The Morning of the Magicians: Secret Societies, Conspiracies, and Vanished Civilizations

Louis Pauwels (1920-1997) was a French journalist who founded the magazine Planète, an outgrowth of this book. Jacques Bergier (1912-1978) was a nuclear physicist and chemical engineer who was active in the French Resistance in World War II and helped destroy the German atomic plant at Peenemünde.

This groundbreaking, international bestseller popularized occultism, alchemy, and paranormal phenomena in the 1960s. It provides insights into our perceptions of reality, telepathy, mutants, and parallel universes, reveals occult influences on the Nazis and introduces the alchemist Fulcanelli.

PREFACE Part One The Future Perfect I. Salute to the reader in a hurry--A resignation in 1875--Birds of ill omen--How the nineteenth century closed the doors--The end of science and the repression of fantasy--Poincaré's despair--We are our own grandfathers--Youth, Youth! II. Bourgeois delights--A crisis for the intelligence, or the hurricane of unrealism--Glimpses of another reality--Beyond logic and literary philosophies--The idea of an Eternal Present--Science without conscience or conscience without science?--Hope III. Brief reflections on the backwardness of sociology--Talking cross-purposes--Planetary versus provincial--Crusader in the modern world--The poetry of science An Open Conspiracy I. The generation of the "workers of the Earth"--Are you a behind-the-times modern, or a contemporary of the future?--A poster on the walls of Paris 1622--The esoteric language is the technical language--A new conception of a secret society--A new aspect of the "religious spirit" II. The prophets of the Apocalypse--A Committee of Despair--A Louis XVI machine-gun--Science is not a Sacred Cow--Monsieur Despotopoulos would like to arrest progress--The legend of the Nine Unknown Men III. Fantastic realism again--Past techniques--Further consideration on the necessity for secrecy--We take a voyage through time--The spirit's continuity--The engineer and the magician once again--Past and future--The present is lagging in both directions--Gold from ancient books--A new vision of the ancient world IV. The concealment of knowledge and power--The meaning of revolutionary war--Technology brings back the guilds--A return to the age of the Adepts--A fiction writer's prediction, "The Power-House"--From monarchy to cryptocracy--The secret society as the government of the future--Intelligence itself a secret society--A knocking at the door The Example of Alchemy I. An alchemist in the Café Procope in 1953--A conversation about Gurdjieff--A believer in the reality of the philosopher's stone--I change my ideas about the value of progress--What we really think about alchemy: neither a revelation nor a groping in the dark--Some reflections on the "spiral" and on hope II. A hundred thousand books that no one reads--Wanted: a scientific expedition to the land of the alchemists--The inventors--Madness from mercury--A code language--Was there another atomic civilization?--The electric batteries of the museum of Baghdad--Newton and the great Initiates--Helvetius and Spinoza and the philosopher's stone--Alchemy and modern physics--A hydrogen bomb in an oven--Transformation of matter, men, and spirits III. In which a little Jew is seen to prefer honey to sugar--In which an alchemist who might be the mysterious Fulcanelli speaks of the atomic danger in 1937, describes the atomic pile and evokes civilization now extinct--In which Bergier breaks a safe with a blow-lamp and carries off a bottle of uranium under his arm--In which a nameless American major seeks a Fulcanelli now definitely vanished--In which Oppenheimer echoes a Chinese sage of a thousand years ago IV. The modern alchemist and the spirit of research--Description of what an alchemist does in his laboratory--Experiments repeated indefinitely--What is he waiting for?--The preparation of darkness--Electronic gas--Water that dissolves--Is the philosopher's stone energy in suspension?-- The transmutation of the alchemist himself --This is where true metaphysics begin V. There is time for everything--There is even a time for the times to come together The Vanished Civilizations I. In which the authors introduce a fantastic personage--Mr. Fort--The fire at the "sanatorium of overworked coincidences"--Mr. Fort and universal knowledge--40,000 notes on a gush of periwinkles, a downpour of frogs and showers of blood--The Book of the Damned--A certain Professor Kreyssler--In praise of "intermediarism" with some examples--The Hermit of Bronx, or the cosmic Rabelais--Visit of the author to the Cathedral of Saint Elsewhere--Au revoir, Mr. Fort! II. An hypothesis condemned to the stake--Where a clergyman and a biologist become comic figures--Wanted: a Copernicus in anthropology--Many blank spaces on all the maps--Dr. Fortune's lack of curiosity--The mystery of the melted platinum--Cords used as books--The tree and the telephone--Cultural relativity III. In which the authors speculate about the Great Pyramid--Possibility of "other" techniques--The example of Hitler--The Empire of Almanzar--Recurrence of "ends of the world"--The impossible Easter Island--The legend of the white man--The civilization of America--The mystery of maya--From the "bridge of light" to the strange plain of Nazca IV. Memory older than us--Metallic birds--A strange map of the world--Atomic bombardments and interplanetary vessels in "sacred texts"--A new view of machines--The cult of the "cargo"--Another vision of esoterism--The rites of the intelligence Part Two A Few Years in the Absolute Elsewhere I. All the marbles in the same bag--The historian's despair--Two amateurs of the unusual--At the bottom of the Devil's Lake--An empty antifascism--The authors in the presence of the Infinitely Strange--Troy, too, was only a legend--History lags behind--From visible banality to invisible fantasy--The fable of the golden beetle--Undercurrents of the future--There are other things besides soulless machinery II. In the Tribune des Nations the Devil and madness are refused recognition--Yet there are rivalries between deities--The Germans and Atlantis--Magic socialism--A secret religion and a secret Order--An expedition to hidden regions--The first guide will be a poet III. P. J. Toulet and Arthur Machen--A great neglected genius--A Robinson Crusoe of the soul--The story of the angels at Mons--The life, adventures, and misfortunes of Arthur Machen--How we discovered an English secret society--A Nobel Prize winner in a black mask--The Golden Dawn and its members IV. A hollow Earth, a frozen world, a New Man--"We are the enemies of the mind and spirit"--Against Nature and against God--The Vril Society--The race which will supplant us--Haushofer and the Vril--The idea of the mutation of man--The "Unknown Superman"--Mathers, chief of the Golden Dawn meets the "Great Terrorists"--Hitler claims to have met them too--An hallucination or a real presence?--A door opening on to something other--A prophecy of René Guénon--The Nazis' enemy No. 1: Steiner V. An ultimatum for the scientists--The prophet Horbiger, a twentieth-century Copernicus--The theory of the frozen world--History of the solar system--The end of the world--The Earth and its four Moons--Apparition of the giants--Moons, giants, and men--The civilization of Atlantis--The five cities 300,000 years old--From Tiahuanaco to Tibet--The second Atlantis--The Deluge--Degeneration and Christianity--We are approaching another era--The law of ice and fire VI. Horbiger still has a million followers--Waiting for the Messiah--Hitler and political esoterism--Nordic science and magic thinking--A civilization utterly different from our own--Gurdjieff, Horbiger, Hitler, and the man responsible for the Cosmos--The cycle of fire--Hitler speaks--The basis of Nazi anti-Semitism--Martians at Nuremberg--The antipact--The rockets' summer--Stalingrad, or the fall of the Magi--The prayer on Mount Elbruz--The little man victorious over the superman--The little man opens the gates of Heaven--The Twilight of the Gods--The flooding of the Berlin Underground and the myth of the Deluge--A Chorus by Shelley VII. A hollow Earth--We are living inside it--The Sun and Moon are in the center of the Earth--Radar in the service of the Wise Men--Birth of a new religion in America?Its prophet was a German airman--Anti-Einstein--The work of a madman--A hollow Earth, Artificial Satellites and the notion of Infinity--Hitler as arbiter--Beyond coherence VIII. Grist for our horrible mill--The last prayer of Dietrich Eckardt--The legend of Thule--A nursery for mediums--Haushofer the magician--Hess's silence--The swastika--The seven men who wanted to change life--A Tibetan colony--Exterminations and ritual--It is darker than you thought IX. Himmler and the other side of the problem--1934 a turning point--The Black Order in power--The death's-head warrior monks--Initiation in the Burgs--Sievers' last prayer--The strange doings of the Ahnenerbe--The High Priest Frederick Hielscher--A forgotten note of Jünger's--Impressions of war and victory Part Three That Infinity Called Man . . . I. A New Kind of Intuition: The Fantastic in fire and blood--The barriers of incredulity--The first rocket--Bourgeois and "Workers of the Earth"--False facts and true fiction--Inhabited worlds--Visitors from Beyond--The great lines of communication--Modern myths--Fantastic realism in psychology--Toward an exploration of the fantastic within--The method described-- Another conception of liberty II. The Fantastic Within: Some pioneers: Balzac, Hugo, Flammarion--Jules Romains and the "Great Question"--The end of positivism--What is parapsychology?--Some extraordinary facts and experiences--The example of the Titanic--Clairvoyance --Precognition and dreams--Parapsychology and psychoanalysis--We reject occultism and the pseudosciences--In quest of machinery for sounding the depths III. Toward a Psychological Revolution: The mind's "second wind"--Wanted: an Einstein for psychology--A renaissance of religion--Our society is at death's door--Jaurès and the "tree buzzing with flies"--We see little because we are little IV. The Magic Mind Rediscovered: The green eye of the Vatican--The "other" intelligence--The story of the "relavote"--Is Nature playing a double game?--The starting-handle of the supermachine --New cathedrals and new slang--The last door--Existence as an instrument--A new view of symbols--All is not everything V. The Notion of an "Awakened State": After the fashion of theologians, scientists, magicians, and children--Salute to an expert at putting spokes in wheels--The conflict between spiritualism and materialism: the story of an allergy--The legend of tea--Could it be a natural faculty?--Thought as a means of travel on the ground or in the air--A supplement to the Rights of Man--Some reflections on the "awakened" Man--Ourselves as honest savages VI. Three True Stories as Illustration: The story of a great mathematician "in the raw"--The story of the most wonderful clairvoyant--The story of a scientist of the future who lived in 1750 VII. The "Awakened" Man: Some Paradoxes and Hypotheses: Why our three stories may have disappointed some readers--We know very little about levitation, immortality, etc.--Yet Man has the gift of ubiquity, has long sight, etc.--How do you define a machine?--How the first "awakened" Man could have been born--A fabulous, yet reasonable dream about vanished civilizations--The fable of the panther--The writing of God VIII. Some Documents on the "Awakened State": Wanted: an anthology--The sayings of Gurdjieff--When I was at the school for "awakening"-- Raymond Abellio's story--A striking extract from the works of Gustav Meyrinck, a neglected genius IX. The Point Beyond Infinity: From Surrealism to Fantastic Realism--The Supreme Point--Beware of images--The madness of Georg Cantor--The Yogi and the mathematician--A fundamental aspiration of the human spirit--An extract from a story by Jorge Luis Borges X. Some Reflections on the Mutants: The child astronomer--A sudden access of intelligence--The theory of mutation--The myth of the great Superior Ones--The Mutants among us--From Horla to Leonard Euler--An invisible society of Mutants?--The birth of the collective being--Love of the living INDEX