Sitting portrait of Guillaume Postel, French linguist, astronomer, Cabbalist, diplomat, professor, and religious universalist, engraved on a copperplate by Esme de Boulonois; from the book ‘Académie Des Sciences Et Des Arts’ by Isaac Bullart, published in Amsterdam by Elzevier in 1682.

*

Today’s sharing from the Blue House of Via-HYGEIA, is the first part of a sampler devoted to Guillaume Postel (25 March 1510 – 6 September 1581)-a French linguist, orientalist, astronomer, Christian kabbalist, diplomat, polyglot, professor, religious universalist, and writer-as there is almost nothing of his works translated in English (!) We will select key texts from his many treatises to help give a taste of what his thoughts were and what key concepts made him special during his time and why his legacy has reached us in our modern world. We will publish from ‘The Doctrine of the Golden Century’, ‘The First Elements of a Christian Euclid’, ‘The Victory of the Women of the New World’, ‘The Venetian Virgin’, the ‘Key to all the things hidden in the constitution of the World’, plus two great articles from professor François Secret, ‘Amen, that is ‘per Artem’ and ‘The difference between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christus’. We hope by this effort, we can bring to the English speaking world more to read from his seminal and stimulating writings that were too advanced for his time, making him a sort of misunderstood prophet ‘of the Restitution of All Things’. Part 3 of the Triptych, the English translation from the French is by Via-HYGEIA from the 1899 edition of Postel’s ‘Key to all the things hidden in the constitution of the World’ for Abraham von Frankenberg’s introduction and appendix.

**

*

1-First introduction by Alastair Hamilton,

Arcadian Visiting Research Professor  at the School of Advanced Study,

London University, attached to the Warburg Institute.

Few scholars illustrate the conflicting currents of thought which characterised the late Renaissance as clearly as Guillaume Postel, and few carried them to such extremes. On the one hand he was fascinated by esotericism and oddly credulous where apocryphal and spurious texts were concerned. He held firm beliefs in the role of the prophet and the imminence of the millennium preceding the end of the world −beliefs whose roots can be traced back to the Middle Ages and which were deeply affected by the enthusiasm attending the Reformation. He was convinced that France was destined to play a providential part in reforming the Church, and that he himself had a divine mission. This was the stuff of some of the great ‘heretics’ of the time – Giordano Bruno, Francesco Pucci and Tommaso Campanella. Postel’s visionary behaviour led to his expulsion from the Society of Jesus, his incarceration by the Roman Inquisition, and, finally, to his confinement in a lunatic asylum in Paris.

On the other hand Postel was a pioneer. He launched the study of Arabic in Europe – as a teacher he had insights into how the language should be tackled which were far ahead of his time – and he was one of the first practitioners of Samaritan and Syriac. He produced some of the earliest works on comparative linguistics. The manuscripts he collected and edited contributed to furthering biblical studies and to creating a critical attitude to the received texts ultimately due to undermine the very roots of the Christian faith.

Born in Barenton in Normandy in 1510, Postel was educated at the Collège de Sainte-Barbe in Paris, where he started to learn some of his many languages, both ancient and modern, and acquired a reputation as a mathematician and a philosopher. In 1536 he was appointed to accompany Jean de la Forest to the Ottoman Empire. La Forest was the first French ambassador to Istanbul and signed the capitulations or trading agreement which would make of France the preferred European commercial partner (and occasional military ally) of the sultan. Although the ambassador and his train made brief stops in the Arab world on their way to the capital, it was in Istanbul that Postel learned Arabic from a Turkish Christian who urged him to contribute to the spread of Christianity in the East.

Postel’s journey inspired some of his first works. In 1537, on his way back to France, he stopped off in Venice, and prepared his ‘Linguarum duodecim characteribus differentium alphabetum introductio’, which came out in Paris in the following year. The twelve alphabets treated are Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Samaritan, Arabic, Ethiopic (which he calls Indian), Greek, Coptic (which he calls Georgian), Southern Slavonic or Serbian, Glagolithic, Armenian and Latin. Although the title reflects the custom of early tourists of collecting exotic alphabets – a characteristic of the reports by Sir John Mandeville in the early fourteenth century and Bernhard von Breydenbach in the late fifteenth century – the book represents a major advance. Postel, like most of his contemporaries, believed that all languages descended from Hebrew, but, besides being the first European to reproduce the Samaritan alphabet, he was one of the first scholars to observe a special affinity between the languages later defined as Semitic – Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, Samaritan, Arabic and Ethiopic. He also inaugurated a new era by adding Arabic. In this connection he composed his famous little treatise on the benefits of Arabic – its immense utility for travellers and merchants, who could use it from the Canary Islands to the Moluccas, its importance for scientists, who would at last be able to read the works of their great Arab predecessors, and its value for missionaries.

Postel’s next work to be published, the ‘De originibus seu de Hebraicae linguae et gentis antiquitate’, may have been the first book he ever wrote – in 1533, well before he set out for the Levant. He again presents the idea of Hebrew as the first language from which all others are descended and lists words in Greek, Latin, French and Italian which display points of community with the original tongue. Even if such a view was ultimately to prove misleading, Postel’s comparative method was revolutionary.

The ‘De originibus’ was followed by Postel’s Arabic grammar, the ‘Grammatica Arabica’ of about 1538. The introduction on the uses of Arabic had already appeared in the earlier work on alphabets, as, indeed, had many of the observations about Arabic grammar, yet the book was a turning point in the study of eastern languages. It was the first grammar of classical Arabic, produced with Arabic types, to appear in print. It was unsurpassed for over seventy years, and even then, with its adaptation for a western readership of the rules set out by the Arab grammarians, it remained a model for later grammars published in Europe. In 1538 the French king, François I, gave Postel a professorship at his new foundation known then as the Collège Royal (and now as the Collège de France). As its holder and the author of the grammar, Postel can be regarded as the inaugurator of Arabic studies in early modern Europe. Two years later he published his geographical and historical study of Greater Syria, the ‘Syriae descriptio’, a work he would include in his ‘De universitate’ of 1552.

One of Postel’s firmest convictions was the importance of Arabic for Christian missionaries, and the need for missionaries to know the Koran and to be able to confront the Muslims with simple arguments, based on tenets common to the three monotheistic faiths, which would inevitably lead to their conversion. This idea can be traced back to the Middle Ages, and, in what is perhaps his greatest work, the ‘De orbis terrae concordia’, written after his dismissal as professor of Arabic in 1542, Postel displayed his own originality, as well as his competence as an Arabist and his familiarity with Islam, by translating sizeable extracts from the Koran into Latin. The quality of his translations is far superior to that of any of the existing Latin versions. When, in 1543, Theodor Bibliander published the Latin rendering of the Koran made in Toledo by Robert of Ketton in the twelfth century – the first complete translation of the text ever to appear in print − he included Postel’s translation of the first sura as it appeared on the last page of his Arabic grammar.

At about the same time as his ‘De orbis terrae concordia’ Postel also composed his ‘Alcorani seu legis Mahometi et Evangelistarum concordiae liber’ in which he compared Islam to Protestantism. This was to become an increasingly popular line of attack in Roman Catholic circles. At this point, filled with missionary zeal, Postel tried to join the new Society of Jesus, leaving Paris for Rome in 1544. To begin with Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Society, welcomed him, and Postel was duly ordained and took the first vows as a novice. Soon, however, he antagonised his supporters with his views about France. The French king, he maintained, would have to nominate a French pope who would then usher in the millennium. Postel was consequently expelled from the Society at the end of 1545. But he remained in Rome, profiting from the many possibilities of studying eastern Christianity, oriental languages such as Syriac, and, above all, of investigating Jewish mysticism and reading the medieval texts of the Cabala.

From Rome Postel went to Venice in January 1547 to continue his research into the Cabala (which would lead to his Cabalistic publication of the same year, the ‘Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis’. In Venice his belief in his own part in reforming the Church came to the fore. His ‘Πανθενωσια: compositio omnium dissidiorum’ was similar to his ‘De concordia’, yet it implied a more tolerant attitude to different Christian confessions and contained the assertion that no reformation of the Church could be expected from the Roman papacy in its current state. Postel’s choice of a pseudonym, Elias Pandocheus, moreover, revealed his pretensions. In the Cabala the prophet Elias had a particularly significant role. He was a harbinger of peace and concord, a herald of the messianic age, and a chastiser and purifier of the Church. With such persuasions about himself Postel encountered a fifty-year-old nun who, he believed, had a perfect understanding of the Cabala (despite the fact that she had no education), and had been sent to save the world − ‘Mère Jeanne’, also known as the Venetian Virgin and referred to by Postel as the ‘mater mundi’ and the ‘new Eve’. She was due to play a part of decisive importance in Postel’s life – Postel later declared that all he had written since 1547 was intended to celebrate her mission – but in the summer of 1549 he again set sail for the East with the object of propagating Christianity.

Postel went first to the Holy Land and then to Istanbul where he was assisted by another French ambassador, Gabriel de Luetz, baron d’Aramon. On this occasion not only did he proceed with his study of eastern languages, but he gathered an impressive collection of eastern manuscripts and prepared still further what was to be one of his most interesting works, his ‘De la République des Turcs’ which he had started during his first visit to the Levant and which would be published in 1560 and expanded in 1575 as the ‘Des histoires orientales’. Despite the rhetorical hatred of Islam and his call for a crusade, Postel was in fact remarkably sympathetic to the Turks, about whose faith he proved knowledgeable and whose piety and honesty, he believed, compared most favourably with the behaviour of the Christians of the West. When he was back in France, after another visit to Venice in 1551, Postel was protected by the new king, Henri II, and by some of his leading ministers. He published his ‘De Etruriae regionis’, in which, hoping to strengthen the alliance between the French monarchy and the Medicis of Florence – Catherine de’ Medici was the queen of France – he presented Etruria (or Tuscany) as the cradle of civilisation. In his ‘De Foenicum literis’ he explained the role in the dissemination of the alphabet of the French, whose descent he traced to Noah’s grandson Gomer, the son of Japheth, while his ‘De originibus seu de varia et potissimum orbi Latino ad hanc diem incognita aut inconsyderata historia’ is a further study on the origins of languages, their descent from Hebrew, and their spread throughout the world. In his ‘De universitate liber’ of 1552, moreover, he included his earlier description of Syria in a more general work on cosmography, adding an initial section in which he declared that the mission of the French descendants of Gomer was to ‘restore’ Syria and the Holy Land. Also in 1552 he published his ‘Loy Salique’. Dedicated to Henri II, it is an impassioned defence of the Salic law concerning the rights of male primogeniture as imposed by the Gauls and their descendants, whom he describes as the ‘first’ people. Postel also started to contribute to Biblical studies.

The manuscripts he had brought back from the Levant included some important Arabic versions of parts of the New Testament (which would later be published by Franciscus Junius) and the ‘Protoevangelion’. This last work was an apocryphal gospel attributed to St James and probably dating from the second century AD. Postel, however, whose susceptibility to forgery emerges from his acceptance of the spurious texts concocted by Annius of Viterbo in his ‘De Etruriae regionis’, was convinced of its antiquity, regarding it as a missing section at the beginning of the Gospel of St Mark. He translated the Greek text into Latin and had it edited by his Protestant friend Theodor Bibliander in Basel. Despite his own gullibility, by introducing the text into the West Postel marked the beginning of the study of the apocryphal works of the New Testament. This would have an immense impact on Biblical criticism and on the historiography of the first centuries of the Christian era.

The fine prospects which Postel once more seemed to have as a scholar were ruined by his belief that the Venetian nun, who had died while he was in the Levant, had returned to take possession of him and had passed on to him her mission and gifts. Now it was he who, with almost Christ-like attributes, would reform Christianity and usher in the millennium. This he announced in his ‘Vinculum mundi’ of 1552 and, still more boldly, in his ‘Très merveilleuses victoires des femmes’ which came out in 1553 dedicated to Henri II’s sister, Marguerite de Valois. When he found that his calls were unheeded by the Sorbonne he left France for Basel, and then for Venice, and considered allying himself with the Protestants whom he proposed to convert to Catholicism. He entered into correspondence with, and met, some of the ‘magisterial’ reformers such as Bullinger and Melanchthon, as well as more radical figures such as Caspar Schwenckfeld and David Joris. He also started to work on the Syriac text of the Gospels, and decided to go to Vienna where his old friend Johann Albrecht Widmanstadt was planning to publish it (20). Together with Widmanstadt he produced a ‘Syriac primer’, one of the first of its kind, preceded only by Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi’s ‘Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam, atque Armenicam, et decem alias linguas’ which had been published in Pavia in 1539. Also a close friend of Postel, Teseo Ambrogio had himself taught Widmanstadt Syriac.

The emperor, Ferdinand I, gave Postel a chair at the university of Vienna, and Postel started to suspect that it was the Habsburg ruler rather than the king of France who would lead the Christian conquest of the world. He expressed this view in his dedication to the emperor of his ‘Cosmographicae disciplinae compendium’ of 1561 – a work in which he allowed the Germans too to be descended from Gomer. Hearing that his works were placed on the Venetian Index by the Inquisition, Postel left for Venice in 1555, convinced of his righteousness and determined to defend himself. On his way he ran out of money and sold many of his invaluable oriental manuscripts to Ottheinrich, the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg. Once in Venice, in November, he was arrested by the Venetian Inquisition and was dispatched first to Ravenna and then to Rome. Not until August 1559, when a mob stormed the Castel S. Angelo after the death of the pope, Paul IV, was Postel liberated.

He made for Basel, and subsequently for Poitiers where he had his ‘République des Turcs’ printed. Again he went back to Venice, and toured northern Europe before returning to Paris in 1562. There, after reverting to his former career of teaching, he was arrested as a political agitator, and in January 1563 was confined in the lunatic asylum of Saint Martin des Champs. But his confinement was moderate. He was allowed to receive visitors, to come and go freely, to provide instruction in oriental languages – he taught Arabic to Joseph Justus Scaliger and Franciscus Raphelengius – and above all to pursue his studies.

It was thus from Saint Martin that Postel corresponded with the French printer Christophe Plantin in Antwerp and, together with the Flemish scholar Andreas Masius, urged him to carry out his plan of publishing a polyglot Bible which would surpass both in excellence and in the number of languages represented the multilingual Bible published in Spain at the beginning of the century. The principal objective of the polyglot Bibles was to present as many different early versions of the sacred texts as possible in order to enable readers to assess the reliability of the Vulgate, the standard Latin translation attributed to St Jerome. The’ Biblia Regia’ or ‘Antwerp Polyglot’ was one of the greatest scholarly enterprises of the second half of the sixteenth century, subsidised by the king of Spain, Philip II, involving some of the best orientalists of the time, and supervised by the Spanish Biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano (who himself provided a fascinating critical apparatus). Since he could not leave Paris himself, Postel dispatched two of his pupils, Nicolas and Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, to work on the ‘Peshitta’, the Syriac text of the New Testament. The Bible was published between 1569 and 1572, and the difficulty which Arias Montano had in getting it approved by the Catholic Church testifies to its importance in the history of Biblical studies. For it brought to light numerous variants with regard to the Vulgate sanctioned by the Church, and was considered a dangerous instrument of criticism.

Postel spent the final years of his life at Saint Martin trying vainly to carry out the tasks with which he believed he had been entrusted by the Venetian Virgin, developing his ideas on a world monarchy under which the final reformation of the Church would be carried out, and searching for a successor who could take over his mission. He died in 1581. His works continued to be reprinted long after his death. ‘De Magistratibus Athenensium’ ran through four editions between 1635 and 1699, and ‘De Universitate’ was reissued in 1685. ‘De Etruriae regionis’, ‘Syriae descriptio’, ‘De Foenicum literis’, and ‘La Loy Salique’ were all republished in the eighteenth century. Postel, moreover, became a subject of research in his own right. Théophile Raynaud’s ‘Dissertatio’ of 1653 and Gottlieb Petzsch’s ‘Exercitatio historico- theologica’ of 1704 were the first of a
growing flow of studies which have continued to the present day. ( Source for Alastair Hamilton’s bio-bibliographic notice press here ).

*

2- Second introduction

by Godfrey Edmond Silverman

for the ‘Encyclopedia Judaica’

Guillaume Postel was a French Orientalist and philosopher, and an outstanding exponent of Christian Kabbalah. A self-taught prodigy, Postel was appointed in 1538 professor of mathematics and philology at the College of the Three Languages in Paris and thereafter produced an enormous output of books, tracts, and pamphlets. Four years later he abandoned his post following the first of several mystical visions.

His first major work, ‘De orbis terrae concordia’ (1544), made room for Islam in its universal scheme and Postel thereafter exploited rabbinic and kabbalistic literature in support of his pretensions, notably his “immutation” as Elijah and Balaam and as the “Angel-Pope.”

Postel traveled constantly in search of rare manuscripts and prophetic writings. In Venice he met Elijah Levita and Daniel Bomberg, the Christian pioneer of Hebrew printing, whose Jewish publications he was engaged to censor during his second visit to Venice in 1546–49. Here he began his first translation of the Zohar and published an extraordinary mystical treatise on the significance of the menorah (“candelabrum”), first in a Hebrew broadsheet entitled ‘Or Nerot ha-Menorah’ (undated; 1547?) and then in a modified Latin version, ‘Candelabri typici in Mosis Tabernaculo… interpretatio’ (1548). A Latin-Hebrew copy made by Conrad Pellicanus has been preserved in Zurich, and unpublished versions in French and Italian are also extant.

During the next few years, Postel’s millenarianism reached frenzied heights. He visited Ereẓ Israel (1549–50), accepted the emperor’s invitation to teach in Vienna (1554–55), and multiplied his publications in anticipation of the messianic year 1556. In his Hebrew ‘Candelabrum’, Postel had styled himself ‘Ish Kefar Sekhanya u-Shemo Eliyyahu Kol-Maskalyah she-Nitgayyer le-Ḥibbato shel Yisrael…‘ (“A man of Kefar Sekania, named Elijah Kol-Maskalyah, who converted [to Judaism] out of love for Israel…“), which suggests that he had then become some kind of Judeo-Christian (cf. Av. Zar. 27b; and see Jacob of Kefar Sakhnayya).

During his imprisonment by the Inquisition at Ripetta (1555–59), he was said by a Jewish fellow-captive to have prayed in Hebrew. Postel returned to Paris in 1562 and spent the rest of his life in protective custody. However, he continued his voluminous writing and correspondence, and also influenced such younger scholars as G. Génébrard, A. Maes, and the French poet Guy Le Fèvre de la Boderie, through whose agency Postel’s approach even penetrated the “Catholic” Antwerp Polyglot Bible printed by Christophe Plantin (Biblia Regia, 1568–72).

His published works include many of Jewish interest – grammatical and philological compendia, ‘A guide to the Holy Land’ (1562), and a Latin version of the ‘Sefer Yeẓirah'(1552), with his own mystical comments.

Postel’s unpublished Latin translations of the Zohar on Genesis and of other Jewish classics have in recent years been discovered and discussed by François Secret. Long derided as an heretic or a madman, Postel has emerged as one of the most impressive and influential personalities of the Renaissance. (Source for Godfrey Edmond Silverman’s notice press here).

3-Third introduction

by Abraham von Franckenberg

*

Did you know that Abraham von Franckenberg (yes, yes, the hermetic philosopher, friend and follower of Jacob Bohme !) was responsible for editing and re-publishing Guillaume Postel’s ‘Key to all the things hidden in the constitution of the World’-(‘Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis’, first published in Basel in 1547)-to which he added the below Foreword and the ‘Key‘ published as an appendix? His 1646 Ioannem Jansonius Dutch edition is considered THE reference for this seminal treatise. When René Philipon, for his ‘Bibliothèque Rosicrucienne’-under the auspices of  the Masonic Rite of Misraim-published it’s first French translation by Émile-Jules Grillot de Givry in 1899, he followed Franckenberg’s 1646 edition:

This French publication introduced Guillaume Postel to a wider readership-the French rival and antinomic occultist & esoteric ‘milieux’-other than the withdrawn and chilly academic world, who-before George Weil in 1892 and Francois Secret in the second part of the twentieth century-took Postel as ‘a gifted scholar gone mad‘, ‘a drowsy lunatic‘ and ‘a daring and unrepentant heretic‘ unworthy of their pristine attention!

In our modern times, due credits are to be given to the many herculean labors of professor Francois Secret who placed Postel again under the limelight, having patiently unearthed rare manuscripts, rescuing them from the dust of many European libraries, thus allowing-against all odds-for a long-due vindication and a complete re-evaluation of Postel’s value and legacy. And now, let’s read from Abraham von Franckenberg!

*

Abraham von Franckenberg’s foreword to Guillaume Postel’s posthumous 1646 ‘Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis’.

*

Epigram:

From Psalm 78 

‘2. I open my mouth with parables; i utter the wisdom of ancient times.

3.What we have heard, what we know, what our fathers told us, 

4. We will not hide it from our children; We will tell the future generations the praise of the Eternal and his Might and the Wonders he operated.’

*

Dedication

To his lordship, Werner of Pallant, hereditary minister, etc…, as noble and generous through his descendance and his wisdom, who maintains, while protecting his epoch in Jesus-Christ, Quietness and Innocence.

As soon as i was, according to your wish, admitted into your intimacy, O magnificent and most noble Lord, Venerable protector, i recognized as my greatest good and consolation, that i have inspired you, beyond every thing, with the taste for the sacrosanct studies, which are now banished from the world.

Why, wouldn’t i-as a testimony of a grateful soul and in memory of your Piety and Kindness towards me, and in according to my limited merits-produce this little Book from the remoteness of my Exile, great and noble Lord, augmenting and correcting it, inscribing it and dedicating it to you?

In order for you to receive this new publication, as you were accustomed to, with a benevolent spirit and a friendly hand, I pray that you keep me, in my miserable exile, within your favor and protection.

May you LIVE and DWELL in Christ, as He lives and dwells in you! As you desire Him, only because he is the least blamable and reprehensible of all beings; Therefore, may He be in you, with you, by himself and by all things!

Yours Truly, Noble Lord, and respectfully, Abraham von Frankenberg.

*

 Prologue

To the friendly reader, Eternal Light and Peace upon you, in our Lord Jesus-Christ! Finally, Light is born from Fire, Peace from War, Meekness from Violence, thus rather late, because, according to Plato’s saying: ‘It is easier to move what is still than retain what is in movement’. This is why refrain from creating trouble, because it is not easy after to appease it. Is it not that the first miserable men to come desire shouts of joy after the sabre-rattling of war, day after night, summer after winter-so that the fruit may come into maturity? It is like, after gathering all the fallen branches of an oak, and after lighting a fire, someone is vainly striving to extinguish it and does nothing but excite the flamme with a sword or throw oil into it, or feeding its with twigs. This is why we all wish after the Good. And, first of all, the Christian world-in this age of trickery and dissimulation, miserably divided and attacked by the slyness of the old serpent-calls for a restauration through prayers and tears, and also through the counsels and exhortations of pious and wise men; and the salvation of the Christian flock, the safety of the kingdoms, the peace of consciousness-they all depend so much from their care and their heart, which is is the supreme law.

Among them, and coming first among the elects, the serene and potent king, Vladislas the Fourth, peaceful conqueror and victor, who wanted to ornate his royal throne with an addition of Virtue and Felicity, so that the Tranquility of the government having been acquired, it may, after the labors of the armies and the legions, finally take care, fatherly, through education and the laws of the Church, and provide Concord and Salvation within the Caritative Council, assembled in the regal city of Thorn. An Oeuvre truly worthy of this great king and Christian Protector.

We saw, also, our dear author, Elias Pandocheus, a.k.a. Guillaume Postel, mystically describe and explain openly and demonstrate with evidence the Foundation and universal reason behind, which produced such a result. And he was, according to the wisest, as his writings testify, the most learned and greatest Lover in his century, of the Pan-Sophia, or Universal Wisdom, which is Truth and  Charity, (through them only salvation and life of mortals remain).

This is why, among other gifts and honors, he was bequeathed by God through Nature and after many long travels and adventures-both piously and skillfully brilliant to be a teacher of twelve of the main languages and to become a notorious citizen of Jerusalem, of Alexandria, of Constantinople, of Rome and Paris (where he received his education and where he died); he duly deserved, not only of being blessed with all the goods of life, but also to have died-which is very peculiar-in his one hundred and thirty years of age (as attested by Helisaeus Raeselinus in his book: ‘De Expeditione Aquilo Nautica et  Stella Nova’, chapter VII, page 43.) during the month of September of the year 1581. He surely held the highest rank of his century, by travelling, by writing and teaching throughout all the chapters of his life, as reflected by his books.

This little book from the very same author we present you now, this ‘Key to all the things hidden in the constitution of the World‘, was published one hundred years ago, in the great city of Basel; this is why we are putting it to press again: 1. so that we may  influence again our society in a beneficial manner, through the help of our sacrosanct masters-following the Norm and salutary Form of Universal Peace and Concord-so that a taste and a desire for them may be re-born. 2. so that we may help all the holders and dispensers of the Mysteries to understand how much it would be Good and Pleasant, even truly Beautiful and Salutary for the whole Christian World, not to violently unite-through force and fear, or violence and the noise of carnal weapons-the Spirits and Souls (aminos ac animas), of Christians and bad Christians-or ignorant slaves and pimps of Christ that have gone astray in a misleading cult of particular religions-but to suavely re-unite them to Christ HIMSELF, Lord and Groom of the consciences, through Christ’s very own Spirit, which is Meekness and Humility, inviting them to be strongly devoted to Him by humbly imitating Him with a Holy Faith and a Holy Life. Because, according to the prophetic key (First Book of Kings, chapter XIX, verses 11 and 12): ‘ It is not the the impetuous breath of the World and of Nature, nor in the fulminating commotion of the law, nor in the Fire of the Zealots of Jugement that the Lord is to be found:

but in the little and soft and tenuous breath that is the voice of Grace and the Gospel of Peace’. ‘Et hic est Jesus‘, this son of dilection, in whom is the Salvation, Peace and Rest of the soul, and is all Will and Pleasures of the Omnipotent Father; Bless be his Name!

This UNIQUE thing, at the same time very necessary, has not been followed with the  vigilance it needed, but was attacked, unwisely (to not use an even worse expression) by the great many; and it is the very cause that we are, in our European countries, in this present miserable state: discordant, hateful, hardened, envious, proud, bellicose, spiritless, faithless, without charity, godless and Alas! Christians! Christless!

May IeHoVaH-who is Jesus, the Path, Truth & Eternal Life, who is for us THE example and our unique, plane, excellent and canonical RULE of the things we ought to Believe and Do- help us that by scrutinizing the nature and the greatness of them, they become more intimately known than they were until now; May He help us in being more dedicated to Charity, and that we turn ourselves through healing and peace in all of our studies and exercises to the sole grace and glory of Jesus, our King, our Catholic and Oecumenic Priest!  The seventh series of the Beatitudes has these following verses that offer us a great conclusion:

9. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they shall be called sons of God’.

and

5.’Blessed are the meek,
For they shall inherit the earth’. (the promised Earth, the Earth of the Living). (Matthew, V).

*

Written by Abraham von Frankenberg, under the fore-coming shadow of the ‘Gan Eden'(the after-life garden of Eden, or after-life realm), alongside the North wind, in the city of the great king, during the year of the restoration of the peace-1645-We live happily under the protection of Vladislas the Fourth!

*

Abraham von Franckenberg’s KEY

to the ‘Absconditorum a constitutione mundi clavis’,

or ‘Key of the Key of the author, given by the Editor’

1. Friend of the Mystery, we salute you! We are giving you the Key to penetrate inside the Sanctuary; may you receive it with purified hands and do not enter with impure feet, because we walk in chastity towards the Gods; it is the law. Because if you attract, earlier through the decrees and Secrets of the INITIATES, the UNIVERSAL, and if you know in advance the Tetrachord or the quadriga of Apollo, then you will acquire more easily and more happily without any doubts, the science of the Mercabah

or of the Chariot of Isra-el with the Sephirot and the other Wheels (ROTAE) of the Cherubic or Biblical Wisdom. By this struggle, sometimes Poetical, sometimes Prophetical, filled and anointed by the breath of the Sacred Spirit, touched and driven by its presence, you will divinely escape the fortress where you are a prisoner.

2. This is the aim that our Initiate followed in his chapter XV when he showed us the Spirit contemplating the magnificence and the  marvels of God and of Nature that we ought to know and seek inside the veil of the Eternal Truth. And it is through this mystical skill that the three straight lines or the three points of the circle or of the triangle of the Sacred MONOTRIAD are gathered and sealed by the fourth or radical center of this divine science in Unity or the sacrosanct sanctuary of the Deification.

3. If you desire to collect a few seeds of this flour and, by chewing them, fully understand the holy Bibles (the medicines of the soul,

you will find in the works of Abbot Johachim of Fiore, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Yohann Roechlin, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Francesco Georgius, Paulus Schalichius, Paulus Brunus, Jakob Brocardus, Willhem Ouciacus, Giodano Bruno, Petrus Bongus, Julius Sperterus, Philip Ziegler, Yohann Bureus and all the other Initiate of the Great People, Greeks, Chaldeans or Hebrew; come then here, hear and observe what they have taught by writing about the Mysteries and the Arcana of the Names, of the Powers and the sacrosanct Numbers and not about the fleeting riches of the temporal world, (in Latin: ‘Nomino, Numina et Nummi‘) and even more, what they have revealed and entrusted orally to their worthy audience, their faithful and their accointances.

4. Seriously apply your spirit to what the author has expressed, according to his time and his genius, to be admired, thought after and applied and correctly explained according to our way of seeing things and our own epoch. Believe this and be firmly convinced. Collect them and understand that Writing with Nature and Nature with Writing are united in a sweet and blessed union through the infinite mysteries of the countless numbers and meanings (because God’s speech is infinite) and may they be presented according to one only meaning and always similar to itself in all and everywhere and one predestined MYSTERY, concealed since the constitution of the centuries, which means JESUS-CHRIST, savior of the World, truly God-Incarnated, Crucified, Resurrected and Exalted For Us, and according to the Mystery and the Analogy of Faith, this must be spiritually Incarnated, Crucified, Resurrected and Exalted every day in each of us, believers, until the end of time. In such a manner that all the testimonies-of either the Pagan or the Christians and all of Nature and the Written Word concur together and are applied to this sole unique and true Living God and that every tongue and Spirit confesses and acknowledges that is is necessary that H.I.C. Jesus is Christ (Ha Immanu Ael or Immanuel), the only true God and the Eternal Life that is inside all of us and in which all the being dwell. May He be blessed throughout the centuries. Hallelu-ja!

Below follow the table and the two keys,

to helps us understand chapter XV more easily:

*

Coming Soon:

Part 2, Guillaume Postel’s 1553

‘The Doctrine Of The Golden Century’,

***