The doctrines of Martinez Pasquales were essentially Kabbalistic and the Kabbalah formed the framework on which he based his rituals and expositions. Pasquales was a man of mystery, saying little about his own teachers or the mystic schools in which he had been instructed. His manuscript, called a “Treatise On the Reintegration of Beings” makes plain, however, that he was fulfilling a mission and that his sources of Light were traditionally correct in spite of his failure to make his theme altogether plain as a system of philosophy.
Since there were several copies of his work in manuscript, all somewhat different in style and phrasing, it is possible that he taught verbally and depended upon his disciples to record his teachings. It is equally possible that he improved his instruction from time to time.
His instruction, appropriately and significantly, began with God, the everlasting Creator of all that is.
The Treatise says that God is absolute in power and knowledge. God’s understanding surpasses that of any created mortal being; therefore, God is, in a sense, inscrutable and unknowable to us.
Let us think for a moment in terms of the BEGINNING. God, as the Creator, existed before any created thing, before the world of nature —man, or plant, or animal. God’s thought and power encompassed every possibility. God existed without limitation, want, hindrance, or insufficiency. In the divine Immensity, in the bosom of the Creator, existed the potentiality of an infinitude of beings, as well as endless
types of creations. For reasons knowable only to God, God emanated a class, or group, of spiritual beings. These were the first created beings. At the time of their emanation, they received laws of order and purpose appropriate to their natures and a free will. The crime of these first spiritual beings was that they turned their wills against God: They willed to change the order and purpose of their beings and even desired to challenge the powers of the Creator by creating other beings themselves—a thing absolutely forbidden to them. God, noting their crime and misuse of will, punished them by absenting Himself from them and by thrusting them into the prison house of the material world. The material world was emanated at this time for the express purpose of punishing these beings and teaching them humility, obedience, and harmonious cooperation.
Humanity was emanated as a second class, or group, of spiritual beings known as MAN-GODS, who were to be rulers of nature, the material creation, and the first perverse beings.
In the words of Pasquales:
“God would not be the Father and the Master of all things if he had not within himself an inexhaustible source of beings that he emanated at will through his pure desire. It is by this infinite multitude of emanations of spiritual beings without himself that he holds the name of CREATOR. His works form the divine creation—spiritual, temporal, and animal.”
Following his emanation, Adam (collective Man, known in the Kaballah as Adam Kadmon) enjoyed enormous powers and privileges. He had free access to the centre of the universe, to the divine thoughts, and his being was clothed in a spiritual form of glory—not subject to the ravages of time or the limitations of space.
One of the duties of Adam was to rule the first perverse beings and see that their proper and necessary lesson was learned. However, the chief, or prince, of these beings enticed Adam (collective Man), suggesting that he, too, challenge the immutable and absolute power of the Creator. Filled with pride and wilfulness, Adam succumbed to these blandishments and temptations, and attempted spiritual operations beyond his ordained powers. He set his will against the immutable Will and decrees of God, and thus sinned.
As a result of this weakness, this inability to resist temptation, this misuse of his free will, Adam fell. His FALL meant that he no longer dwelt in the centre of divine thoughts, in a body of spiritual form, clothed in glory. He was forced to exchange his glorious form for a material body, subject to the action of time and space. Furthermore, he lost his enormous powers as MAN-GOD of nature and created beings. He had to live in spiritual darkness, privation, pain, sorrow, and misery.
In the view of our Venerated Master, then, there were two Falls: The first, by which the perverse beings found themselves separated from God because of their attempted assumption of His powers of creation; the second, when Adarn, the MAN-GOD, was himself deceived by the perverse beings over whom he was placed as a guard.
The long story of mankind (the Adamic history) has been a ceaseless struggle to overcome the limitations and sufferings imposed by the FALL, to obtain reconciliation with the Creator, to recover the lost status as MAN-GOD, the favoured and intimate one of the Eternal Power. From this sad condition stems the power of the word Reintegration. The hopes and longings of the race are embodied in it. No one can ever find permanent rest and felicity until humanity, the collectivity of mankind, has regained completely the divine favour and obtained oneness, absorption, reintegration with the Creator of All, God.
The Fall of Man, properly conceived and broadly interpreted, is a fact. The traditional history of many peoples refers to a time when men lived in greater spiritual glory and closer attunement with God. This tradition is older than histories, legends of the Flood, and the existence of lost and mighty civilizations. Perhaps, too, our conceptions of sin are derived from faint recollections of our collective “original sin,” that of turning our wills from the will of the Creator, conspiring to ignore His laws, setting our wills against His commands and precepts.
After the Fall, collective man undoubtedly was in a miserable condition. Considering the misery, lust, and greed of a large proportion of humanity after many epochs of supposed evolution, the sense of man’s privation and darkness immediately after the Fall seems real and appalling. It must have been like abruptly leaving an intensely lighted room and plunging into a black and impenetrable abyss that was devoid of light and all other sense perceptions.
Especially tormenting must have been the faint memories of privileges enjoyed in the former high estate—the freedom of manifesting in a spiritual body, unencumbered by the wants and demands of the flesh; the ineffable peace and joy of participating intimately in divine thoughts, of basking, as it were, in the effulgence of God’s love and goodness. All of this, exchanged for a miserable, limiting physical body, which constantly warred against the inclinations of the subtler self within and imposed chains upon the freedom of the soul personality! It is small wonder that the body came to be known as the prison house of this world, the abode of the devil, a demon whose design was to work eternally for man’s destruction and obliteration.
In reconciling the above thoughts with the concept of evolution, it is evident that some progress has been made by collective man since the Fall. Many have evolved, perfected, and released their soul personalities to a considerable extent. Higher types of men and women do exist today. We are evolving upward—forward and onward—to the goal, the only worthwhile and enduring goal, that of reconciliation and reintegration with our First Spiritual Principle.
As has been stressed before, the punishment of man, following the misuse of his will, was the exchange of his glorious, spiritual, non- material form for the physical body which he inhabits during the present period of privation. Note that the anguish of privation, of man’s exile from the Creator, centers about the material body. What is wracked by pain and suffering, enfeebled and twisted by disease, tormented by insensate lusts and passions, anguished by worldly appetites which disconcert the soul personality? Obviously, the body. Therefore, the dominance of the material body over the soul personality must be overcome. A mistaken understanding of this has led many to the path of asceticism, which for us is a false and unprofitable one. In mastering the body, its harmonious functioning and possibilities as a vehicle for good should neither be weakened nor destroyed but rather subjected to the spiritual needs and aspirations of the soul personality within.
The Martinist Pentacle 