When one winter morning in 1952, Louis Cattiaux – whose business card read “painter, poet and apothecary” – entered the church of San Martín de Limal, in the middle of the Walloon country, he looked at the altar for a moment, then went to the stove that heated the basilica and knelt before the fire. There, under the impressed gaze of his friends, he remained bent over adoring the flames in which was reflected the image of the divine fury that runs through all religions and whose symbol Cattiaux (1904-1953) renewed in his adoration of the incandescence of the fire.
At that time, in the Paris of artistic novelties and avant-garde movements, Louis Cattiaux, the painter, was finishing “his book”, The Rediscovered Message that we now present in the Herder edition, where he collected the inner encounter with the message universal. This message he apprehended from the ancient and classic, alchemists. Not vulgar alchemy, the one that is currently in vogue, but rather the alchemy according to which the human being can resurrect from his animal body in the spiritual body (the soma pneumatikon taught by Saint Paul).
For the noble alchemists, the core of all tradition would be in the knowledge of the new body and, consequently, in the understanding of the universality of all authentic religions. Cattiaux built his book from this wisdom. To reach it, studies in recognized schools are not necessary, nor academic titles, nor ecclesiastical formulas, but a pure heart and great freedom, the freedom of a direct relationship with God…
In the first half of the 20th century, in Europe, alchemy seems to have become detached from religious traditions, instead of merging with them. Cattiaux, a painter without higher education or an ecclesiastical career, rediscovered true alchemy: palingenesis. Curiously, in The Rediscovered Message he does not use the proper alchemical language: mercury, salt, sulfur, etc., but in each verse the sublime character of the forgotten alchemy is manifested, for this reason his message is “refound”. He reinterprets the basic themes of the spirit as new truths that are difficult to accept, even understand, by the wise who have settled in the forms and not in the interior life. For this, it is necessary, as we have mentioned, freedom in purity.
The life of Louis Cattiaux, and of his book, is pure freedom, a freedom that stems from the certainty that what he wrote in The Rediscovered Message corresponded to an interior spiritual experience and not a subjective one. Being free in subjectivism is relatively simple, it’s also fashionable, but being free in your inner life is very different, loneliness is the result. Few understand the ancient message explained in a different language, few are those who study the words of the ancient sages to find in them their living experience, like Cattiaux. “The first freedom and power” he writes in verse 18, 58, “are like the exit of the individual conscience and like the immersion in the divine conscience, where God acts and rests eternally.”
Freedom is, we insist, an arduous path. As his friend Charles d’ Hooghvorst wrote, Cattiaux was a living witness of universal tradition, few knew him, few frequented him, most rejected him. A free person who openly shows his spirituality has been used to being questioned and attacked since the beginning of time; he before he would be a heretic, now, an unknown. How can a personal experience be something universal? From this question, humans prefer established rules, repeated languages… Freedom is not doing what we want, it is emptying ourselves to let God act, because in Him is complete freedom. Forget circumstantial opinions and open up to the light that lies within us thanks to the visit of a certain secret and celestial spirit. In this sense he wrote:
“How could we have thought for ourselves of writing a Book that has taken us the twelve best years of our youth according to the world, that has required a thousand cares and withdrawal from ambient life, that has provoked the judgment and rebellion of our own? , that poverty has earned us, that nobody wants to accept, that leaves the world indifferent, that bores our relatives, that offends the religious, that makes us pass off as unbalanced and that only engenders, until now, silence and abandonment ? How would we have thought for ourselves to lose our life in this world to gain it in God? (21, 65)
Cattiaux’s book is the opening to the freedom for which the human being was created. The freedom of salvation. The essential basis of all religion and philosophy. The universal and living tradition. The transforming alchemy that recognizes the first and the last being. He who has eyes to see. He who has ears to listen.
Raimon Arola specializes in history of religion, symbolic studies and the work of Cattiaux
Louis Cattiaux The message rediscovered. Preface to Spear of the Vast. Editorial Herder. 430 pages. €28.31
