Occultist Freemasonry in the 18th Century and the Order of Élus Coëns

René Le Forestier's La Franc-Maçonnerie occultiste au XVIIIe siècle et l'Ordre des Élus Coëns (Paris, 1928) remains a fundamental documentary study of the theurgic Order founded by Martinès de Pasqually around 1760, the Order from which many Martinist traditions trace their descent. Drawing on Pasqually's Treatise on the Reintegration of Beings and on the correspondence of Pasqually, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, Le Forestier reconstructs the doctrines, the rituals, and the history of the Order from its own documents rather than from the legends that later grew up around it.

The work is divided into three Books. The first sets out the doctrine of the Reintegration: the emanation and fall of the Spirits, the creation of the material world as their prison, the emanation and prevarication of the Spiritual Minor, and the long work of reconciliation. It then describes the Operations themselves: the daily and equinoctial invocations, the tracings and Circles of Correspondence, the costume of the Operant, and the "Passes," the manifestations that the disciples awaited as signs that their work had been received.

The second Book examines the sources of Pasqually's system: the Bible and the Talmud, the Kabbalah, Jewish and Renaissance magic, Pythagorean arithmosophy, esoteric Christianity, and the Gnostic schools of antiquity, with which Le Forestier compares the Reintegration point by point.

The third Book traces the Order as a Masonic rite: the Class of the Porch and the high Coën degrees up to the Réau-Croix; the beginnings at Toulouse, Foix, and Bordeaux; the Sovereign Tribunal in Paris; the disputes between Pasqually and his disciples at Lyon; the Master's departure for Saint-Domingue and his death in 1774; and the dispersal of the Order. It closes with portraits of the Emulators who passed through its Temples, among them the abbé Fournié, Bacon de la Chevalerie, the marquise de la Croix, and Jacques Cazotte.

This second edition is a thorough revision of a translation first made in 2016 and published in 2023. The entire text has been collated anew, line by line, against the French edition of 1928, and errors of sense have been corrected throughout. Every bibliographical reference has been checked against the original. Le Forestier's notes have been restored to the foot of the page, where he placed them. They are joined by the translator's own annotations, which identify persons and works, explain terms of art, and note where later research has qualified the author's conclusions. The Translator's Introduction has been revised and enlarged, the original plates reproduce the Table of the Universe and the tracings of the Operations, and a full index of persons, places, Lodges, degrees, and doctrinal terms has been added.

Le Forestier was not himself a Freemason, and he wrote as a historian, with independence of judgment and close attention to the documents. His study remains essential reading for members of the Martinist orders and Gnostic churches, for Freemasons interested in the high degrees of the eighteenth century, and for scholars of Western esotericism.