The Messianic Apodictic: A Treatise on Supreme Knowledge - Hardcover

by Józef Maria Hoene-Wroński (Author), Tau Phosphoros (Translator), Tau Phosphoros (Introduction by)

In 1852 a young Frenchman named Alphonse-Louis Constant entered the Paris circle of an aging Polish mathematician. Two years later he began to publish as Éliphas Lévi, and the modern occult revival had its founder. The mathematician was Józef Maria Hoëné Wronski, and this is his central work, translated into English for the first time.

Wronski (1776-1853) was no visionary amateur. He fought in the Kościuszko Uprising at eighteen, studied in the German states, and became a mathematician of standing: the Wronskian determinant carries his name, and a commission of the Institut with Lagrange among its members reported favorably on his work. Then, at Marseille in 1803, he underwent what he described ever afterwards as the discovery of the Absolute - and spent the next fifty years deducing the whole of reality, a priori, from a single Law of Creation.

The Messianic Apodictic is the summary of that undertaking. Left unfinished at his death and published posthumously in 1876 by his adoptive daughter Bathilde Conseillant, it sets out 244 genetic tables that derive, in strict order, God and the Trinity, the world, man, the beautiful, freedom, nature, the evil and good principles, life, anthropology, psychology, language, and revealed and absolute religion. It closes by declaring that the coming of the Messiah has been accomplished - and accomplished in this book.

For readers in the Gnostic, Martinist and Masonic traditions it is a strange and valuable inheritance. In 1887 the young Papus, four years before founding the Martinist Order, named the five sources of contemporary occultism: Louis Lucas, Wronski, Éliphas Lévi, Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, Blavatsky. Wronski stands second, ahead of Lévi. Yet Wronski himself is frequently withering about the orders that would come to revere him. He calls the corporification of the mysteries in emblems "ridiculous apings of reason" and initiatic trials so many "degradations of man" - while at the same time giving the Cabala, the occult sciences, theurgy and goety, practical mysticism, the secret societies and Freemasonry determinate and legitimate places in a system deduced from first principles, and setting Saint-Martin and Eckartshausen at the summit of the entire history of mysticism.

That tension is the interest of the book. His History of Mysticism is a syllabus of the Western esoteric canon as a well-informed Pole understood it in 1823 - the Sepher Yetzirah and the Zohar, Herrera, Paracelsus and Khunrath, Pico and Reuchlin, Agrippa, Boehme and Kuhlmann. His treatment of Freemasonry distinguishes a "pure or speculative" masonry he calls "certainly very innocent" from an applied masonry recruited out of it. And at printed page 248, writing in the 1820s, he lists the Baphomet among the mysteries of the masculine sex - three decades before Lévi gave that name the goat-headed figure it now universally denotes. The edition offers the conjunction as a conjunction, not as proof.

This translation renders the complete text of the 1876 edition, including the front matter, the author's errata (applied to the text, with each change recorded), and the Index of Tables. It is accompanied by a substantial introduction covering Wronski's life, his system, his religion, the transmission through Lévi and Papus, and how to read a genetic table; a glossary of some 300 technical terms and Wronskian coinages; a concordance to the pagination of the French; and the twenty original plates in facsimile. Wronski's own notes and those of his editor are distinguished throughout from the translator's, and nothing has been softened.