Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, the Missions Revealer

Joseph-Alexandre Saint-Yves was born on March 26, 1842, in Paris, the son of Guillaume-Alexandre, a 36-year-old physician, and Marie-Josephine Amouroux, slightly over 18 years old, at one o’clock in the morning at the family residence located at number 23 on Rue L’Echiquier, a few meters from the Church of Saint-Denis.

His childhood was unhappy, marked by violent conflicts with paternal authority. Considered an untamable rebel, he would later describe himself in adulthood:

At school, I had the sad honor of being, among the insubordinate, the most insufferable.

Weary of his eccentricities, his parents enrolled him at age 13 in the Mettray Colony, a reformatory school in Indre-et-Loire, near Thiers. It had been founded by a counselor of the Court of First Instance of Paris, Frédéric-Auguste Demetz (1799–1873), who, from 1839 onward, had resigned from his official duties to devote himself to juvenile delinquents.

His pedagogical method was based on the intention to reform troubled youths through a life of work in the countryside, in a setting that included a château. He defined his institution as “a paternal society for the moral, agricultural, and professional education of young detainees under the age of 16, acquitted under Article 66 of the Penal Code for having acted without discernment.”

This initiative attracted the attention of many prominent figures in French society: the Count of Gasparin, the banker François Delessert, the Duke Decazes, Rambuteau, and others.
Run by Demetz and Herman de Courtelles, the institution—which spanned 196 hectares by 1855—took in youths from both wealthy and poor backgrounds. Demetz so effectively bonded with Saint-Yves and educated him that Saint-Yves developed great admiration for him and considered him his spiritual father.

That phase of Saint-Yves’s life lasted two years, after which he studied with the priest of Ingrandes, Abbé Rousseau, before returning to his paternal home. His relationship with his father did not improve during his absence, and his father forced him to enlist in the Marine Infantry. An intervention by Demetz made the father consent for Saint-Yves to continue his studies at the Naval Medical School of Brest.

For reasons that remain unclear, after three years of study, at the age of 22, he left the Medical School and decided to settle among the political exiles of the Second Empire on the Island of Jersey, probably to have the opportunity to associate with his great idol, Victor Hugo. Saint-Yves would remain a fervent Hugo supporter until the end of his life. In that environment, he met another Hugo devotee, Adolphe Pelleport, and frequently visited the homes of Auguste Desmoulins and Luc Desage, sons-in-law of Pierre Leroux.

Local society provided him other connections that would prove important for his future studies. Pelleport’s grandmother, Virgine Faure, highly cultured, had been associated with the occultist Fabre d’Olivet, who was often mentioned by Demetz to his disciple Saint-Yves. There, Saint-Yves had the opportunity to study Fabre d’Olivet directly at a reliable source, gaining exposure to his entire body of work, as well as to classic authors, forming a cultural foundation that would prove very useful to him later.

With the outbreak of the war of 1870, Saint-Yves returned to France and witnessed the Paris Commune, which made a profound impact on him and led him to reflect on political and social matters, marking the beginning of his ambition to discover a political formula capable of curbing violence in social relations.

However, his projects lay dormant for a time, as Saint-Yves had to accept modest employment at the Ministry of the Interior to earn his living.

Marriage

Poor and solitary, having authored a few pamphlets that went unnoticed, he even considered becoming a Trappist monk. Fate, however, led him in a different direction. During a soirée—one of the rare social gatherings he attended—held by Paul Lacroix at the Arsenal Library, he met Marie-Victoire de Risnitch, who in 1876 had divorced Count Edouard Fiodorovitch Keller, a senator and private counselor to the Russian czar. The wealthy countess, then 50 years old, and Saint-Yves, 36, discovered shared personal interests and a common love for studies in occultism and hermetic sciences. They fell in love and were married in 1877 in a discreet ceremony in Westminster, England.

After unsuccessful industrial ventures that resulted in heavy financial losses, the couple acquired, in 1880, Italian lands associated with the marquisate of Alveydre. By this transaction, the noble title—Marquis d’Alveydre—was bestowed upon the commoner husband of Marie-Victoire.

Thanks to his wife’s wealth and his newfound financial independence, Saint-Yves devoted himself exclusively to occult studies and to his attempt at formulating synarchy.

Developing his psychic gifts, Saint-Yves—assisted by his secretary, Louis Cabrol—began to dictate his works “in a kind of continuous trance,” known as the “Missions.”

In 1882, he published Mission des Souvenirs par l’un d’eux, in twelve chapters, corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac. It was an essay in which he presents himself as a Machiavelli who had written a new book of State: the Machiavellianism of Light.

The sovereignty he spoke of was a sacerdotal sovereignty, just as he considered himself a sovereign, stating, “Even though I do not have Jewish blood in my veins, I take my place among the Jews; I address their Talmudic scholars, their Kabbalists.” Mission des Ouvriers (1882), Mission des Juifs (1884), and La France Vraie (1887), in 22 volumes based on the Major Arcana of the Tarot, rounded out his theory, which he then presented in a series of lectures across Europe, proclaiming the need for a European synarchic amphictyony. His occult politics separated Authority from Power, and Power (Imperium in the Roman sense) from the popular Will, making it an expression of a synthesis of knowledge through the reconciliation of Judeo-Christian science and religion and through rapprochement between religious and civil teaching bodies. Far from exalting enlightened despotism, his system limited personal powers and subordinated them to the formula: To reign is to serve.

However, the publication of Mission des Juifs caused him a series of problems. So closely aligned were his ideas with those of Fabre d’Olivet that Saint-Yves was accused of plagiarism. Though the works differed but followed a similar line of reasoning, in the July 7, 1885 edition of Le Rappel, one Victor Meunier (also editor of the journal Cosmos) accused him of plagiarizing Fabre d’Olivet’s works: Histoire Philosophique du Genre Humain, La Langue Hébraïque Restituée, and Les Vers Dorés de Pythagore.

Saint-Yves defended himself feebly and was deeply shaken by the publication in 1886 of a novel on the matter, Monsieur le Marquis, Histoire d’un Prophète, signed by one “Claire Vautier de l’Opéra,” a pseudonym used, most likely, by the renowned astronomer and scientist Camille Flammarion.

His prestige among occultists suffered. Oswald Wirth, secretary and biographer of Stanislas de Guaita, a renowned occultist of the time, wrote that de Guaita felt “a cruel disappointment when the author of Mission des Juifs was unmasked as a plagiarist of Fabre d’Olivet. Not wanting to join the chorus of Saint-Yves’s adversaries, de Guaita kept silent, but could not avoid maliciously confiding that, after all, everything good in Saint-Yves comes from Fabre d’Olivet, and the rest is Saint-Yves’s own doing—an observation as cruel as any enemy’s,” since, in the opinion of other prestigious occultists, the work of the Marquis d’Alveydre was truly unique.

It is possible that Saint-Yves’s contemporaries were overly harsh in their judgments, for he was a continuator of Fabre d’Olivet’s ideas, and the body of his work was highly original compared to the occult studies of the Mystery Schools of that time. On the contrary, one might say that even Madame Blavatsky and other Theosophists drew upon Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s body of work to formulate their doctrine.

Hence, considering him a successor to Fabre d’Olivet, Saint-Yves, following in his mentor’s footsteps, rewrote human history based on myths and etymologies. While eminent historians focused on Europe’s Greco-Roman legacy, Saint-Yves underscored the dual Celtic-Druidic and Judeo-Christian influence on European civilization: “The Cycle of the Ram and the Lamb,” in which the Ram (Ram) is also referred to as the Lamb, i.e., Christ. He further notes, “The name of Western Europe was Vahara; that of the East was Kouru,” illustrating this point by citing place names of regions and cities such as Var, Warsaw (Varsóvia, Warszawa), and by the word war itself, signifying the uprising of Vahara. In India, the ram represents the vehicle of Agni.

Aware of the importance of his own work, he did not let discouragement keep him from writing further; in the following years, he published several books, brochures, and patriotic poems to illustrate his synarchic system.

Some of the ideas Saint-Yves advocated, as noted earlier, were later embraced by the Theosophical movement, even prior to the appearance of Blavatsky’s Isis segment in 1887, concerning the existence of Mahatmas or Masters of Wisdom—Invisible Beings usually dwelling in the remote areas of Tibet, belonging to the “Great White Lodge,” from which they secretly guided the world’s destinies. This was greatly supported by Lady Caithness, Duchess of Pomar, editor of the journal Aurora, where Abbé Roca, a fervent follower of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre, published articles.

The Duchess of Pomar gained fame in Parisian society for the lectures she organized at her château on Rue Wagram, attended by spiritualists from diverse streams of thought.

In 1887, the Marquis d’Alveydre met Prince Hardji Schariff, from Bombay, a mysterious figure who claimed to be a Brahman-Guru-Pandit. It was Schariff who conveyed knowledge to Saint-Yves that led him to write Mission de l’Inde en Europe.

Regretting having written it—or perhaps warned by the masters who had shared their revelations—Saint-Yves destroyed nearly the entire edition of that work, fearful people would say of him: “This man is mad, a victim of mystification or a mystifier.” The only copy he saved ended up in the possession of his son-in-law, Alexis Keller, after his death. Keller later gave it to the Society of Friends of Saint-Yves, headed by Dr. Gérard Encausse (Papus), who republished it in 1910. Added to that edition was the remark:

“It is Saint-Yves’s first work in which the practical experiences of out-of-body travel allowed the author to enter the most secret sanctuaries on Earth to verify oral teachings. These sanctuaries were located in Agharta, the lost city.”

It was Schariff who revealed to Saint-Yves the secret of a supreme authority in the world, organized in a synarchic manner and led by three pontiffs: Brahatmah, Mahatma, and Mahanga.

Saint-Yves also feared reprisals from these pontiffs if he were to publish the work. Of note was his warning to Westerners contained in the text:

“If you do not establish synarchy, I foresee, a century from now, your Judeo-Christian civilization forever eclipsed, your brutal supremacy definitively tamed by an incredible resurgence of all Asia—resurrected, risen, confident, fully armed—and fulfilling, without you and even against you, the social promise of the Abrahamites, of Moses, of Jesus Christ, and of all the Judeo-Christian Kabbalists.”

Coincidence or not, more than a hundred years after that prediction, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea possess a feared and threatening atomic arsenal.

Financial Decline

In 1890, the Marquis d’Alveydre published Mission des Souverains, an epic poem dedicated to the French Army, followed by Jeanne d’Arc Victorieux.

By that time, his wife’s fortune had begun to wane, and they moved to Versailles to live more modestly in her small mansion at 9 Rue Colbert.

A heavy blow befell Saint-Yves when he lost his beloved wife, whom he had called “Angel of My Life” from the moment they first met. She was 68 years old when she passed away on June 7, 1895. Her bedroom, as previously noted, became a funeral chamber that Saint-Yves frequently visited to honor her memory and receive her inspirations.

In 1894, eight years after he had destroyed Mission de l’Inde, Saint-Yves’s biography records the visit of another Oriental figure, perhaps more powerful than the first. He did not reveal his identity and did not receive much attention from the occultist, who by then was consumed with producing his grandest work, even more significant than the synarchic system, which he called The Archeometer—a concrete synthesis of all human knowledge. Within the Archeometer, according to the author, lies the synthesis of humankind’s religious, scientific, and aesthetic possibilities.

The Archeometer

The Archeometer was not only Saint-Yves d’Alveydre’s dream. In 1275, Raymond Lull wrote Ars Magna, in which he expounded his ars generalis or ars magna, a combinatory method for logical deduction and demonstration of all knowledge. His work had a strong influence on Leibniz, Nicholas of Cusa, and Giordano Bruno.

Athanasius Kircher, a lover of all things Egyptian, was considered an erudite Kabbalist and Hermeticist who strived for a synthesis between Kabbalism and Hermeticism.
In his study of the Kabbalah in Oedipus Aegyptiacus, in the chapter De allegorica & hieroglyphicae paralteia, Kircher attempts to blend all mystical traditions. In this regard, he is a Pico della Mirandola of the seventeenth century, though his synthesis includes sources unknown to Mirandola, such as Mexico and Japan, visited by Jesuit missions.

Pico della Mirandola traveled to Rome in 1494 with his nine hundred theses or questions derived from every philosophy, proposing that they could all be reconciled with each other.

Francisco Sanches, who claimed to have discovered the root of all languages, built his speculum archetypum, allegedly able to provide the meaning of every imaginable word and the key to all musical systems.

The word “Archeometer” comes from Greek, meaning “the measure of the Archaeo,” which Hermeticists speak of. Saint-Yves, however, preferred to explain the term as coming from the Sanskrit Arka-Matra: Arka is the Sun, the central emblem of the divine seal, where Ar is the radiant wheel of the Divine Word, and Ka is primordial matter, while Matra is the “Mother measure par excellence, that of the Principle.” It also signifies the metric Sinai of the Divine Gift, of Substance in all the proportional degrees of its equivalences. The universal knowledge of the Archeometer constitutes the foundation of all religions and sciences, uniting the Spirit, the Soul, and the Body of Truth, demonstrating—through observation and experience—the Unity of its Universality in its threefold social state: economic, juridical, and academic spheres.

The Archeometer itself is a circle of 360° divided into concentric zones with movable triangles forming 12 sections of 30° each, where Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit letters, as well as a mysterious “primordial language,” vattan, appear alongside zodiacal and planetary signs, colors, and musical notes, creating an indefinite number of harmonic combinations. This instrument of universal correspondence spans all domains of human knowledge and is the key to every Initiatic Tradition. It enables, for example, architects to derive forms from a name, a color, or an idea; poets to establish relations between letters and colors, expressing the perfect ideal of humanity. Saint-Yves clarifies, “The relationships between letters and colors, intuited by Rimbaud and his imitators, are scientifically determined by the Archeometer.” He emphasizes that the Archeometer aligns all measures with current metric units: the meter and the circle, i.e., 103 mm and 360°.

In summary, the Archeometer can be described as follows:

1. A double circle of 360° rotating in opposite directions such that:

   • 3 represents the Word (Verbo)
   • 6 represents the Holy Spirit
   • 360 represents the defined Universe

2. A Zodiac of 12 gates (the “Modal Letters”) measured at 30° each. Every gate contains its morphological letter and the traditional number of that letter within a frame of the corresponding Archeometric color.

3. A movable zone called the “Planetary of the Letters,” consisting of 12 Angles; 4 Equilateral Triangles; 12 Letters; 12 Numbers; 12 Colors; and 12 Notes. The triangle formed by the letters IshO is the Triangle of the Word (IphO).

4. A fixed (pink) zodiacal band with the 12 signs derived from the 12 zodiacal letters.

5. A bluish planetary astral band in motion, containing its seven diatonic astral signs (five are excluded). Note that Archeometric Astrology has its own characteristics and differences in astrological domiciles. Similarly, the values of the letters in the Hebrew alphabet do not coincide with the Constructive, Evolutionary, and Involutionary letters of the Archeometer, since Saint-Yves drew on a knowledge older than the Jewish tradition.

6. A small area composed of 12 angles formed by 4 intersecting Equilateral Triangles beneath the Metrological Generating Triangle.

7. A central circle (Solar Center) containing a Musical Pentagram, with one note (Mi) at the common center, a Resurgent Adamic Letter in the shape of a semicircle, 5 lines, and 12 white rays forming 6 diameters spaced 30° apart around the circle (30° x 12 = 360°).

The author’s aim in creating the Archeometer is thus to inscribe the measure of the Word in a physical instrument that, according to Papus, is precisely what the ancients used to establish all esoteric religious myths. It is the canon of ancient art in its various architectural, musical, poetic, and theogonic expressions.

The Passing

On June 26, 1903, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre obtained a patent for his invention of the Archeometer, explaining how to use it to determine the musical structure of a cathedral or the “speaking architecture” of a chant. This first version already contained an introduction recounting the history of the formation of humankind.

When he died at noon on February 6, 1909, in Pau, France—where he had gone for medical treatment—research on the Archeometer ceased. His body was taken to Versailles and buried next to that of the Marquise d’Alveydre in the Notre-Dame Cemetery. The tomb was built using measurements derived from the Archeometer and was surrounded by beautiful trees enclosing a six-pointed cross adorned with Hebrew letters, which is no longer there because it broke. Did this accident echo the dreams of Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and break just as his ideas did?

Only time will tell if Humanity will one day adopt synarchy—“a new social order”—and employ the Archeometer, the canon of ancient art in its various architectural, musical, political, and theogonic manifestations.

Barlet, Saint-Yves’s biographer and Grand Master of the Rosicrucian Order and a Kabbalist, said upon his passing:

“Saint-Yves will always be with us to inspire and guide us.”
He then added, speaking to those who hold “table-turning” séances:
“This is not an allusion to spiritist methods of communicating with the souls of the departed, but rather a mental presence. I have even the most serious reasons—and therefore the duty—to affirm that the soul of Saint-Yves rests in peace in a region inaccessible to us, and that any attempt to evoke his soul—true profanation according to his own theories—would have above all the effect of dangerously disturbing the evoker.”

Eduardo Carvalho Monteiro
Madras Editora

Sources

• Sinarquia, a Nova Ordem Social que se Aproxima, Plínio A. Branco
• La Synarchie ou Le Vieux Rêve d’un Ordre Social Nouveau, Jean Saunier
• Histoire de la Philosophie Occulte, Alexandrian
• Theosophical Glossary, Helena Blavatsky
• Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates
• Vida y Obra de Ramon Llull — Filosofía y Mística, Joaquim Xirau
• Les Maîtres de l’Esprit, Special Issue of Planète magazine
• Le Roi du Monde, René Guénon
• La Mission de l’Inde en Europe, Saint-Yves d’Alveydre

BOOK I

Introduction to the Study of the Archeometer

1. The Archeometer
2. Its objective reconstitution
3. Solstices and equinoxes of the Word of the Verb
4. Archeometry of compared religions in the incomparable
5. Brahmanism, inversion of Ishoarism
6. The Protest of Pho-e, Zoroaster, of Proto-Buddhism Gayna
7. The Iohanism of the Sobbhas and Mohammedanism

Foreword

It has been only two years since our Venerable Master departed from the visible world, passing through the Gate of Souls to unite eternally with the divine Word, the angelic Soul who was always, though invisible, his support in this earthly life.

The disappearance of this luminous genius has brought forth many disciples from all corners, which would be a source of joy were it not that some of them, recently converted and overly zealous in their newfound fervor, try to persuade themselves and others that they are the true custodians of the Master’s ultimate confidences and the transmitters of his most intimate thoughts. Needless to say, they all claim a deep knowledge of the Archeometer, though the precise description of it, which we received from its very inventor, remains wholly unpublished.

Some do not hesitate to give “cabalistic” interpretations to this interpretive instrument. Others, unashamedly asserting that they thoroughly know all the secrets of Archeometric science, promise magnificent and illusory initiations which, by God’s grace, will never come to pass—except in their own feverish imaginations. Still others invoke Saint-Yves to present their readers with ramblings of a most rudimentary and infantile anticlericalism and anti-papal sentiment, fitting perhaps for a sub-electoral committee in a small town or a tenth-grade Lodge of the G∴O∴, which, if the Master were alive, would have earned them one of his scathing rebukes that he kept quietly at hand.

Some readers who sincerely admire Saint-Yves wonder why his friends appear to do so little to defend his memory. The explanation is simple: A being such as he, whose absence is forever felt, needs no defense; even after his departure from this Earth, he is powerful enough to defend himself, leaving behind enough unpublished work to silence all impostors.

This work is a splendid example thereof. It comes to light at exactly the time chosen by the Master himself, answering like thunder all the mad calumnies spread after his death under the guise of his name.

A complement and conclusion to the Missions, this book is a true Introduction to the Study of the Archeometer. Never before, in any of his previous works, had Saint-Yves delved so far into revealing the foundation of his inner thought; never had he explored the Mysteries so boldly; never had he revealed himself so fully.

We will not see him solely as the Christian renovator inspired by Synarchy; we will see him as the true successor of the ancient Nabis, the last Prophet. An awe-inspiring fire runs through his work as this modern Isaiah, as severe with today’s scribes and Pharisees as the son of Amoz was with the scholars and priests of Judah. His visions of the future of France and Europe—now fallen into the worst pagan anarchy—are frightening; many of these visions, sadly, have already come to pass, and others are in the process of unfolding. Had we not heard them read by the Master himself more than seven years ago, by the infinite sea that lent them even more scope and majesty, we would think they were written only yesterday.

Yet, as he describes the looming cataclysms for peoples subject to the implacable laws of historical Cycles, his heart bleeds at this inevitability that might still be avoided. He exhorts his human brothers to abandon the false road and follow the true Path—one he had pointed to for more than twenty years and still indicates. He implores them to attempt it in good faith, for only those means can oppose Destiny and save Humanity. And herein lies his authentic humanity; nothing human is foreign to him, which is far from the least of his titles to our veneration and profound esteem.

Composed around 1903, or so it seems from certain allusions to events of that time, this work—now published—consists of scattered notes and complete texts that were devoutly gathered. We have acted solely as coordinators. We mention this so the reader understands our need to include in the appendix a fragment written in a style quite different from the rest of the work. Should we choose to publish it despite its unfinished nature, it is because we are sure that those who knew and studied the Master, however briefly, will be delighted to read it. They will recognize the Master’s subtle irony, that ingenious spirit, that marvelous blend of simplicity and elegance that brought such charm, originality, and at times unpredictability, into his loftiest and most serious conversations.

We will not discuss the book’s structure and divisions here, as we believe they are sufficiently clear—especially now that a few plates of the Archeometer have been reproduced and circulated widely.

THE FRIENDS OF SAINT-YVES

Translator’s Note: Nâbhi (sansc.) — Chief, king.