Elus Cohen

The Order of Knight-Masons Elect Priests of the Universe, known as the Elus Cohen, is the source from which the whole Martinist current flows, and its distinguishing feature is a commitment to theurgy, ritual operations intended to contact the divine.

Theurgy within a Masonic frame

Founded in France in the early 1760s by Martinez de Pasqually within the world of eighteenth-century Freemasonry, the order taught a system of ceremonial magic set inside a Masonic structure of grades, drawing on the Kabbalah and on Christian theosophy. Its central concern was reintegration, the return of fallen humanity to its original divine state, pursued through elaborate theurgic rites reserved to the higher grades, which is what sets it apart from the purely symbolic Masonry of its day.

The inheritance

After the death of Pasqually in 1774 the order declined, but its teaching passed to students who shaped the later tradition, above all Louis Claude de Saint-Martin, who moved away from ceremonial theurgy toward an inward mystical path, and Jean-Baptiste Willermoz, who carried elements of it into other Masonic systems. The modern Martinist orders organised in the late nineteenth century trace their descent to this eighteenth-century foundation, so that the Elus Cohen stands behind a family of currents far larger than itself.

Pasqually's order was theurgic in the strict sense: it performed operations intended to produce an effect from outside the operator. Members worked to a calendar, in prepared rooms with drawn figures and specific incense and hours, over long sequences, and the object was the Passe, a perceptible sign that the operator's reintegration was proceeding. Members recorded whether they received one. Some did, some did not, and the correspondence discusses the failures as freely as the successes.

The doctrine behind it is a full cosmology of fall and return. Humanity was created to a function it lost, the material world is the consequence, and the work of the initiate is to be reconciled and to assist in a general restoration. Every later Martinist body carries some version of this, and it is why the tradition has an ethical seriousness that the ceremonial detail can obscure.

The interesting turn is Saint Martin's. Having been Pasqually's secretary and worked the operations, he concluded that the ceremonial apparatus was unnecessary and turned to an interior way, and it is his version that gave the later movement its name. A tradition that begins with the most elaborate ritual programme in eighteenth century Europe is now best known for the position that none of it was needed.