Electronic
logbook for the second half of January 2020
Maurice Maeterlinck now in the public
domain
Gallica is the umbrella term used to describe all bibliographic
resources connected to France, Gallia being the Latin word for
ancient Gaul – a territory which comprised France, Belgium and parts of
Germany and the Netherlands and which was inhabited by various Celtic
peoples until the Roman invasion of that territory and all the subsequent
invasions that took place after the collapse of the Roman empire.
Appropriately, it is also the name of the Internet portal of the French
National Library for its digital collections: gallica.bnf.fr.
On wanting to pursue some thematic research, I noticed on the ‘home page’ of
Gallica a caption linking to an article
about some French literary works in the public domain as of this year.
Interestingly, the article almost laments the lack of any celebrity writers
for this year's batch (120 writers), with the exception of the Belgian
author Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), who won the Nobel prize for
literature in 1911. Among the works
of his the French National Library has digitised, the article mentions
three. Being in a hurry, I downloaded the book described as a
‘metaphysical work’ and called The Big Secret (‘l’ouvrage
métaphysique Le
Grand Secret’).
Having read the introduction and two chapters plus a foray into a third
(namely ‘the Hermetists’, ‘the Modern Occultists’, ‘the Metapsychists’ , but
NOT the conclusion), I felt that the book's title most probably was
ironical, somewhat in keeping with the author's warning in his introduction
that the book is not a monograph or a history of occultism. Maeterlinck says
that it should rather be seen as recorded impressions of a personal
investigation into esoterism through texts and that it may serve as a
stepping stone for those interested in exploring the subject further. Well,
I certainly bear no grudge against Maurice Maeterlinck or even Gallica.
Firstly, the book was free. Secondly, I really enjoyed reading the author's
well-crafted prose. So much so that there is no doubt in my mind that I
shall read the rest of The Big Secret
in the near future, if only to read the book's penultimate and concluding
chapters.
There is an additional advantage with electronic versions of books in the
public domain, which is that there is no need to worry about library fines!
This is especially attractive to people like me who have at home several
books on loan. In my case, I nearly always have 3 to 5 books on loan,
borrowed from one of Lausanne's 5 municipal libraries or from the Riponne
branch of the cantonal and university library.
To conclude, so, yes, a book does
not necessarily have to be read from cover to cover, nor does it have to be
read in one go. In fact, for some books, it is better to open them again
after an interruption that can vary from a few days to a few years...
If it were not to draw attention to the fact that the works of a French
language writer who won the Nobel prize for literature are now in the public
domain, this weblog article might seem uncalled for. True also if it were
not for some kind of synchronicity (which the Shorter Oxford English
Dictionary defines as ‘the simultaneous occurrence of events which appear
meaningfully related but have no discoverable causal connection’). Namely,
that on conducting later on a search for Maeterlinck in my own little corpus
of texts in electronic format, I came across his name in an article in an
issue devoted to the Rennes-le-Château* mystery, with claims that the 17th of
January is important to this story and that the number seventeen,
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is of particular significance when
encountered in a text or on a monument (‘Pour m'être intéressé à ce
nombre pendant une trentaine d'années, je peux vous dire que, 99 fois sur
100, quand il apparaît de façon curieuse dans un texte ou un monument, il
y a quelque chose à découvrir dans ses parages.’ Paul Rouelle, p.39
of Top-Secret 14).
I am in no position to comment on the alleged significance of the number 17
(a claim based in part on the seventeenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet).
However, today is the seventeenth of January,
which I thus take it to be a good omen for resuming this weblog, an
undertaking postponed for so long...
*A small village in France's Languedoc region where in the nineteenth
century a priest suddenly became wealthy after having found some documents
in a hollow pillar of his parish church. Unsurprisingly, this story has
caught the imagination of many fringe writers, with speculation about a
treasure hoard belonging to the Knight Templars and claims that the Frankish
Merovingian dynasty descended from the offspring of Jesus Christ and Mary
Magdalen, who had come to France (with the implication, therefore, that
Jesus did not die on the Cross), speculation about hidden hints in a famous
painting by the French seventeenth century painter Nicolas
Poussin, called ‘Les Bergers d'Arcadie’ [The Arcadian Shepherds], inter
alia.
The Big Secret (Le
Grand Secret’):
table of contents (in French)
Préliminaires
1
L'Inde
29
L'Égypte
111
La Perse
133
La Chaldée
141
La Grèce anté-socratique
149
Les Gnostiques et les Néo-Platoniciens
181
La
Kabbale
189
Les Hermétistes
213
Les Occultistes
modernes
229
Les Métapsychistes
255
Conclusions
303
Ces
œuvres qui entrent dans le domaine public en 2020,
Gallica, posted 16th January 2020
Lausanne, 17th January 2020
