Illuminati di Avignone/en
The Illuminati of Avignon were a Masonic system of an hermetic-alchemical character founded by Antoine-Joseph Pernety (1716–1796), a former Benedictine monk, scholar of exact and hermetic sciences, and particularly of alchemy. Their story is documented in Boella's work The Ascent to Olympus and constitutes one of the best-documented bridges between the hermetic tradition and the magnetic tradition.
Antoine-Joseph Pernety
Pernety (1716–1796), a former Benedictine monk, was a scholar of exact and hermetic sciences, particularly alchemy. Boella documents:
- In 1765 he founded in Avignon a Masonic system of an hermetic character, with the directing center being the Loge des Sectateurs de la Vertu.
- Avignon was located in papal territory — and therefore "unsafe" for an esoteric system: in 1767 Pernety took refuge in Berlin, where he became librarian to Frederick II, who benevolently welcomed French emigrants "endowed with boldness of opinion."
- Pernety left disciples in his homeland (such as the Parisian doctor Boileau); his hermetic rite later gave rise to the Grande Mère Loge Écossaise de France, which continued to make proselytes in various parts of Europe and Italy even after his departure.
In Berlin, Pernety came into contact with circles dedicated to occult sciences and alchemy, and received philosophical material for laboratory work through figures linked to the circle of Elias Artista Hermetica and the abbot Guyton de Morveau called Brumore, who shared with him a love for Swedenborg.
Diffusion in Italy
The system had a certain diffusion in Italy: Boella documents that in 1777 the mystic Masons of Avignon founded a branch in Naples, and that various Italian cities performed the rite. Cagliostro himself, according to the sources cited by Boella, used addresses and materials partly coinciding with those of the Illuminati of Avignon (see Cagliostro and the Egyptian Rite).
The bridge with magnetism: the magnetic society of Avignon
The most relevant connection for the magnetic tradition is documented by Boella through the Marquis de Mirville and Doctor Billot. From a letter from the head of a "society of theosophists of Avignon," Mirville extracts the description of a meeting:
"When the members are gathered and all on their knees, the director recites a general prayer [...]. Then the Veni Creator and Psalm LXVII are recited: Exsurgat Deus et dissipentur inimici eius... to drive away the adversary. Then the magnetizer, provided with a glass tube with which he must channel the magnetic fluid onto the person he wishes to put to sleep, recites another prayer..."
The sessions, set in Cucuron in Vaucluse, "began with a mystical part, that is, the athanatophania or apparitions of spirits." Boella documents that Doctor Billot "was part of a magnetic society of Avignon," in psychic relation with Neapolitan Marinists, and — the decisive point — notes: "It is possible that this magnetic society gathered the surviving Illuminati of Avignon."
This is a documented continuity between initiatory hermeticism and magnetic practice: the use of the glass tube to channel the fluid anticipates, in a ritual key, the same instrumental principle that we find in the "tubes" of Consonni and in the technical codification of Count Szápáry.
The connection with Mesmer
Primary sources
OCR text for instant verification of citations: Boella — native OCR text (archive OCR_FONTI_WIKI).
- Alessandro Boella, Antonella Galli, The Ascent to Olympus — Cagliostro and the Hermetic Tradition in Freemasonry (ISBN 978-88-96052-97-6) — PDF Drive (chapter III. Elias Artist and the Illuminati of Avignon)
The citations derive from the native text of the volume (direct extraction, without OCR).