Summary: Paul Sédir’s ‘Initiations’, his fictionalised account of his chance encounter with Maître Philippe (Nizier Anthelme Philippe), a 19th-century French thaumaturge, the latter’s resuscitation of a woman and Sédir’s subsequent spiritual rebirth (his conversion to Christian mysticism). Sédir on grabbing too much at the expense of others (life is a zero-sum game). Colin Wilson’s very short ‘book list’ on thaumaturgic healing.
There are some books which we pick up (or open if they are in digital format or land upon if they are on the Internet), start reading a few pages here and there, but decide to continue reading on another day. In the case of Paul Sédir’s ‘Initiations’, it is because I would like to read this novella in its original language, i.e. French. Moreover, having found on the Internet the passage I was interested in, I decided that I would put off reading ‘Initiations’ until I would have enough time to read it in one go, especially since the novella was revised and even expanded over a period of more than two decades. The work must have been dear to its author, obviously, and to read it a few chunks at a time would be almost as if I were not paying proper respect to an author I was interested in, after having read a quote of his in an article online*. The more so as, according to the book description accompanying a recent English translation (that of Gareth Knight, Skylight Press, 2014), ‘Initiations’ ‘distils and encodes a lifetime’s esoteric and mystical knowledge in a way which serves as a very real initiation for the perceptive reader’.
Furthermore, I had come across a series of references to unconventional healers, especially in 2018 and 2019, for instance Edgar Cayce, various Brazilian spiritual healers, the ‘water-focused’ acuáticos in Cuba and I had even remembered stories dating back to the eighties about people in the Philippines who, the press then claimed, were performing surgical operations with their bare hands. So that when I came across the following lines in Colin Wilson’s Strange Powers, I copied them and saved them into an electronic file: ‘Altogether, I found The Cathars and Reincarnation a puzzling, difficult book. Not long after buying it, I realized that I had a couple more books by Arthur Guirdham on my shelves: A Theory of Disease and The Nature of Healing. I had bought them at the time I had been writing my study of Rasputin and the fall of the Romanovs — I had asked Professor Wilson Knight’s advice on books about thaumaturgic healing, and he had recommended these and a couple by Harry Edwards. At the time, they had failed to strike a chord, and I had forgotten I had them.’
When roughly 9 months ago I read a retelling of Paul Sédir’s story about a resuscitation performed by an enigmatic, quasi supernatural doctor, I made a note so that I would remember to find the source. The retelling had been done by Mouni Sadhu (the esoteric nom de plume of Mieczyslaw Demetriusz Sudowski) and I had come across it in the work of a third author. This should explain why I wanted to find the ur-text, no?**
The story is about a disillusioned Parisian doctor who is suffering from a lack of faith in his professional abilities after having failed to cure some near desperate cases and is therefore in a state of depression (he is on ‘sleeping pills in order not to think’ and is barely nourishing himself). Fortunately for him, after three months of this, he is called in the early hours of the morning by a working-class husband whose young wife is about to lose her battle against tuberculosis. However, the doctor had been called for by the deeply grieved husband not so that the doctor would try to save the life of the young wife but in order for the doctor ‘to alleviate her suffering at least during the agony of the last hour’. After this, the reader can only expect a grim outcome, unless he or she believes that the husband’s ordeal will end on a happy note and thus anticipates some miraculous healing of sorts.
On their way to the couple’s flat, they bump into another doctor (a friend of a mutual friend) symbolically named Theophane (from the Greek words theos, god, and phainein, phan-, to show). He offers to come along with them to provide assistance, even though he has not been told the reason for the pair’s nightly errand. Unfortunately once they reach the flat, it is to find that the young woman is already dead, with only a little heart left ‘in the pit of the stomach’. Theophane then offers to resuscitate the dead woman on the condition that the husband promises to ‘stay with [his wife and] never leave her in body or heart’. Unsurprisingly, the husband agrees to the deal and Theophane performs the resuscitation (using his hands and voice).
Upon which the two doctors leave the flat, with Theophane now being able to bring his colleague back to life (metaphorically speaking), having suggested that the latter accompany Theophane on his rail journey to northern Italy. As a result, Theophane is able to ‘la[y] bare the most hidden wheelworks of [his colleague’s] conscience [...] and ‘pierc[e] the opaque darkness of long forgotten centuries’. The Parisian doctor is thus not only cured from his own lung problem, but is resurrected from the spiritually dead and now finds himself in a state of ‘exquisite ideal freshness, [...] vigorous vitality and [...] serene confidence’. Yet the novella ends with the Parisian doctor’s sad realisation ‘that so many men are unconsciously passing so close to this Heaven without recognizing It, not because It is hidden but because, unable to escape from their self-induced limitations, they are incapable of perceiving It, neither do they want to see It, because they do not focus on, nor plumb the depths’.
As was common with many nineteenth-century occultists, Paul Sédir was not the real name of the author of ‘Initiations’. It is the anagram of the French word ‘désir’, which (surprise, surprise) gave the English word ‘desire’. The name Theophane (which I must repeat comes from the Greek words theos, god, and phainein, phan-, to show) is a clue as to what kind of desire the heart of Paul Sédir harboured. As I was able to discover upon reading some background information on Paul Sédir (whose real name was Yvon Le Loup), in 1897 he had a quasi mystical experience when he met*** the real-life and Lyons****-based healer of the poor (and also of crowned Europe) Nizier Anthelme Philippe, better known as Maître Philippe. Paul Sédir got to meet Maître Philippe several times after that. For the time being, however, I shall stop here by saying that Paul Sédir considered his Master to be a ‘perfect resemblance of Christ’. As a result, Paul Sédir dropped all occult activities to pursue a form of modern Christian mysticism.
A Portuguese Martinist website has a text posted online, attributed to Émile Besson (a friend of Sédir’s who claimed to have lived several years in the same house as Sédir during the latter’s final years), who affirms that ‘Initiations’ was a fictionalised account of his encounters with the ‘Unknown Man’ and that not a single detail in it is untrue (‘Sédir y raconte, sous une forme romancée, ses rencontres avec l’« Inconnu ». Il faut préciser qu’il n’est pas un détail de ce récit qui ne soit matériellement vrai.’) [source: http://www.martinismo.pt/les-documents/biographies/sedir-yvon-le-loup.html]
Hopefully, more in a future entry about the incredible healer Nizier Anthelme Philippe, better known as Maître Philippe (and who in his day was sufficiently famous to have been invited in Russia by the Tsar himself).
*It was in a French esoteric publication which I had found on the Internet as I was trying to look up a specific quote by another French author. The Sédir quote was in article devoted to the question of spiritual versus material riches (entitled ‘Poverty, the path to real wisdom’). However trite such a dichotomy might seem at first, the Sédir quote – at the very end of the article – ended on a claim that resonated deeply with me, which is that, be it wealth, love, success, etc., everything is in a way a ‘zero-sum game’, in that, for Sédir, to grab too much of any of these is necessarily to do so at the expense of others. A powerful but frightening proposition, no? Should you be interested in reading the quote in its original wording in French, please take a look at the bottom of page 245 (page 12 in the pdf) at https://www.linitiation.eu/telechargement/L-Initiation-2000-4.pdf.
** I suppose it was this note about the resuscitation of Saint Agnes I jotted down last month (and which I happened to come across on Monday) which must have prompted me to try to find either Sédir’s or Sadhu’s account of the resuscitation. No, I got it wrong: it can only have been because I was thinking about the similarities and differences between national karmas and egregores, the latter being associated in my mind with the book where I read about the Sédir story (as retold by Sadhu) for the first time.
*** In 1910, he inaugurated a new column in the French bi-monthly L’Écho du Merveilleux, entitled ‘Authors criticising their own work’, in which he listed in an unfavourable light all the insights he had gained from the representatives of nearly all esoteric or religious traditions (the list seems almost too long to be genuine!) he had met in comparison with what he had learned during that momentous encounter and the subsequent train journey with Maître Philippe (even though he never names him): ‘But all that these admirable men had taught me appeared to me, one evening, after a certain encounter, like the light smoke that rises at the twilight from the overheated earth.’ [source: https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k55562160/f18.item]
**** This was the proper British spelling for this French city until recently; I do not mind using archaisms from time to time.
Links
Mouni Sadhu’s retelling of the story on pages 226-227, 228-229 and 230-231 of his Ways to Self-Realization.
Gareth Knight’s English translation of Paul Sédir’s ‘Initiations’, published by Skylight Press in 2014: http://www.skylightpress.co.uk/9781908011992.html.
List of works by Paul Sédir, as catalogued by the French National Library: https://data.bnf.fr/en/documents-by-rdt/11924283/te/page1.