The Mask, the Cloak, and the Doctrine of Return

Martinism is a Christian esoteric current organised around a single idea, the fall of humanity from a divine state and the path of return to it, and around a deliberate anonymity.

Reintegration

The tradition takes its name from Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, the eighteenth-century French mystic known as the Unknown Philosopher, and from his teacher Martinez de Pasqually, founder of the theurgic Order of the Elect Cohens. Its teaching concerns reintegration, the return of the human being to the primordial state through inner prayer, theurgy and moral discipline, and it works in small groups transmitting a chain of initiation. The symbol of the mask and cloak signifies the anonymity of the unknown philosopher: the initiate is meant to work unseen.

A scattered inheritance drawn together

The eighteenth-century lines of transmission were dispersed after the deaths of Pasqually in 1774 and Saint-Martin in 1803, and it was Papus, the pen name of Gerard Encausse, who organised the modern Martinist Order in France in the 1880s and drew the scattered threads together. Disruption in the twentieth century split it further, and it continues through several successor bodies rather than one.