy, in France this time, still reported in the Discours merveilleux et espouvantables des Signes et Prodiges by Jean Pinart:

“On 23 January 1579, around six or seven o’clock in the evening, above a village on the Seine River named Essone, there appeared a great dragon of round shape which was vomitting fire in great abundance.  And this dragon followed the river, and it was said that it sent out thunder, and there was a great flooding of the waters, to such an extent that several boats of food supplies were lost, even though there had been no storm nor earthquake.  Then, the dragon danced around and it disappeared and no-one saw it again…”

***

On 7 August 1566, over Bale, numerous spherical objects (some dark-coloured, others luminous) seemed to be in combat. This lasted several hours and terrified the population.

Most of these texts come from the Bibliotheque nationale where a friend of Louis Pauwels found them.  They were in a little book from the 1600s only re-published in  the XIXth Century and drawn up by what could be called the “journalists” of the epoch, to give an account of a particularly abundant series of prodigies.

***

They occurred in the sky, on the surface of water or on the ground but they all ended in a more or less sudden manner in the atmosphere…  They were all visions of unidentified objects which are of course interpreted according to the cultural references of the epoch.  As we have seen, they are round castles, surrounded by flashes of lightning, or round stars which move very rapidly throwing out blinding lights, or carriages (the only vehicles at the epoch which could serve as comparison) which float in the air surrounded by serpents of light or by fat thistles.  Forms where the sphere predominates and which emit red or blue lights, or fabulous animals (what impression would the Concorde make in the sky of Henri IV of France?) which vomit flames.  What is particularly remarkable is that – on the contrary to what happens today – all of these phenomena are observed at the same time by hundreds or thousands of people and always in well determined places…

***

On 14 April 1561, the inhabitants of Nuremberg fearfully watched objects with strange forms performing a fantastic ballet in the air above their city.

Everything invites us to think that these phenomena totally resemble the observations of flying saucers which appeared regularly in the press in the XXth Century.

Louis Pauwels, whose work I have translated, thinks that it would be fascinating to undertake a systematic study of all of these discours on the prodigies of the XVIth and XVIIth Centuries which, aside from the moralising conclusion attached to all of them – Heaven is sending us these signs to exhort us to repent and prepare us for the Last Judgement – are nothing more than reports taken down at the time, certain of which are excellent and worthy of the reports by our Police Forces today…

Why would these authors have invented these stories?  The most striking thing about them is perhaps the relative dryness of their accounts, their sobriety in any case.  They never try to embellish their testimony or make ulterior events depend on these manifestations.  That these events had also been seen in Geneva, in the austere capital of calvinism, is another proof of their authenticity:  the mistrust of the Reformed Church for anything marvellous of divine origin is well known.

***

Louis Pauwels does not necessarily conclude that flying saucers exist, although certain testimonies are often particularly serious and troubling.  He simply ponders the constance of these phenomena throughout all human History.  And the constance of these apparitions and of these hallucinations in the sky should lead, along with research and objective, material proof, to systematic speculation about this remarkable permanence in History…

***

I should like to add that, although I believe that people really do see these things, I do not necessarily believe that they come from another planet.  I think that they could come from the Future.  A Future where Science has managed to find an answer to the question of the expansion and contraction of Time and Space and has been able to build machines for their biologists and anthropologists, not to mention environmentalists, to visit the past.

All that work and money going into doing something that people do already today without machines.  Wouldn’t it be easier to study how they do it and develop a method that other people can use?  Of course, this would involve scientists studying all the different fields of spiritualty and they seem intent on studying only material things.  Pity.

Louis Pasteur and the microbe revolution – part 10

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) in 1886.

Meanwhile, in France, nothing has changed.  The great medical chiefs have absolute confidence in themselves, and despite the brilliant results that Joseph Lister continues to obtain in Edinburgh, the principle of asepsis is disdainfully rejected.  Today, one can look back sadly at the number of lives which would have been saved if Pasteur’s, Lister’s and Guerin’s advice on elementary hygiene had been adopted as soon as it was known.  Pasteur, a great one for shaking up ideas, outdoes himself in communications before the Academie de medecine, and battles on all fronts:

“If one examines a probe under the microscope, one finds on its surface ridges and valleys inside which are lodged dusts that the most minutious washing cannot completely remove.  The flame allows the entire destruction of these organic dusts.  So, in my laboratory where I am enveloped in germs of all sorts, I do not use an instrument without firstly passing it through the flame.”

Alas, for the eternal supporters of spontaneous generation, the germ is born in the patient, it does not come from the instruments.  Therefore, people continue to die under the Surgeon’s scalpel.

The room where one gives birth seems to the women of the people to be death’s antechamber.  They still recall in horror that, inside the Hopital de la Maternite de Paris, from 1st April to 10 May 1856, out of three hundred and forty-seven women having given birth, there were sixty-four deaths.  The hospital had to be closed, and the survivors were obliged to take refuge in the Hopital Lariboisiere, where almost all of them succumbed, pursued – it was said – by the epidemic.  Eight years later, in 1864, out of one thousand, five hundred and thirty women having given birth, there were three hundred and ten deaths.  It was another thirteen years before Tarnier, then at the head of the Maternite de Paris, put into practice Lister’s techniques, asepsis techniques which had already been adopted by Russia, Holland, Germany, Austria and Denmark, with the greatest success.  Doctor Roux evokes Pasteur’s state of mind during these incessant battles that he was having with the Doctors.  He is not content with just giving advice, criticizing (and, in passing, making permanent enemies among those who place their professional vanity higher than scientific progress), he works ceaselessly to demonstrate that which he is advancing.  He searches, he experiments and improves the technique of the culture of microbes in the laboratory, getting them to reproduce in his flasks, his test-tubes, in different nutritive media, such as the beer yeast bouillon.  This technique was initiated by a young German Medical Doctor who himself admitted being stimulated by Pasteur’s studies.  His name is Doctor Koch.  Assisted by his wife and daughter, this country Doctor, living in a little village in an eastern province, will bring direct proof that a defined type of microbe is at the origin of a defined type of illness, by developing a pure culture containing only one bacterial layer.  It is with this method that he would succeed, in 1882, in isolating the tuberculosis bacillus.

In Paris, Pasteur goes into hospitals, takes samples from sick people, with his sterilized test-tubes and pipettes.  When he is warned of the dangers of contagion, he replies:

“Life amongst danger is a real life, it is a great life, it is a life of sacrifice, it is a life of example, that which fecunds!”

He roars with holy anger against the Doctors who continue to dissert without acting:

“I’ll make them move!  They must come round to it, whatever it takes!”

In June 1877, he notices under his microsope a long filament, crawling and flexible, translucent to the point of easily not being seen and which, in his own words, “pushes aside the globules of blood like a serpent pushes aside grass in the bushes”.  It is the septic vibrion, discovered inside the deep veins of an asphyxiated horse.  From the peritone where it is rife, this moving thread passes into the blood after death.  A drop of this infected blood innoculated into another animal immediately provokes septicaemia in it.  But there is a problem:  this minuscule killer cannot stand oxygen, which destroys it.  How can it then act and make victims by passing through the air?  The Chemist cultivates the vibrion in a vacuum and in the presence of carbonic gas.  His experience in the seeding and dissemination of beer yeasts, and those of the silkworm maladies, allow him to work by comparisons.  As Emile Duclaux says:

“To the question:  is it a virus?  Is it a microbe?  Pasteur is better placed than anyone else to find an answer.  From his studies on beer, from his fights with his contradictors, he is armed with a technique already formed, with the knowledge and the manipulation of microbian species.”

In fact, the “so-called Chemist” permits himself to give courses on Methodology to his enemies.  Amedee Latour, a journalist from Union Medicale, who regularly follows the seances at the Academie de medecine, reports, amused, one of Pasteur’s clashes with a contradictor.  It is again a believer in spontaneous generation, but this time it is not a Medical Doctor, it is a Veterinary Surgeon, Colin,  professeur d’ecole from Alfort.  Colin describes his experiment:  he had innoculated the leg of an animal with blood from another animal which had died from anthrax.  The lymph gland nearest to the injection swelled, the innoculated animal is in turn ill, but Colin does not find bacteridies in the gland, or in the animal’s blood, and yet, it is infectious.  Pasteur asks him how he had examined the glandular liquid.  Colin replies with the microscope of course.  Pasteur tells him that, as his microscope only shows things four or five hundred times their size, this was not the right way to go about it.

“It was four or five square metres of your glass plate over which you should have passed your microscope to be able to perceive the one and only bacteridie which had escaped […] when you examined your gland.  It is by the culture of the bacteridies that one is able to arrive at the certitude of the opinions that I have advanced on anthrax.”

And the journalist concludes:

“What a valiant fighter Monsieur Pasteur is!”

To be continued.

Louis Pasteur and the microbe revolution – part 8

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) in 1886.

Curiously, it is in Italy that the utility of Pasteur’s method of raising silkworms will be demonstrated.  In Italy and in a private Parisian study whose high windows open onto the Place du Carrousel.  There, an old soldier, Field-Marshal Vaillant, Minister of the House of the Emperor, raises silkworms in the heart of Paris and verifies the merits of Pasteur’s procedure.  Convinced, he decides to take the scholar to finish his convalescence in Trieste in a magnanery whose production of silk cocoons has been nil for ten years.  Under the direction of its inventor, the Pasteur Method then performs marvels, and at last, in the Centre of Production’s Accounts Ledger, in the column which has been empty for ten years, the sum of 22,000 francs is written, the nett profit from the sale of cocoons from silkworms, at last productive and in perfect health.  Pasteur takes advantage of this calmer period to write a treatise on his procedure.  High Italy and Austria adopt the system, France would end up following.

A good many years later, in 1882, he would be acclaimed by the little town of Aubenas, in Ardeche.  The Municipality would make him a gift of a little microscope – that microscope of which it was said that no magnanery would know how to use it.  The President of the Spinners’ Syndicate would say at the time to him:

“For us all, you were the helpful genie whose magical intervention removed the spell of the plague that was ruining us.  It is the benefactor that we salute in you.”

In fact, during these four years, the Chemist Pasteur will have progressed in the understanding of living beings, and gleaned along the way a whole sum of information which will take on all its sense a few years later with vaccination.  He was able to observe that the visible corpuscules in the sick silkworm moths totally lose their faculty for contagion by exposition to air and through dessication.

The 1870 War erupts, the Museum of Natural History is bombarded, Val-de-Grace Hospital is under fire from Prussian cannons, l’Ecole normale is partially destroyed;  there is fighting in Paris.  Pasteur and his family then leave the capital for Arbois.  Gradually, the cannon noise moves away and work will start again.  Pasteur remarks:

“The War put my brain out to pasture.”

***

Pasteur writes to Claude Bernard:

“I have decided to go with my family to settle for a few months near Clermont-Ferrand close to my dear Duclaux, at Royat.”

Pasteur joins his pupil who has become a Professor of Chemistry at the Faculty of Clermont.  Duclaux sets up a little laboratory for him.  But between Royat and Clermont, there is Chamalieres and its Beer Brewery.  Like wine, beers “become troubled, acidic, turn bad, runny or putrid”.  Pasteur is then animated by patriotic sentiments:  German beer, in fact, is largely superior to French beer.  He wants to free his country from its importations by finding an answer, that is to say, by isolating the good yeast.  After crystals and silkworms, he studies fermentations.  The same scenario as that of the tartrate occurs again:  he goes to visit Breweries in England where the samples of beer are observed under the microscope, then taken from the greatest Parisian cafes, as well as in the Brewery of the Tourtel Brothers, in Nancy.  In this periple, he is accompanied by Bertin, a former companion at the Ecole normale, and joyful gastronomist.  Bertin tries to convince his friend that beer should not be considered exclusively as a fermentation problem, but that it can also procure great joys…  Pasteur smiles and bends over his microscope.  He notices that quality yeast is obtained more or less by chance;  if a fermentation fails, the Brewer procures other primary materials, with all the dangers of contamination represented by transports between Breweries, between cities, between countries.  The study begins.  The balloons are seeded, they are heated to 20 degrees Centigrade, 60 degrees Centigrade.  In 1875, after five years of experiments, it is the publication of Etudes sur la biere et les conseils aux brasseurs.  The principle would be:

“It is necessary that the sweetened wort [that is to say, the future beer, not yet fermented] be exempt from impureties and that the air which is continuously renewed on the surface of the liquid always arrive pure…”

The Chemist shows that there are good and bad yeasts in the fermentation wort.  He proposes therefore to the Brewers to remove all the yeasts, before seeding them exclusively with the good ones.  To finance his research, he becomes an Engineer and deposits the Patent for an apparatus for the sterilization of the beer wort.  Pasteur rejoices to see that the Brewers accept his process without reticence, and that the Jacobsens have created in Carlsberg “a laboratory destined exclusively to progress in the art of brewing”.

Then the scholar tries his hand at Politics, for the Senate Elections, with a programme which can be summed up almost in one sentence:

“Science at the service of the citizen.”

It’s a bit short, and the voters send him back to his test-tubes.  His nephew, Adrien Loir, proposes an amusing explanation for this defeat:

“Pasteur had the phobia of shaking hands, and that is probably what made people think that he was haughty.  […]  In the light of his principles [of hygiene], he was sparing with his handshakes.  It is perhaps for this, and also for other reasons that, in 1876, he failed when he presented himself for election to the Senate in the Jura.”

***

To be continued.

Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and Agarttha

Saint-Yves d'Alveydre

The writer Saint-Yves d’Alveydre (1842-1909) was the first to speak of Agarttha in his work Mission de l’Inde en Europe.  This strange book was published in 1886;  but the editor did not have time to distribute it to the bookshops.  The author, pretexting that superior authorities had ordered him not to deliver secrets which until then had remained unviolated, made him destroy it immediately.  One copy escaped destruction.  Which allowed another printing in 1910.  The number of copies was unfortunately so small that this work rapidly became impossible to find.  A few decades ago, it was reprinted by Claude Boumendil and Gilbert Tappa, Directors of Editions Belisane, in Nice, with an introduction by Jean Saunier.  The following is an extract of this book, with the description that Saint-Yves d’Alveydre gives of Agarttha according to information given to him by two Hindu Initiates.

***

Where is Agarttha?  In what place exactly does it reside?  By what road, through which peoples does one have to travel to enter it?

To this question, that diplomats and war people will not miss asking, it is not appropriate for me to answer further than I am going to do, as long as the synarchic understanding [entente synarchique] is not finalized or at least signed.  [Synarchy is government by a group of people.]

But, as I know that, in their mutual competitions throughout the whole of Asia, certain powers touch this sacred territory without knowing it, as I know that at the moment of a possible conflict, their armies must be obliged to either pass through or near it, it is out of humanity for these European peoples, as well as for Agarttha itself, that I am not afraid to pursue the divulgation that I have begun.

On the Earth’s surface and underground, the real extent of Agarttha defies the embrace and constraint of profanation and violence.  Without mentioning America, whose underground belonged to it in very ancient times, in Asia alone, almost half a thousand million men more or less know of its existence and size.  But one will not find a traitor among them to indicate where its Council of God and its Council of the Gods, its pontifical head and its juridical heart can be found.

If this did however happen, and if it were invaded despite its numerous and terrible defenders, any army of conquest, were it of a million men, would see renewed the thundering response of the Temple of Delphi to the innumerable hords of Persian Satrapes.

Calling to their aid the Cosmic Powers of the Earth and the Sky, even vanquished, the Templars and the Confederates of Agarttha could, if need be, blow up part of the Planet and crush with a cataclysm both the armed profaners and their country.

It is for scientific reasons that the central part of this holy land has never been profaned despite the ebb and flow, the shock and the mutual swallowing up of military empires, from Babylon to the Touranian Kingdom of High Tartary, from Suzes to Pella, from Alexandria to Rome.

***

Hardjij Scharipf was doubtless one of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's informers.

The libraries which hold the veritable body of all the antique arts and sciences, for five hundred and fifty-six centuries, are inaccesssible to all profane eyes and to all attacks.

One can only find them underground.

Concerning the Cycle of Ram, they occupy some of the underground parts of the ancient Empire of Aries [the Ram] and its colonies.

The libraries of the anterior Cycles can be found right under the seas which flooded the antique southern continent, right in the underground constructions of the ancient prediluvian America.

What I am about to say here and further on will seem like a story from the Arabian Nights, however, nothing is more real.

The veritable university archives of the Paradesa occupy thousands of kilometres.  Since the cycles of centuries, each year, a few high Initiates, in possession of the secret of only certain regions, are the only ones who know the real aim of certain works…

***

The reader must imagine a colossal chess-board extending underground through nearly all the regions of the Globe.

In each of the squares can be found the splendours of the terrestrial years of Humanity, in certain squares,  secular encyclopaedias and those of the millenia, in certain others those of the Minor and Major Yugs.

The day when Europe has replaced the anarchy of her General Government by the Trinity Synarchy, all of these marvels and many others will be spontaneously accessible to the representatives of its first Amphictyonic Chamber:  that of Teaching.

But, until then, curious, imprudent people who would start digging the Earth, beware!

They would find nothing but certain disappointment and an inevitable death.

The Sovereign Pontiff of Agarttha, along with his principal assessors, of whom I shall speak, is the only one who gathers completely in its totality the knowledge, within his supreme initiation, of the sacred catalogue of this planetary library.

He is the only one to possess in its integrity the cyclical key indispensable not only to open each of its sections, but to know exactly what is to be found there, to pass from one to another, and above all to be able to leave it.

What good would it be to the profaner, to have succeeded in forcing open one of the underground sections of this brain, this integral memory of Humanity?!…

***

When the breeze made ladies pregnant – part 4

In the XVIIIth Century, it was believed that a woman sleeping naked on her bed could be fecunded by the South-West zephyr.

The whole History of procreation seems to have been marked by great misogyny.  Over two or three centuries, a completely specialized literature develops it, inspired at the same time by Scripture, scientific observation and philosophy.  Speaking of Woman, eminent Sorbonnards affirm:

“The humidity of her constitution renders her inapt for tasks which demand character”,

and,

“on top of which, one is not totally sure that she has a soul”…

It is for this reason that, out of prudence, the first human dissections are practised on women.

In 1595, an opuscule in Latin by the German philosopher Acidalius proclaims:

“Mulieres non esse homines”;  women are not part of humankind…

***

It is therefore understandable that parents are not ecstatic about the birth of a little girl…

In the XVIIIth Century, it was starting to be said that women carried eggs from which children were born.

From the IVth Century before the present era, since Aristotle, the woman is only the receptacle of the embryo deposited by the man.  She is a reproduction tool accorded to the man to relieve him of the burden of having to nourish this embryo and give birth to it.

This is why L’art de procreer des males, a book by Morel de Rubempre, still has, in 1824, great success and numerous re-editions.  It essentially takes up the elucubrations of Millot in 1802, of which the following is a sample:

“The husband must always lie on the woman’s left.  At the moment of the ejaculation, he must quickly pass his left hand under his spouse’s right buttock, and lift her up until her hip forms, with the suface on which she is lying, an angle of twenty-five to thirty degrees.  This is not all, things such as the height of the bed, the position of the husband, whether he is standing, and the wife lying down, for example, must be taken into account.  If he is himself lying down, he has to modify the firing angle of the “cannon of life” in function of the width of the opening of his spouse’s hips and the depth of the dent that they make in the mattress.”

The great Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, in his Histoire des anomalies, recounts seriously, in 1832, that sentiments can have a strong influence on the child before its birth.  For example, a little girl is born in Year III of the French Republic with, on her left breast, the mark of a Phrygian bonnet.  The Directoire also rewarded with a pension of four hundred francs a mother so patriotic as to have given birth to a female child bearing on her buttock a patriotic brevet and a revolutionary emblem.

The first serious refutations of the role of the imagination or fears, or of “cravings”, only go back to the middle of the XIXth Century.  In English maternities, pregnant women are then asked what has impressed their minds during their pregnancy and it is perceived that:

(1) – children are born without anomalies;

(2) – that if there are any anomalies, it is only after the birth that the mothers find any explanations.

However, these fears of another age still last today.  In 1971, a report on pregnancy and birth, established by Marie-Therese Miehe (collection “Diagnostics”) notes the following questions asked by young women:

“I saw a black man and I had a shock.  Will my child be born black?”

“I listened to a lot of music for nine months.  Will my child be a musician?”

“Do unsatisfied cravings cause malformations?”

We are far from having left the age of magic.

***

When the breeze made ladies pregnant – part 3

A few years later in this XVIIth Century, thanks to the microscope which is a recent invention, a young German doctor, Louis de Ham, discovers that a drop of sperm was in fact

“an ocean where an innumerable multitude of little fishes were swimming, in a thousand different directions”.

These little fishes immediately suscitate an infatuation which is even more considerable.  Exactly what are they…  animals?  Probably!  But what sort of animals?  Fishes, tadpoles, toads?  Let us say “animalcules”, decides the scientific world.  But most importantly, it is again the man who is at the origin of life.

So fecundity, which that laughable ovist thesis had attributed to females, is returned to the males, gloats Maupertuis, the great French mathematician.

But are these animalcules miniature humans and do they have sexes?  Of course they do!  It is thought that little male and female fishes can be distinguished.  They are incredibly numerous and the adults have a tail while the little ones do not.  There is a rut season for the spermatozoa, during which they mate.  The female spermatozoa soon give birth…

Their way of life is not very amiable.  They love to fight and if the one who survives is seriously wounded, a monstrous child will be born.

It must also be noted that the little male fishes are to be found in the right bourse, the little female fishes being in the left bourse.  Therefore, in the man, as in the woman, the left testicle – the left ovary in the woman – gives females.  To be sure of having boys, which is infinitely preferable, it is enough, advises Doctor Michel Procope-Couteau, the author of a remarkable Art de faire des garcons, to cut off the left testicle.  But can any volunteers be found?  He suggests:

“To prove that this essential thesis is correct, let us start by cutting the testicles and the ovaries of people who have been condemned to death and marry these half-eunuchs together.”

This strange doctor does not appear to have found the human material for which he was asking, but his thesis flourishes…

Doctor Tissot found a way of having only boys. The woman had to lean on her left side "when she was working to become a mother"...

People are convinced that, to have a boy, they only have to place themselves on their right side at the moment of their love-making…  But in the end, the idea that Man comes from a tadpole displeases just as fast as the one that situates his origin in an egg.

Abbot Spallanzani, the great Italian biologist, Pasteur’s precursor, who died at the dawn of the XIXth Century, is the last to say anything good about spermatozoa.

Creatures endowed for him with a “supreme wisdom”, an “adorable wisdom”, they are only, for the Swiss physiologist Haller, the author of two hundred works on these questions, “insects” who are born in a not very nice environment, “faecal”, he says.  Soon, they are called “parasites”, vulgar “cercaried gymnodes” and the immense Cuvier himself reduces them, in 1841, to the rank of “microzoa”…

From the beginning of the XVIIIth Century, there is a forceful return of the egg vogue…

But then these spermatozoa must be only “parasites”.

In the heart of the XIXth Century, two theses are going to sweep away all of the others, those of chemical generation and of electrical generation.

Tinchant demonstrates in four hundred tight pages that it is the man who “breathes in the principle of life contained in the air”, distills it in his blood and transforms it into sperm, “germ of life par excellence”.  The woman only “condenses” it, supplying it with hydrogen and carbon which form the membranes and the waters…  Long live the warrior once more, and too bad for the vivandiere!…

Burdach is scarcely more collected in demonstrating that the sexual act is of an electrical essence.

He explains that the electric contact which runs through the body when two people join, provokes an electrical commotion, and an “electrical conflict manifests itself in the power of the gaze of the two beings, enchained by the ties of love”…

So, Victor Hugo’s contemporaries are delighted to learn that it is the electricity fairy who, by slipping “between the spinal cords of the man and the woman”, communicates to the organs of generation what is necessary to assure, with ecstasy, the survival of the species…

And Man would only begin to understand the true nature of fecundation less than one hundred and fifty years ago with Van Beneden’s fundamental discoveries.

We have only left the magical, crazy or baroque ideas on human procreation for this short space of time.

Less than one and a half centuries, against two or three  thousand years of phantasmagoria.  Food for thought, no?…

***

To be continued.

Elisabeth, the untamed princess – part 3

In Summer 1848, Princess Ludovika, Duchess in Bavaria, accompanied by her daughters Helena and Elisabeth, and two of her sons, had met her sister, Archduchess Sophia of Austria, at Innsbruck.  Franz-Josef and two of his brothers had accompanied their mother.  Sissi and Franzi had seen each other for the first time, but a whole world then separated them.  Firstly, age:  he was almost eighteen, she was only ten.  Then, the preoccupations of a State on the verge of crumbling.  His mother kept telling him that the future reposed on his shoulders, the time for childish games was over.  The boy was grave, and looked without any particular interest at this little cousin with the round cheeks, and her hair done in bands in the Bavarian fashion, not really pretty, but whom everyone adored.  On the other hand, his brother Karl-Louis, who is only fifteen, stops dead in admiration before Sissi.  And any pretext is good to gather a bouquet and choose fruit for her.  The young girl is delighted at receiving all these little attentions.  The separation is made that much sadder.  Karl-Louis grabs his pen and writes to his cousin who has gone back to Possenhofen.  He even sends her a rose and, in a revealing gesture, a ring:  Karl-Louis is in love.  Totally, sincerely, definitively…  On her floral writing paper, she thanks him.  And her kind letter is also accompanied by a ring.  Karl-Louis has no doubt that such a gift represents a vow.  But Sissi is still only a little girl, a forest princess, a rosebud.  Adorable and already adored, but with no constraints.

Five years later, in the middle of August 1853, Sissi has become a young lady obliged to keep quiet and not move, in the family travelling coach which has left Salzburg for Bad Ischl.

Her mother’s project is simple:  she wants to marry her daughter Helena to her nephew Franz-Josef.  And her sister, in Vienna, completely agrees with this idea.  Having already given an emperor to Austria, Sophia is now actively looking for an empress.  European politics are then essentially a family matter, a succession of alliances and rivalities.

Emperor Franz-Josef of Austria.

His first official portrait shows the young Emperor in his favourite clothes, the uniform.  He had been a soldier, receiving his baptism of fire against the Sardes, at the Battle of Santa Lucia on 6 May 1848;  he will remain a soldier all his life.  With a white tunic embroidered with red and gold cord, red pants with gold bands, gilded belt, he wears the colours of Austria.  His right hand at his waist, the left fist on some battle plan, Franz-Josef wears a sabre.  With his auburn hair, full lips, and long,slim face, he is beautiful.  His body, very slim, is thought fragile and delicate.  However, his energy is astounding.

The liberal varnish has quickly fallen away and national claims have clashed with terrible repression.  Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg, a very firm diplomat at the head of the Government, is very clear:

“We can be clement later.  For the moment we need to go on hanging for a while.”

The Italian uprisings have been put down, but it is in Hungary that the repression has been the worst.  By order of the Tsar, three hundred thousand Russian soldiers have crushed Hungarian resistance.  Nicolas I did not act only out of love for Austria, but out of fear that Poland, in turn, might rise.  The President of the Council had been shot and thirteen generals had died at the end of a cord.

Franz-Josef had asked that the right of grace be used, and prescribed that any capital condemnation firstly be approved by his Cabinet.  Certain Austrian generals having forgotten this procedure, Franz-Josef had the courage to remove them from their functions.

The infernal machine of repression in Italy and Hungary bloody the first months of Franz-Josef’s reign.  Sequestrations, confiscations, executions, imprisonments, no-one escapes the counter-revolution, not even aristocrats who had dared to rise against Vienna.  Schwarzenburg resumes his political  opinions:

“The basis of Government is strength, not ideas.”

The Croatians, the Czechs, the Hungarians, the Bohemians, the Lombards, the Piemontais and the Venitians had had too many ideas, or rather they had had only one:  to be free.  But the fragile Viennese monarchy considers these foyers of revolt as too numerous to be spontaneous.

On 4 March 1849, Franz-Josef promulgates a Constitution.  This text recognizes only one State, Austria;  Hungary is integrated as Crown Land, while Lombardy and Venetia become provinces.  The nationalisms are not calmed, they are gagged.

In Vienna, Franz-Josef presides his first Council of Ministers on 17 August 1851.  A sort of unofficial triumvirat directs Austrian affairs:  Franz-Josef reigns, Schwarzenberg governs and old Chancellor Metternich, the “coachman of Europe”, advises the Emperor, who consults him frequently.  The Archduchess rules her precious son’s life.  His marriage has become an obsession.  For there is nothing like the image of happiness for consolidating a monarchy, particularly if it is convalescent.  The Archduchess looks at the great European families.  An Hungarian?  Out of the question!  How could the Austrians forget the insurrection of Budapest?  How could the Hungarians forget the execution of the President of the Council of Ministers?  A little farther North, an alliance with Prussia could give Austria a certain weight against a faraway, but substantial Russia.  Franz-Josef is attracted to Princess Anna, the King’s niece.  She is twenty-two, he likes her, but the tractations come to nothing with the impossibility for Princess Anna to renounce her Protestant religion.  Sophia then looks toward the West, close to Austria, the other side of the Tyrol, toward Bavaria.  She looks at her sister Ludovika.

Politically, Bavaria is sure.  Bavaria is Roman Catholic, like Austria;  Bavaria is threatened by Prussia, like Austria.  An alliance between the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs could be very useful in the role that Austria plays at the heart of the Germanic Confederation.  Archduchess Sophia remembers her niece Helena, beautiful and above all reasonable, the perfect young lady.  She would be an ideal empress who would not overshadow the great lady of the family.

The Archduchess is on the point of writing to her sister to ask for news of her daughter Helena, Nene for the family, when an assassination attempt plunges Vienna into stupefaction.  On 18 February 1853, a little after half-past-noon, an Hungarian, armed with a knife, rushes towards Franz-Josef, who is busy watching troop exercises.  A woman’s cry makes the sovereign turn his head, the blade slides between the collar of his uniform and the metal buckle of his tie.  Another few centimetres and the Emperor would have been dead with his throat cut.  In the confusion that follows, Franz-Josef cries out to the brave passer-by who, with his own aide-de-camp, has brought down the struggling aggressor:

“Don’t kill him!”

To be continued.

The Baron de Geramb – part 4

The Baron de Geramb

Until his arrest, the Baron de Geramb is occupied, with great perseverance, in turning the crowned heads of Europe against Napoleon.  He also attempts to win over the Prince de Conde, the Commander-in-Chief of the Armee des Emigres.  For this purpose, he goes to Worms and to Coblenz where the Emigres had reconstituted a little turbulent and exalted Court.

The Duke de Berry, who is there, does not, however, succumb to Geramb’s charm.  He is supposed to have said of him:

“This charlatan is more a General for the Jacobins than a General against them”.

Superficial impressions perhaps inspire this severe judgement.  Just imagine the Baron arriving with his portable arsenal at the refined Coblenz Court.  Or, perhaps the Duke has a rapid intuition of the Baron’s fragile psychology.  Police reports, generally bad, because they are drawn up by people who have every interest in denigrating the Baron, perhaps influence the Duke, too.

***

It is certain that, at the Empire’s collapse, when he leaves prison, Geramb has his moment of truth, which definitively cures him of his youthful extravagances.  At forty-three, after twenty-five years of dissipations and extravagances, he draws the line on his follies.

For thirty-three years, he devotes himself to his religious Order, with the same fervour that he put into his profane adventures.  It is from 1816 that he throws himself headlong into Faith, a bit like Saint Augustin, who starts out by “throwing hinself into love”, the physical variety, before serving only the glorious body of the chosen, as he, himself, will say.

***

Brother Marie-Joseph

The general biographical acts of the clergy allow us to follow more easily the different stages of his second existence.  On the portrait that we have of him, he appears a bit absorbed in devotion, his head partly bald and his body thickened.  The mystery of his size is not really cleared up because he is represented seated.  The police reports are very contradictory also on this point:  some give him as one metre seventy-five, others one metre sixty-five, that is to say, way off the gigantic size given to him by the English press when he debarks in London.

What is certain is that he played an important role in the Order of the Trappists, a most venerable Order, since its foundation goes back to the XIIth Century, and which counts several dozen convents and a few thousand monks in the middle of the XVIIIth Century.

The function that he exercised, “General Procurer” of the Order, puts him on an equal footing with the “General Abbot” who, from 1892, will reside in Rome.  In Rome, where the adventures of Geramb are known, and captivate the highest Vatican dignitaries.

But this life, so very rich and so spell-binding, whose magical character is undeniable, hides a last mystery, which is quite sizeable.  Adulated by his equals, estimed by the whole hierarchy of the Church, Geramb is also received by pious Queen Marie-Amelie, the daughter of that Marie-Caroline whose head he had turned so well, twenty-five years earlier.

He is at the head of a religious Order, which is very strict about its Rule, at the Paris Court and in Rome, but he dies without ever having received Orders, not even the “quatre moindres”.

We don’t even know where he is buried.

***

The Baron de Geramb – part 3

The Baron de Geramb

It seems fairly certain that the Baron de Geramb is born in Lyon on 14 July 1772.  His father is an Austrian citizen who moves to Lyon to trade in silk, and his mother, Marie-Magdeleine Lassause is of the good middle-class.  In 1790, his father returns to Vienna, taking his wife and two daughters, the sisters of Ferdinand-Francois, the spirited Baron.  No-one knows if Geramb goes with his parents when they return to Austria, which is motivated by the excesses of the French Revolution (the Baron’s own step-father will be guillotined in 1793).  This uncertainty also authorises many hypotheses on his identity:  the chronicle of his adventures really only starts in 1809, at the Court of Vienna.  Is the adolescent fleeing the proscriptions, and the knight serving the Empress of Austria, the same man?  Nothing permits us to affirm it with certainty.

On the other hand, we can be assured of the perfect honorablility of the Gerambs who are of authentic nobility, which gives them a very visible situation at the Vienna Court.  Geramb’s uncle had received letters of bourgeoisie from the city of Lyon, in 1763, and had acquired the lands and the Castle of Jigny, one of the most beautiful domains in Bourgogne [Burgundy].  We also know that the Baron’s mother returns to live in Lyon, her town of birth, at the end of the French Revolution.

***

Our Baron makes frequent stays in Lyon, from 1814.  His mother never repudiates her prodigal son, and neither does the rest of the family.  When she is asked about him, she indicates that he is “in the military state or public servant”, that he is a widower and the father of three children.  There is, however, no trace of either his wife or any descendance.

The most troubling fact is that this man, reputed for his sincerity and his often brutal frankness, will deny throughout his whole life that he was born in Lyon, and will never reveal the place of his birth.

***

The French authorities intend to organize a confrontation between mother and son.  Right throughout his detention in France, they zealously try to pierce the mystery of his origins.  For very simple reasons:  Geramb assuredly knows a lot of important people in Europe.  Because of this, he is feared to be a spy and a lot is expected of him as an eventual indicator or informer.

At the time of his incarceration, the French police learn that he really did have plans to kill the Emperor.  During his stay in Palermo, he is supposed to have proposed to Queen Marie-Caroline that he go to Paris to assassinate him.  Every day, he practised firing pistols at a target which was a portrait of Napoleon.

His acquaintances and his reputation afford him the special prison treatment meted out to “political” prisoners.  The quarters in the prisons where he is incarcerated are those reserved for important prisoners.

For example, the man whom he finds in the fiacre which carries him to La Force, and with whom he will share a cell, is none other than Monsignor de Boulogne, a famous Prelate of the time, who is imprisoned for the crime of Ultramontanism.

***

The confrontation between mother and son is supposed to take place in November 1812.  It is the tragic outcome of the Russian campaign which adjourns Madame Geramb’s arrival in Paris.  The Empire’s gradual crumbling after that, means that this confrontation, which would have been decisive, never takes place.

***

Geramb’s title of Baron is authentic.  He obtained it in circumstances which are again strange.  Many questions have been asked about the reasons for the Baron’s “flight” when, in 1809, Napoleon is advancing in forced marches towards Vienna.  He is known to be courageous, even temerarious, and this precipitous retreat does not fit with the character.

His detractors have accused him of embezzling the money that he received from selling lieutenant commissions to young nobles – these sales are customary at the time.  This explanation is surely false, for three months later, on 19 July 1809, the Emperor of Austria confers the title of “Austrian Baron” on him, a great and very coveted favour.  The best explanation is to be found in the role that Geramb plays at the Court of Vienna.  A beautiful young man, spirited, dancing attendance, always in love, our Chamberlain rapidly attracts the fascinated gazes of the ladies of the Court.  The Empress finds that he has an allure “which incites to the most romanesque thoughts” and shows him all sorts of attentions.  Her prevenances are such that the Emperor of Austria, Franz I is offended by them, obliging our gallant Equerry to go away.  It is later shown, however, that he doesn’t hold a grudge.

***

A superficial examination of Geramb’s existence allows us to see a certain harmony, in spite of the blurred, mysterious parts of it.

All of the first part of his life, that is to say from 1790 to 1815, is consecrated to adventures, pleasures, intrigues and spectacular acts.  During all this period, he is taking care of his image of providential man, God’s flail, the defender of civilization.

He succeeds in attracting the confidence of some of the most important men of the epoch…  The Cortes name him General and send him with letters patent to England “to solicit the support of King George”.

***

Getting together an army of deserters can seem like an excellent idea.  Le us not forget that from 1810, the Napoleonic armies are above all improvised armies, from which even the generals often defect.  One of the reasons for the crumbling of the Empire is the excessive demand for recrutes;  deserters, refractory soldiers and prisoners are innumerable.

Persecuted by the recruting sergeants or mortified in their patriotic feelings, the young Europeans of the time dream only of fighting the one that they already call the “Ogre”.  The greatest artists of the epoch, Goya, Chateaubriand and Beethoven, are hostile to him, and it is this quasi general reprobation outside France’s frontiers which will precipitate his fall.  Geramb therefore dreams, a few years in advance, of making the Emperor the enemy of Europe…  which effectively happens in 1814.

***

To be continued.