Raymond Abellio

Georges Raymond Alexis Soulès, * 11 November 1907, Toulouse; † 26 August 1986, Nice. Engineer, socialist militant, collaborationist party leader, novelist, and — under the name he took in 1945 — arguably the most systematic French esoteric thinker of the second half of the twentieth century. Abellio is known for a single construction, the structure absolue, a six-poled sphere which he claimed to be the invariant form of every genesis, of perception, of consciousness, of history, and of the great “ideograms” of the esoteric traditions — the Sephirotic Tree, the Zodiac, the Tarot and the hexagrams of the I Ching — and for the doctrine he built on it, which he called the nouvelle gnose. He is also known, and will always be known, for the road by which he reached it: through the École Polytechnique, the Socialist Party, the Popular Front, and the leadership of a collaborationist movement founded by the former chief of the Cagoule. Few comparable figures moved so far, or were so determined to present that distance not as a break but as a genesis.

Life#

Toulouse and the École (1907–1932)#

Soulès was born into a poor family of the faubourg des Minimes in Toulouse, a working-class quarter whose reconstruction, street by street, fills the first volume of his memoirs.¹ A scholarship pupil of the kind the Third Republic produced in quantity, he passed through the lycée and the preparatory classes into the École Polytechnique in 1927 and out of it, in the elite of the promotion, into the Corps des Ponts et Chaussées.² Two things from these years would matter later. The first was a conversation of 1928 with the chaplain of the École about Saint Paul’s “inner man,” which Abellio would recall as the earliest naming of the thing his whole work tried to reach.³ The second was the discovery that the Republic’s engineering meritocracy offered a young man of his origins a route to power that was not political, and that he wanted the political route anyway.

The Militant (1932–1939)#

He joined the SFIO in 1932, coming through the socialist student groups and the Jeunesses socialistes of the fourteenth arrondissement, and at the same time joined X-Crise, the study circle of polytechnicians who, in the wake of the Depression, were drafting the plans and the technocratic vocabulary that would pass, in the following decade, into both the Popular Front and Vichy.⁴ As an engineer of the Ponts he served in the Drôme from 1932 to 1936, then in Paris and Versailles; as a militant he moved through the party’s left wing — his biographer calls the young Soulès a “gauchiste mystique” — represented the left opposition on the party’s directing committee in 1937 and 1939, and in 1936 was seconded as chargé de mission [special adviser] to the Ministry of National Economy of the Blum government.⁵ The second volume of the memoirs, Les Militants, gives this period its most sustained treatment, and gives it a moral: the militant is the man of action, rajasic in the Hindu typology Abellio would later adopt, whom the gnostic must both understand from within and leave behind.⁶

The War and the MSR (1939–1944)#

Mobilised in September 1939 with the 6th Engineer Regiment at Angers, Soulès was captured at Calais in May 1940 and released from captivity in 1941.⁷ He then joined the Mouvement social révolutionnaire (MSR), the party Eugène Deloncle — the former head of the terrorist Cagoule of the 1930s — had founded in September 1940 and folded, as a faction, into Marcel Déat’s Rassemblement national populaire.⁸ On 14 May 1942 Deloncle was ousted by his own lieutenants, in a coup led by the ex-Cagoulard Jean Filliol together with Soulès and André Mahé; Soulès then led what remained of the MSR until its disappearance in 1944.⁹ Under his own name, and with Mahé, he published in 1943 La Fin du nihilisme, a call for a “national” and “socialist” European revolution against the exhausted liberalism and party socialism of the pre-war years; in the same year he attended the two Mont-Dore assemblies of the collaborationist movements held under Pétain’s patronage and sat in Déat’s Front révolutionnaire national.¹⁰ He also, in 1943, founded a clandestine group, the “Unitaires,” with a paper called Force libre — a fact his defenders would later stress and his historians have weighed with care.¹¹ Deloncle himself was shot dead by the Gestapo in Paris on 7 January 1944, suspected of having opened channels to the Allies; Soulès had no part in it, but the death closed a chapter with which his name remains bound.¹²

The scholarly verdict on these years has been rendered twice, from opposite directions, and the two verdicts do not quite meet. The Cerisy colloquium of 2002 devoted two papers to “le rôle de Soulès-Abellio dans la France de Vichy” and to a historical reading of [the role of Soulès-Abellio in Vichy France]Sol invictus; the historians of collaboration who mention him — Conan and Rousso among them — treat that memoir as an apologia.¹³ His biographer Nicolas Roberti, working from the papers, reads the trajectory as continuous: the planiste engineer, the “national” revolutionary and the gnostic were the same man pursuing the same thing, a total reorganisation of the world by a caste of the competent, and the last of the three simply moved the reorganisation from the state to consciousness.¹⁴ Abellio would not have disputed the continuity. He built his metaphysics precisely to account for it.

The Turn (1943–1947)#

In March 1943, in the middle of his political life, Soulès met Pierre de Combas — a former schoolteacher turned healer and finally recluse, who “initiated Soulès into esotericism” through the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita, teaching him numerology and Kabbalah.¹⁵ Abellio always maintained that the “materia prima” of Vers un nouveau prophétisme came from Combas, and that at the end of 1946 the older man told him that it was now Abellio who would “deal with these things.”¹⁶ The initiation coincided with the collapse of the political project, and Abellio’s own account makes 1943 the “année-charnière” of his life, the year in which he renounced politics “en tant que choix entre plusieurs politiques.” [turning-point year; as a choice among several political programs]¹⁷

After the Liberation he hid — in the Loiret from October 1944 to July 1945, then in a series of other refuges until 1947 — and wrote.¹⁸ In hiding he produced Heureux les pacifiques, a novel he called “le bilan de mes expériences politiques,” and [the reckoning of my political experiences]Vers un nouveau prophétisme, the first statement of the doctrine. The novel appeared in January 1947 under the name Raymond Abellio — Raymond being his own second given name, Abellio that of a solar god of the Pyrenean Comminges, an Aquitanian Apollo attested in two Roman inscriptions, a choice whose logic the title of the third memoir, Sol invictus, makes plain enough — and won the first Prix Sainte-Beuve.¹⁹ “En 1945,” as his French biographers put it, “Georges Soulès devient dès lors officiellement et définitivement Raymond Abellio.” [In 1945 … Georges Soulès henceforth officially and definitively becomes Raymond Abellio.]²⁰

Exile and Return (1947–1953)#

In 1947 he crossed into Switzerland, where he lived, among other expedients, as tutor to the son of Jean Jardin, Laval’s former chief of staff.²¹ In his absence a Paris court sentenced him to ten years’ forced labour — the French sources give the date as October 1948 or May 1949, and record that the judgment was compounded by a confusion with a namesake, Jules Soulès, who had administered confiscated Jewish property under the Occupation; the English-language literature repeats a figure of twenty years that appears to be an error.²² In Switzerland he wrote Les Yeux d’Ézéchiel sont ouverts and completed the two volumes of La Bible, document chiffré. He was pardoned in 1952 on the intervention of Resistance figures, notably the testimony of General Pierre Guillain de Bénouville, and returned definitively to Paris in 1953, where he founded an engineering consultancy that supported him for the rest of his life.²³

The Paris Years (1953–1986)#

The next thirty years were those of the work. Assomption de l’Europe (1954) was the first book written in what Abellio called his second birth; in 1955 he directed a short-lived series, “Correspondances,” at Grasset, opening it with an essay prefacing Paul Sérant’s Au seuil de l’ésotérisme.²⁴ The decisive intellectual event he dated precisely: a “violent” rejection, in July 1951, of Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant and its “vacuité du moment présent,” which set him to think the inverse intuition, first as an “explicitation du symbolisme de la croix” in operative form and then, with the help of Husserl’s reduction, as the raising of that cross into a third dimension.²⁵ The result, after preparatory papers for a Cercle d’études métaphysiques in the 1950s, was La Structure absolue (1965), which he ever after treated as the centre of the corpus.²⁶ Around it he arranged the rest: the great novel La Fosse de Babel (1962), which applies the structure in fiction; the interviews with Marie-Thérèse de Brosses (1966); the three volumes of Ma dernière mémoire (1971, 1975, 1980), the third of which won the Prix des Deux Magots; La Fin de l’ésotérisme (1973), his most read book; Approches de la nouvelle gnose (1981); the last novel, Visages immobiles (1983); and, with Charles Hirsch, the Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques (1984).²⁷ A Cahier de l’Herne was devoted to him in 1979, a television portrait had been broadcast in 1977, and in 1983 the Bibliothèque nationale acquired his papers.²⁸ He also sat, from the 1970s, on the patronage committee of Nouvelle École, the review of the Nouvelle Droite, whose leader Alain de Benoist interviewed him at length in 1982 — a connection to which we return.²⁹ He died at Nice on 26 August 1986 and is buried in the cemetery of Auteuil; the Manifeste de la nouvelle gnose on which he was working was published, unfinished, three years later.³⁰

Thought#

Sources and Position#

Abellio’s sources are heterogeneous and he made no attempt to hide it. From Combas he had the numerical Kabbalah and the conviction that Genesis was a cipher; from the Pyrenean and Toulousain background, a preoccupation with Catharism, which produced his one published play; from Polytechnique, a mathematician’s confidence in structure and an engineer’s suspicion of philosophy that could not be built. His philosophical formation came late and from one direction. “Ma rencontre décisive reste quand même celle de Husserl,” he said in 1966, a meeting mediated by Merleau-Ponty and Gaston Berger; the whole apparatus of transcendental phenomenology — epoché, eidetic and transcendental reduction, intentionality, retention and protention, the Lebenswelt, transcendental intersubjectivity — became his working vocabulary, and the subtitle of his major book, essai de phénoménologie génétique, is Husserl’s distinction between static and genetic analysis.³¹ Heidegger he used and reproved: the three ecstases of time “fonctionnent selon la dialectique sénaire du moment présent,” but the poet’s drift and the dictum “la science ne pense pas” were errors, and the confrontation of the century’s two great philosophers had remained “purement littéraire.”³² Hegel was for him the return of dialectic to Western thought, and also its limit: Hegelian and Marxist dialectic is “linéaire,” a “contradiction simple,” and the triad of thesis, antithesis and synthesis is only “la « superstructure » d’un sénaire.”³³ Structuralism he held at arm’s length, claiming the mathematician’s purified notion of structure against “le structuralisme empirique et ses dénombrements irreliés,” while engaging Lévi-Strauss closely enough to read the canonical formula of mythic transformation, with its double torsion, as an unwitting approach to his own sphere; a letter from Lévi-Strauss of October 1965 is cited in the posthumous Manifeste.³⁴ René Guénon, the presiding figure of French esotericism in the years of Abellio’s formation, is the constant foil: Guénon’s Tradition is an “inventaire statique,” a reactionary refusal of science, whereas the old knowledge “de base mystique” must give way to one “de base gnostique.”³⁵

That last formulation states the position. Abellio is a gnostic who accepts modernity, and specifically the two things Traditionalists reject in it: the sciences and the philosophy of the transcendental subject. He regarded the cogito, completed by Husserl, as the West’s specific achievement and the instrument of the coming gnosis. His originality lies in having welded that conviction to the Kabbalah of a provincial healer, and in having thought the weld was not a paradox but a proof.

The Absolute Structure#

The structure is best approached as Abellio approached it, from ordinary perception. I see an object. In the naïve attitude this is a relation between two terms, subject and object. Abellio’s first move is to show that each term already contains an opposition. On the side of the perceived, the object is active (+) relative to the rest of the world, taken as passive (−). On the side of the perceiver, the eye — the organ of sense — is active (+) relative to the rest of my body, taken as passive (−). “C’est à deux couples que nous avons affaire et non à un seul,” and the whole is no longer a [We are dealing with two pairs, not one.]rapport but a proportion; or, in the formula he used in interview, “la dualité objet-sujet cache donc une quaternité.”³⁶ The four poles — object and world, organ and body — form a cross, and the cross is dynamic. A current runs from world to object; the object is “recognised” by the eye, in a rotation by which “un sens est créé par un organe dit… des sens”; it becomes a tool incorporated into the body; and the body acts back upon the world in a rotation of the opposite sense.³⁷ The two contradictions are thus crossed, and the logic that governs them is not the “logique de la contradiction simple” that runs from Aristotle to Descartes, nor the equally linear dialectic of Hegel and Marx, but what the Manifeste calls “la logique de la double contradiction.”³⁸

The second move raises the cross. The double horizontal rotation “crée un axe de rotation vertical.” Enclose the whole in a sphere. Its lower hemisphere receives the ever-multiplying tools of the body — the mode of “ampleur simplement additive,” of quantity, the hemisphere of science; its upper hemisphere “appelle vers le sens de ce monde,” the mode of “intensité qualitative,” the hemisphere of connaissance. The equator is “le domaine de la conscience”; at the centre stands “le Moi ou le Nous transcendantaux, voire le Soi.” The descending polar axis is incarnation, spirit in the service of life, which the traditions called the lesser mysteries; the ascending axis is assomption, life in the service of spirit, the greater mysteries.³⁹ This is the sphère sénaire: “une sphère à six pôles en état de permutation permanente et globale de ces pôles,” with the horizontal rotations as the “phase de développement en ampleur” and the vertical movement as the “phase d’intensité.”⁴⁰ Counting the centre, the senary is a septenary, “6 + 1”; and since each of the four equatorial poles may in turn be taken as originary, each commanding two senses of rotation, the sphere yields thirty-two quadrants and, on the same quaternary base, “les 64 combinaisons traditionnelles du Yi King.”⁴¹ Abellio liked to say that the wave–particle model of physics “est une bonne image de la structure absolue.”⁴²

What makes the structure genetic rather than merely structural is the passage from breadth to intensity, which Abellio illustrated by what he called the “génitif intensificateur,” the form X of X: “Je dois procéder à la perception de ma perception même.” This return of vision upon itself — what his readers call the conscience de la conscience — was always, he observed, what the traditions had called initiation.⁴³ Assumption is this intensification. The structure is “invariante dans son tracé, mais génétique par l’intensité du courant qui la parcourt,” an “unmoved mover”; and it “est inséparable de sa praxis et ne peut être comprise que par elle.”⁴⁴ To the early objection that “on ne fait pas de la philosophie avec des schémas” he replied with the image of the arrowed sphere, charged with dynamic polarisations.⁴⁵ He called the structure absolute, he admitted, when he ought to have called it universal.⁴⁶

Second Memory, Retrogenesis, Interdependence#

Applied to time, the sphere generates Abellio’s most personal doctrine. The lower hemisphere is the apparently unrelated succession of lived events, “la mémoire naïve ou naturelle,” the first memory; the upper is the sense we give them; the horizontal axes are the temporal objects against immanent time, protention (reductive, analogous to the sense organ) against retention (integrative, analogous to the body). A crisis brings a “seconde naissance,” and “simultanément, naît ma « seconde mémoire »”: the past ceases to appear as a series of accidents, coming events cease to disturb, “j’en connaîtrai d’avance le sens profond.” Hence “toute connaissance confine ainsi dans une sagesse et un prophétisme.” [natural or naïve memory; second birth; at the same time my second memory is born; I shall know its profound meaning in advance; all knowledge thus approaches wisdom and prophecy]⁴⁷ The memoirs are titled Ma dernière mémoire because the memory in question is this one: not recollection but the re-genesis of a life read backwards from its sense. The Manifeste speaks of “la réversibilité du temps opérée par la seconde mémoire” and, with the engineer Xavier Sallantin, of rétrogenèse, the rediscovery and recreation of the alpha point from the omega.⁴⁸

Beneath all this lies a postulate Abellio stated with unusual candour. The universe is not a machine from which phenomena can be isolated but “un immense cerveau à fonctionnement global unitaire et insécable”; “tout agit et réagit sur tout”; “la notion de causalité n’est pas une notion initiatique.”⁴⁹ He asked whether universal interdependence was a demonstrated truth or a postulate, and answered that it was a heuristic hypothesis — one which nonetheless entailed “un brouillage général des « causes » et des « effets »” that dissolved classical determinism, chance and libertarian free will together.⁵⁰ It is on this postulate that his astrology, his numerology and his ethics all rest.

The Ideograms#

The claim that gives Abellio his place in the history of esotericism is that the Zodiac, the Sephirotic Tree, the Tarot and the I Ching are “idéogrammes initiatiques” structurally isomorphic with the sphere — “la pure « structure » qu’on appelle en Kabbale l’Arbre des Sephiroth, en astrologie le Zodiaque, et en hermétisme le Tarot.”⁵¹ The Kabbalistic correspondence came first. In 1946, working from Combas’s materials, he constructed a “structuration polygonale du cercle en vingt-deux polygones réguliers, exactement le nombre des lettres de l’alphabet hébraïque,” assigned new numerical values to the letters from the number of sides of the polygons, and found “des centaines de coïncidences” — the pillar of Mercy summing to 248, and so on. “Les nombres sont des nœuds qualitatifs, des pôles de structures.”⁵² The Tree is “une théogonie, tandis que la Genèse de Moïse est une cosmogonie”; the twenty-two letters “s’organisent strictement selon le modèle de la structure absolue,” disposed on the sphere after the Sefer Yetsirah.⁵³ This is the programme of La Bible, document chiffré (1950), recast thirty-four years later, with Hirsch’s formalisation, as the Théorie des nombres bibliques.

The Tarot’s twenty-two major arcana are the letters again; Abellio’s one separate treatment is a text of 1980 accompanying a luxury edition of the trumps, and the Manifeste lists the arcana with the planets, the Sephiroth and the Jungian archetypes as sets of multivalent symbols.⁵⁴ Astrology “prend pour postulat l’interdépendance universelle” and “obéit à une autre rationalité infiniment plus vivante”; La Fin de l’ésotérisme reads the discovery of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in 1781, 1846 and 1930 as “trois ek-stases successives” of the dialectic between individual consciousness and collective force.⁵⁵ The I Ching gave him his most striking modern correspondence: the sixty-four hexagrams, recovered from the thirty-two quadrants of the sphere, are set beside the sixty-four codons of the genetic code, a parallel he pressed from 1973 to the end.⁵⁶

The New Gnosis#

“Ouverture de l’être à l’interdépendance universelle et à l’éternel présent, la Gnose est… une et intemporelle.” [An opening of being to universal interdependence and the eternal present, Gnosis is one and timeless.]⁵⁷ The definition is from the Manifeste, and it has to be read against two things Abellio meant by “new.” Not new knowledge in a new dress — the gnosis is one — but “de nouvelles voies d’approche,” and specifically the two that Tradition lacked: science, which is “indéfiniment cumulative” where philosophy “ne l’est absolument pas,” and the transcendental reduction.⁵⁸ Philosophy in the full sense is “l’activité vécue, réflexive, opérative et transfigurante du Moi transcendantal”; “la transfiguration est par excellence le but et le contenu de la Gnose”; and the gnostic text lives a paradox, since “il conceptualise sur l’effacement final du concept.”⁵⁹ The gnostic’s state is enstasis, “par opposition à l’état d’extase des mystiques”: there are two ways, “l’une… féminine et nocturne,” the way of the mystics, and “l’autre virile et solaire, c’est la voie de la gnose.”⁶⁰ Of ancient Gnosticism Abellio said little, and what he said was a warning against “un certain néo-gnosticisme dont les fondements métaphysiques sont sûrement mal assurés.”⁶¹ His gnosis has no demiurge and no fallen world. Incarnation and assumption are complementary currents of one sphere, and even Lucifer and Satan are functional: “les deux principes d’activation antagonistes,” each containing “un facteur de refus,” from whose “perpétuelle incomplétude” ethics and aesthetics are born, and whom a “dégradation moralisante” has turned into the vulgar devil.⁶² Lucifer in particular — the light-bearer as principle of reflexive, individual consciousness — is to be assumed, not exorcised; a character in the second novel says of him that “ce que les prêtres nomment Lucifer… Dieu l’appelle créature suprêmement activante et pourtant immobile.”⁶³ Of Christ he said: “Mais je me voudrais christique,” and “la gnose est l’échelle (sans fin) jusqu’au Christ.”⁶⁴

The End of Esotericism#

The thesis of his most famous title follows from the definition. “L’ésotérisme, de par son essence, ne peut pas avoir de fin, dans la mesure où… la connaissance en soi est toujours inachevée”; what ends is [Esotericism, by its very nature, cannot end, insofar as knowledge itself is always unfinished.]occultation. “Nous sommes dans une période de désoccultation,” and the West, “de par son exigence fondamentale de rationalité,” is its agent: the traditional contents are being made transparent by phenomenology and structural thought, and science and knowledge are “deux affluents formant un même fleuve.”⁶⁵ It is a thesis that turns the Traditionalist reading of modernity inside out — the Kali Yuga becomes the age of disclosure — and Jérôme Rousse-Lacordaire has noted its paradox: the man who announced the end of esotericism exhibited, in his numerology, his astrology and his doctrine of the two ways, every one of its characteristics.⁶⁶ Abellio would have accepted the observation and denied that it was an objection. Disclosure is not disappearance. The tradition ends as an esotericism by being accomplished as a gnosis, and the sphere is what the accomplishment looks like.

History, Europe, the Political Sacred#

Vers un nouveau prophétisme had already placed this within a philosophy of history. The sacred acts politically through three types — the king, who holds power; the priest, who holds the institutionalised sacred; and the prophet, the man of knowledge outside every institution — and the modern age calls for a new prophetism, because power and knowledge cannot be reconciled: asked in 1982 whether they could, Abellio answered that he feared not.⁶⁷ “Les prêtres invisibles refusent de se laisser institutionnaliser. Eux seuls sont les prêtres de la fin des temps”; “l’Église invisible est en dehors de la morale.”⁶⁸ The book’s cyclical cosmology — involution and evolution, the deluges, the Hindu gunas — is Guénonian in furniture and anti-Guénonian in conclusion, for the cycle of “environ quarante siècles” whose hinge falls at the end of the nineteenth century ends not in catastrophe but in “la sortie de l’homme hors du temps,” the only event, he said, that explains all the others.⁶⁹

Assomption de l’Europe transposed this to the continent. Europe, politically eclipsed between the two blocs, is not to be resurrected but assumed: “un jour, l’Europe sera politiquement effacée des cartes, mais l’Occident vivra toujours,” for “l’Europe est construite, l’Occident est constitué,” and “l’Occident est partout où la conscience devient majeure.”⁷⁰ “Ma vision de l’Europe se veut transhistorique, métaphysique, et indépendante des conditions de l’époque”; “je n’ai absolument pas de solution politique à proposer”; “je n’ai pas à dénoncer mais à annoncer.”⁷¹ The reflexive rationality of the cogito is Europe’s specific work, and its completion by transcendental phenomenology is the instrument of a gnosis that will outlive the continent that produced it. In the later interviews this becomes the idea of a “communisme sacerdotal,” glimpsed once at Cluny around the year 1000 and betrayed at Gregory VII’s “grand virage,” and perhaps to be reborn — Abellio thought of Brazil — outside Europe altogether.⁷²

Ethics#

The posthumous Fondements d’éthique collects fragments of 1950 to 1978, and their premise is the postulate of interdependence, which abolishes chance, causality and libertarian freedom and grounds what the Manifeste calls “la Loi au-dessus des lois.”⁷³ Natural morality and transcendental ethics are distinguished; the master–disciple and father–son dialectics are analysed; Sartrean ethics and Marxist praxis are weighed and found wanting; and the limits of initiatic teaching are set by a rule Abellio took from Exodus — “Tu ne monteras pas à mon autel par des degrés” — and glossed as “la transcendance ne se construit pas.” [You shall not go up to my altar by steps; transcendence cannot be constructed.]⁷⁴ Mastery “engendrée par la conscience est une ordination,” not an institution; and, in the sentence his disciples quoted most, “l’ivresse de la rigueur est la plus haute ivresse.”⁷⁵

Works#

La Fin du nihilisme (with André Mahé; Paris: Fernand Sorlot, “La Vie européenne,” 1943; 253 pp.). Written in 1942 and published under his own name, the only book of the MSR years. A political essay arguing that liberal parliamentarism, capitalism and the socialist parties have ended in “nihilism,” and calling for a national and socialist European revolution led by a new elite; it carries the planiste and technocratic ideas of X-Crise and the SFIO left into the vocabulary of collaboration. Its interest for the historian is as the hinge between the militant of the 1930s and the prophet of 1947; Roberti treats it as the terminus of the “gauchiste mystique.”⁷⁶

Heureux les pacifiques (novel; Paris: Le Portulan, 1946 [released January 1947]; 439 pp.; Prix Sainte-Beuve; reissued 10/18, 1969, and Flammarion, 1979). Written in hiding in 1945–46 as “le bilan de mes expériences politiques.” A first-person novel of the generation of 1934–45 narrated by Robert Saveilhan, a polytechnicien of humble provincial origins, in five parts that follow a liturgical calendar — 1934 Baptême, 1935 Communion, 1936–1939 Quadrature du cercle, 1940–1945 Crucifixion, 1945 Pentecôte. Opening on an assassination, it takes Saveilhan from the communist circles of the École through socialist militancy, war, collaboration and Resistance to disillusion with every form of political engagement and a turn to metaphysics. Ricarda, Saveilhan’s double, is corrupted by power and announces that the survivors will “write a new Bible, more cunningly veiled”; the uncle Pujholac is a theosophical mentor modelled on Combas; three women — Catherine, Lucie, Gina — mark the stages. The form mixes journal, dialogue and meditation. It sold poorly.⁷⁷

Vers un nouveau prophétisme. Essai sur le rôle politique du sacré et la situation de Lucifer dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard, 1947; 215 pp.; revised printings 1950, 1986). Composed in the Loiret from the “materia prima” Combas supplied. The chapters run from a cyclical cosmology of involution and evolution and the deluges, through a critique of Maritain’s “integral humanism,” to “Prophètes contre magiciens” and “Construction de l’arche.” Its thesis: politics has failed because the sacred has withdrawn from it; the modern age is the age of Lucifer, understood not as the devil but as the light-bearing principle of individual reflexive consciousness, which must be assumed rather than rejected; beyond the priests and the “magicians” (the demagogues) a new prophetic caste of men of knowledge must build the ark of the coming age. The first statement of the post-political gnosis.⁷⁸

Les Yeux d’Ézéchiel sont ouverts (novel; Paris: Gallimard, 1949/50; 377 pp.; Livre de poche 1968; in print). Written in Switzerland. Narrated by Pierre Dupastre, a young archaeologist wounded fighting in Spain, who convalesces in Barcelona in the company of Dom Luis, a Benedictine of Montserrat, and Drameille, a cynical French journalist; their conversations on good and evil detach him from the fight. Back in Paris after the Liberation he is drawn into communist power struggles — the compromising documents wanted by the newspaper director Girault and the communist leader Bonnava, the love of Hélène, Girault’s wife and Bonnava’s mistress, the intrigues of the operative Pirenne — which end in Hélène’s suicide, Dupastre’s killing of Bonnava and his withdrawal to Dom Luis’s monastery. Dupastre, Drameille and Pirenne recur in the two later novels; the title names, in Roberti’s phrase, “le regard de l’écrivain” on his new self-conception. Contrary to a common assumption, there is no Cagoule plot in this book; that material belongs to Sol invictus.⁷⁹

La Bible, document chiffré. Essai sur la restitution des clefs de la science numérale secrète (2 vols.; Paris: Gallimard, “Les Essais” XLI and XLVI, 1950; I, Clefs générales, 299 pp.; II, Les Séphiroth et les 5 premiers versets de la Genèse, 345 pp.). The first exposition of the numerical science received from Combas and systematised in 1946–50. Volume I builds a general theory of the numbers one to ten as generative operators rather than symbols — 666 as the “nombre clef de la vie,” the manifestation of the Trinity on all levels; seven as “l’infini nombré dans son retour au principe.” Volume II applies the keys to the ten Sephiroth, the numerical values of the Hebrew letters and a word-by-word gematria of Genesis 1:1–5, to show that the text is a cipher. Contemporary academic reviews were sceptical, and Abellio himself later called it provisional, promising the “édition refondue et augmentée” that became the Théorie des nombres bibliques of 1984.⁸⁰

Assomption de l’Europe (Paris: Au Portulan / Flammarion, 1954; 269 pp.; “Champs,” 1978; digital reissue). The first book of the Paris years. It treats the sacraments as a structure, the emergence of the West, “l’aliénation cartésienne,” the dialectic of East and West, and Christianity against Marxism, confronting two lineages — Aquinas, Descartes, Husserl against Spinoza, Nietzsche, Eckhart. The thesis is the one summarised above: a Europe “encore invisible, celle des prêtres,” a “caste révolutionnaire” passing from “valeurs de dévotion” to “valeurs de connaissance,” and the continent’s political eclipse understood as its assumption into a gnostic Occident. Abellio later called it “un premier essai” and insisted that its Europe was “non politique.”⁸¹

Montségur (play in three acts; written 1957; broadcast by the Radiodiffusion française, 1959; Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1982; 150 pp.). His only published theatre: the last days of the Cathar fortress in 1244 and the choice of the parfaits to burn rather than abjure, staged as the confrontation of gnosis with Church and power. An earlier play, Pierre Cardinal, was read at the Vieux-Colombier in 1946 and never published.⁸²

La Fosse de Babel (novel; Paris: Gallimard, 1962; 648 pp.; “L’Imaginaire,” 1985; in print). The centre of the Dupastre cycle and, in Robert Myre’s phrase, “a direct methodological application” of the absolute structure in fiction. Drameille, the journalist-philosopher of Ézéchiel, sets out to form supermen capable of leading the world to a higher destiny; to recruit the members of a group he calls the “structure absolue,” he provokes conflicts among nationalist, communist and technocratic factions, selecting by combat and eliminating the insufficient, the massacres being a stage toward the “communisme sacerdotal” that will surpass the old religions and the old politics. Around him: Dupastre the writer, the opposed sisters Julienne and Françoise de Sixte, Pirenne the communist policeman, and the abbé d’Aquila, “un saint lucide.” Set in the mid-1950s, its subject is free will caught in the weave of events. Michel Camus called it the indispensable bridge of the trilogy.⁸³

La Structure absolue. Essai de phénoménologie génétique (Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des Idées,” 1965; 531 pp., with an appendix of documents; in print). The system book, composed over eleven years and dated by its author as his second baptism. Its argument is the one set out in the section above: from Husserl’s reduction and the “présent vivant,” through the analysis of perception into two crossed couples, to the vertical axis, the sphere, the logic of double contradiction and the intensifying genesis; the later chapters apply the model to the Sephirotic Tree, the hexagrams, the Tarot, astrology, ethics and aesthetics. Its reception was slow and its readership mixed — philosophers found the diagrams, esotericists found the phenomenology, hard to bear — but it has never been out of print, and a special issue of Question de (1987) was devoted to it.⁸⁴

Ma dernière mémoire, I: Un faubourg de Toulouse, 1907–1927 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971; 228 pp.). The first volume of the autobiography, whose title plays on the “second memory”: recollection as the re-genesis of a life from its sense. It reconstructs the working-class faubourg, the modest family, the scholarship pupil’s schooling and the preparatory classes up to admission to the École in 1927, in a deliberately classical prose that alternates minute description with metaphysical commentary on transfiguration and self-mastery; the childhood is read as the first birth to be redoubled by the second.⁸⁵

Dans une âme et un corps. Journal 1971 (Paris: Gallimard, 1973; 273 pp.). The diary of the year in which the first memoir was written: daily life, reading notes, dreams, and reflections on the body and ageing, on the couple and what he called the “érotique transcendantale,” on death and the living present. The title states the unity of soul and body his gnosis claims to realise. It is the most direct record of Abellio’s practice and of his circle in the early 1970s; a projected continuation did not appear.⁸⁶

La Fin de l’ésotérisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1973; 252 pp.; reissued Presses du Châtelet, 2014, with a preface by Pacôme Thiellement). His most widely read essay. After an Avertissement and “Premières clefs,” it surveys the esoteric doctrines and their applications — astrology, alchemy, magic, divination — across civilisations, then applies the sphere to the I Ching and the Sephirotic Tree, setting the sixty-four hexagrams beside the sixty-four codons. The thesis is that “nous entrons dans une période de dévoilement de la tradition cachée”: esotericism ends not by disappearing but by being fulfilled and made public through the West’s demand for rationality, gnosis (unified knowing) being opposed to épistémè (the split of subject and object). Critical of Guénon and of Jung. The 2014 reissue brought him a new readership.⁸⁷

Ma dernière mémoire, II: Les Militants, 1927–1939 (Paris: Gallimard, 1975; 315 pp.). The political volume: Polytechnique and the Ponts, entry into the SFIO in 1932, X-Crise, planisme and the review La Volonté socialiste, the Popular Front and the ministry, the tendency struggles inside the party and the drift of part of its left toward authoritarian solutions, ending with mobilisation in 1939. The militant is presented as the figure of the rajasic man of action whom the gnostic must both understand and transcend. Roberti’s first volume is built on it.⁸⁸

Ma dernière mémoire, III: Sol invictus, 1939–1947 (Paris: Ramsay, 1980; 497 pp.; Prix des Deux Magots, 1981). The controversial volume: the war, the MSR under Deloncle and after him, the collaborationist years, the Unitaires and Force libre, the Liberation and the hiding in the Loiret where, after the meeting with Combas, he turned to Kabbalah and wrote his first books; it closes with the departure for Switzerland. The title — the Roman sun-god whose feast became Christmas — figures the second birth. Historians read it as an apologia; Abellio’s defenders read it as the only honest account by a collaborationist leader of what he thought he was doing. Both readings are available in the text, which is the most remarkable of the three.⁸⁹

Approches de la nouvelle gnose (Paris: Gallimard, “Les Essais” 217, 1981; 252 pp.; in print). Essays, lectures and articles of 1953–1980 presenting the new gnosis as “l’ouverture de l’être à l’interdépendance universelle”: expositions of the structure for non-specialists, its confrontation with modern science and the genetic code, reflections on the West and the end of history, on intersubjectivity and transfiguration, and on the applied traditional sciences. Jean-Claude Roux regards it as the philosophical foundation of Visages immobiles.⁹⁰

Histoire, structure et symbolisme du tarot (Paris: Club du livre, c. 1980; 14 pp. with 22 plates by Pierre Jacquot; 120 copies). A short text accompanying a luxury set of the major arcana, reading the twenty-two trumps through the six-poled structure; his only separately published Tarot work.⁹¹

Visages immobiles (novel; Paris: Gallimard, 1983; 501 pp.). The last novel and the close of the cycle. Six alternating first-person chapters of c. 1972–77 move from Angola and north-eastern Brazil to converge on a Manhattan built over radioactive rock and an abyssal lake. Dupastre, Abellio’s alter ego, tries to write his final novel and to reunite the women of his past; the architect Achilléus plans an underground city; the nihilist Pirenne, with the parapsychologist Laforêt, plots to poison New York’s water; the ex-priest Domenech pursues Third-World activism; Drameille and the Brazilian padre Vieira embody the positive pole; the clairvoyant Marie-Hélène is “la femme ultime.” Cold War, intelligence agencies, biological weapons and terrorism form the backdrop to the “irreducible confrontation of men of power and men of knowledge.” Four protagonists die; Dupastre survives, “immobile at the hub of the wheel.” Its governing myth is the “eighth day,” the raising of the world to the Ego after the seventh day’s ascent. Camus compared it to Dante; Roberti titles his chapter on it “échec.”⁹²

Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques. Essai de numérologie kabbalistique (with Charles Hirsch; Paris: Gallimard, “Les Essais” 228, 1984; 449 pp.). The definitive statement of the numerical science, conceived as the recasting of the 1950 volumes: the ten numbers and Sephiroth, the twenty-two letters and their values, the rules of gematria and its transformations, and the application to the Hebrew of Genesis, now reorganised around the absolute structure and Hirsch’s mathematical formalisation. It drops much of the earlier speculation and presents itself as a method rather than a revelation.⁹³

De la politique à la gnose. Entretiens avec Marie-Thérèse de Brosses, suivis de Généalogie et transfiguration de l’Occident (Paris: Belfond, 1987; 274 pp.; a new edition of Entretiens avec Raymond Abellio, Belfond, 1966). The conversations of 1966 retrace the life from Toulouse to the sphere and remain the most accessible self-presentation; the 1987 edition adds the late lecture on the West and the fullest bibliography then available.⁹⁴

Manifeste de la nouvelle gnose (ed. Marie-Thérèse de Brosses and Charles Hirsch, preface by Hirsch; Paris: Gallimard, “NRF Essais,” 1989; 292 pp.). Written in 1986 and left unfinished. Six chapters — sciences and gnosis (opening with the 1986 summary “Structure absolue et présent vivant”); philosophies, religions and gnosis; gnosis, symbolism and mythologies; gnosis and heuristics, “la nouvelle logique”; gnosis, history and prophetism; gnosis and ethics, “la Loi au-dessus des lois.” It restates the founding concepts and lays out a programme for reunifying science, philosophy, religion, symbolism, history, ethics and aesthetics as the modern answer to the Delphic injunction. His testament.⁹⁵

Fondements d’éthique (Paris: L’Herne, “Confidences,” 1994; 119 pp.). The ethical fragments of 1950–1978 first printed in the Cahier de l’Herne, published as a volume.⁹⁶

Abellio also wrote prefaces of some importance — to Sérant’s Au seuil de l’ésotérisme (1955), to Balzac’s La Recherche de l’absolu and Louis Lambert (1967–68), to Meyrink’s La Nuit de Walpurgis (1963), to Armand Barbault’s alchemical L’Or du millième matin (1969), to Malcolm de Chazal (1974), to Dominique de Roux’s Le Cinquième Empire (1977), and to works of astrology by Elizabeth Teissier and Jean Barets — and directed the series “Bibliothèque des recherches avancées” from 1974.⁹⁷ His works have been translated into Portuguese and Spanish; none has appeared in English.⁹⁸

Reception and Significance#

Abellio’s readership has always been of two kinds, and they have rarely spoken to one another. The first is the circle of disciples and friends who kept the work alive after 1986: Jean-Pierre Lombard, who edited the Cahier de l’Herne (1979) and published a Dialogue with him (1985), and who gave the cleanest short account of the sphere as “la transformation d’une linéarité en sphéricité”; Robert Amadou, who in 1983 counted Abellio and Jacques Lacarrière as “deux très rares gnostiques” of the century; Michel Camus, who met him in 1962 and wrote on his Husserlianism; Marie-Thérèse de Brosses and Charles Hirsch, who edited the Manifeste; and Jean Parvulesco, whose Soleil rouge de Raymond Abellio (1987) read the last novel as Eurasian eschatology and did more than any other book to fix the image of Abellio as a prophet of the far right.⁹⁹ An Association des Amis produced the Études abelliennes (1979–82) and the Cahiers Raymond Abellio (1983–84); annual Rencontres have been held at Seix in the Ariège since 2004 and are now run by the Association Raymond Abellio de Recherches et Études.¹⁰⁰

The second readership is academic, and it came late. Antoine Faivre placed Abellio within the history of the Western esoteric currents in a chapter of 2000, devoted a seminar at the École Pratique to “la question des « structures » dites « absolues »,” co-directed with Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld the Cerisy colloquium Raymond Abellio aujourd’hui (2–9 September 2002), and supervised the doctoral thesis that became Nicolas Roberti’s two-volume biography (2011).¹⁰¹ The Cerisy volume (2004) is the indispensable scholarly reference: alongside the historical papers it contains Camus on Husserl, Bernard Guibert on Abellio and Marx, Basarab Nicolescu on the conversion of science, Jean-Louis Schlegel on désoccultation, Jean-Pierre Brach on the numbers, Daniel Verney on astrology, Jean-Bruno Renard on Pierre de Combas, and Faivre’s own comparative placing of the absolute structure among the “absolute structures” of modern esotericism.¹⁰² Rousse-Lacordaire’s entry in the Brill Dictionary (2005) is the standard short English account.¹⁰³ Recent work — Éric Coulon on Abellio’s messianism (2025), the reissue of La Fin de l’ésotérisme with Thiellement’s preface (2014), and a short study from the Nouvelle Droite’s own press (2025) that pointedly separates him from Guénon’s orthodoxy and Evola’s heroism — suggests that the readership is widening again.¹⁰⁴

Two questions govern any assessment. The first is the political one, and it should not be waved away with the observation that he changed. Abellio sat on the patronage committee of Nouvelle École; the Nouvelle Droite claimed him, from Alain de Benoist’s article “La seconde naissance d’Abellio” (1981) onward, as one of its intellectual ancestors; and the idea of a Europe assumed into a gnostic Occident by a caste of men of knowledge is the kind of idea that has never lacked for political uses.¹⁰⁵ Against this must be set his own explicit refusals — “je n’ai absolument pas de solution politique à proposer” — and the plain fact that the doctrine of universal interdependence, with its dissolution of causality and of the very notion of an enemy, is about as poor a foundation for a politics as a metaphysics can be.¹⁰⁶ The honest formulation is that Abellio’s thought is not political and that his career was, and that the second fact has shaped the reception of the first.

The second question is the one Rousse-Lacordaire raised: whether the “end of esotericism” is not itself an esotericism, and the sphere one more diagram in a tradition of diagrams. Faivre’s comparative study places the structure among its relatives, the “absolute structures” of the modern esoteric currents, and the comparison brings out what distinguishes Abellio’s: not the shape but the method. No other esoteric thinker of the century tried to derive his diagram from the phenomenology of perception, and none took the sciences as an ally rather than a threat.¹⁰⁷ Whether the derivation succeeds is another matter. A reader trained in Husserl will find the transition from the crossed couples of perception to the Sephirotic Tree unargued; a reader trained in Kabbalah will find the polygons arbitrary. But the attempt to make transcendental philosophy and the tradition of the Tree say the same thing, and to say it as a discipline of consciousness rather than a doctrine, is Abellio’s own, and it has had no successor. He remains what Amadou called him: one of the very few gnostics, in the strict sense, that the twentieth century produced — a man who claimed to know, who said what he knew in the form of a geometry, and who spent forty years insisting that the geometry could be entered.

Bibliography#

Primary#

Soulès, Georges, and André Mahé, La Fin du nihilisme, Paris: Fernand Sorlot, 1943. Abellio, Raymond, Heureux les pacifiques, Paris: Le Portulan, 1946; Paris: UGE (10/18), 1969; Paris: Flammarion, 1979. ——, Vers un nouveau prophétisme. Essai sur le rôle politique du sacré et la situation de Lucifer dans le monde moderne, Paris: Gallimard, 1947; 1950; 1986. ——, Les Yeux d’Ézéchiel sont ouverts, Paris: Gallimard, 1949/50; Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1968. ——, La Bible, document chiffré. Essai sur la restitution des clefs de la science numérale secrète, 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard (Les Essais), 1950. ——, Assomption de l’Europe, Paris: Au Portulan / Flammarion, 1954; Paris: Flammarion (Champs), 1978. ——, La Fosse de Babel, Paris: Gallimard, 1962; Paris: Gallimard (L’Imaginaire), 1985. ——, La Structure absolue. Essai de phénoménologie génétique, Paris: Gallimard (Bibliothèque des Idées), 1965. ——, Entretiens avec Raymond Abellio, by Marie-Thérèse de Brosses, Paris: Belfond, 1966; new ed. as De la politique à la gnose, Paris: Belfond, 1987. ——, Ma dernière mémoire, I: Un faubourg de Toulouse, 1907–1927, Paris: Gallimard, 1971; II: Les Militants, 1927–1939, Paris: Gallimard, 1975; III: Sol invictus, 1939–1947, Paris: Ramsay, 1980. ——, Dans une âme et un corps. Journal 1971, Paris: Gallimard, 1973. ——, La Fin de l’ésotérisme, Paris: Flammarion, 1973; Paris: Presses du Châtelet, 2014. ——, Approches de la nouvelle gnose, Paris: Gallimard (Les Essais), 1981. ——, Montségur, Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1982. ——, Visages immobiles, Paris: Gallimard, 1983. —— and Charles Hirsch, Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques. Essai de numérologie kabbalistique, Paris: Gallimard (Les Essais), 1984. ——, “Structure absolue et présent vivant,” La Liberté de l’esprit 12 (1986); repr. in Manifeste de la nouvelle gnose. ——, Manifeste de la nouvelle gnose, ed. Marie-Thérèse de Brosses and Charles Hirsch, Paris: Gallimard (NRF Essais), 1989. ——, Fondements d’éthique, Paris: L’Herne, 1994. Fonds Raymond Abellio, Bibliothèque nationale de France, NAF 28200.

Secondary#

Amadou, Robert, “La voie gnostique selon Abellio,” Question de 53 (1983). Benoist, Alain de, “La seconde naissance d’Abellio,” Éléments 39 (1981), 44–47; interview with Raymond Abellio [recorded 1982], Krisis 4 (1989), 90–106. Coulon, Éric, Départ et retour du fils. Le messianisme de Raymond Abellio, La Tarente, 2025. Faivre, Antoine, “Raymond Abellio and the Western Esoteric ‘Tradition’,” in Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Faivre, Antoine, and Jean-Baptiste de Foucauld (eds.), Raymond Abellio (Colloque de Cerisy, 2002), Paris: Dervy (Cahiers de l’Hermétisme), 2004. Hanrez, Marc, Sous les signes d’Abellio, Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1976. Lombard, Jean-Pierre (ed.), Raymond Abellio (Cahiers de l’Herne 36), Paris: L’Herne, 1979. ——, “La Gnose en exercice. Lecture de Raymond Abellio,” 3e Millénaire 3 (1982); Dialogue avec Raymond Abellio, Paris: Lettres vives, 1985. Nescine, Vital, Raymond Abellio. Une nouvelle gnose pour l’Europe, Paris: La Nouvelle Librairie, 2025. Parvulesco, Jean, Le Soleil rouge de Raymond Abellio, Paris: Guy Trédaniel, 1987. Question de 72, La Structure absolue. Textes et témoignages inédits, Paris: Albin Michel, 1987. Roberti, Nicolas, Raymond Abellio, 2 vols.: I, 1907–1944. Un gauchiste mystique; II, 1944–1986. La structure et le miroir, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. Rousse-Lacordaire, Jérôme, “Abellio, Raymond,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Leiden: Brill, 2005, 1–2. Tochon-Danguy, Christine, Les romans de Raymond Abellio. Une interprétation imaginaire de la crise contemporaine, doctoral thesis, Université Grenoble 2, 1996.