Abellio, philosopher and writer
Abellio, philosopher and writer
Raymond Abellio was born in 1907, under the name Georges Soulès, in Toulouse in the Minimes district, into a poor family of Pyrenean origin. The Ariège village of Seix, birthplace of his mother's family, would play an important role in Georges Soulès's childhood and early youth.
An introverted child of fragile health, precocious and studious, brilliant in class, he was noticed by his teachers and continued his secondary studies on a scholarship, leading him to prepare for the École Polytechnique entrance exam, which he passed in 1927. This scientific training, especially in mathematics, instilled in him a demand for rigour and precision that would later characterise his approach to philosophy and so-called esoteric traditions.
During his years at Polytechnique, Georges Soulès was torn between his Catholic religious heritage — which manifested in him as a mystical aspiration — and the awakening of a revolutionary political consciousness, which flourished during his years as a young engineer with the Ponts et Chaussées. He then militated on the left wing of the Socialist Party of the 1930s, developing a talent as an orator and deepening a Marxist formation that he would later recognise (once he had moved beyond it) as a kind of science of the social world. In 1936 he was appointed by Léon Blum's government as a mission officer for major public works.
Mobilised from the start of the 1939-1945 war, he was taken prisoner, which led him to reflect on the European geopolitical situation created by Hitler's Germany's victory and its troubled game with Stalin's USSR. Released in early 1941, he was drawn to political action aimed at escaping the dialectic of the powers of the time, which would lead to accusations of collaboration at the Liberation in 1944-45.
His life changed in 1943 when he met Pierre de Combas, an esotericist, who made him aware of the vanity of political action and triggered a radical reassessment of himself in Georges Soulès. He abandoned all political action to devote himself to knowledge: guided by de Combas, he immersed himself in the study of traditions, while also exploring a more classical philosophy, notably Husserl's phenomenology, which played a pre-eminent role in his thought and life. His demand for synthesis and rigour applied to these works, which might have led him to muddled syncretism, but instead guided him towards an original unifying vision of the diverse worlds of spirit, faith, religion, intuition and rationality. In his view, this vision translates into a gnosis that must be both an intellectual approach and a lived transcendence.
Forced to live underground and then to go into exile in Switzerland, Georges Soulès laid the foundations of his philosophical approach while writing his first novel, Heureux les pacifiques, published under the pen name he chose: Raymond Abellio. Cleared by a court of collaboration charges, thanks to testimonies from members of the Resistance, he returned to France in 1953 and thereafter divided his life between writing and his profession as a consulting engineer.
Raymond Abellio published his key philosophical work, La Structure absolue (Éditions Gallimard), in 1965, and developed his oeuvre in novels, essays and a play until his death in 1986.
Abellio's grave is in the Auteuil cemetery in Paris.
Partial pre-publication of Chapter I of the Manifeste de la nouvelle Gnose. Available on the La revue 3e Millénaire website.
These are digitised versions of the mimeographed texts distributed by Raymond Abellio to participants in the Cercle d'Études Métaphysiques, which he founded and led around 1950-53.
This incomplete collection comprises 9 fascicules in 3 parts, forming a draft of La Structure absolue. It was generously donated by the poet Bernard Noël (1930-2021).
Available online and as PDF on Revue 3e Millénaire
Digitised version available from Librairie Numilog.
Contact the Société Amicale des anciens élèves de l'École Polytechnique, 5 rue Descartes, 75005 Paris, France.
Thesis, Université Laval and Université de Sherbrooke, 2009. Downloadable from Université Laval Library.
José Guilherme Abreu
Raymond Abellio created theoretical devices and operative methods aimed at bringing consciousness to the perception of universal interdependence, while integrating the global World and primordial Tradition into a unveiling of the twenty-five-century cycle of Western Civilisation's history. In an era marked by political, cultural and even spiritual confusion, Abellio offers fundamental keys to discover meaning and recognise the signs of the West, while clarifying the wise and silent function that the 'Invisible West' of knowledge must develop.
Having in 1960 'foreseen', in his novel La Fosse de Babel, the fall of the USSR, which occurred in 1989, and anticipated in 1983, in Visages Immobiles, the logic and methods of global terrorism, foreseeing an attack in Manhattan, Raymond Abellio demonstrated a particularly lucid knowledge of the meaning of the times. One must then ask where this gnosis comes from that allowed Raymond Abellio to grasp, so clearly and precisely, a vision that is already comprehension.
Michelle Nahon
Inventor of a method for analysing situations and reasoning, the 'absolute structure', novelist, visionary, author of essays that raised major questions throughout the 20th century such as La fin de l'ésotérisme or De la politique à la gnose, Raymond Abellio, a polytechnician, knew how, like the scholars of the 16th century, to open himself to all official and unofficial sciences, from philosophy to astrology, from political economy to the Kabbalah, from mathematics to gematria, from spirituality to occultism, from mysticism to gnosis. From this thirst for knowledge of extremes was born a remarkable dialectical reasoning that illuminates current events and is fruitful to know. This is why researchers who created the 'Raymond Abellio Rencontres' propose to present this 20th-century scholar and to study his method by applying it to domains as varied as medicine, philosophy, prophetism or simply the meaning to give to one's life.
Jean-Charles Roux
Daniel Verney
Abellio's approach attracted me from my first encounter with his work, and still inspires me, for two essential reasons:
1 / Abellio includes traditions (often wrongly called esoteric) in an approach that is both conceptual and phenomenological. Conceptual insofar as it takes traditions into account as systems of thought and identifies their mutual correspondences. One might thus call Abellio an 'ethnologist of esotericism', for he recognises structures in traditions and seeks to understand them, but an ethnologist who affirms the necessity of a universal structure, which he names, in his Promethean way, absolute structure. Abellio's approach is phenomenological: it demands attentive listening to traditions. Abellio urgently advises 'going to see up close', and above all practising the phenomenological epochè towards them, the first step of which is to suspend all judgement.
2 / Abellio puts these traditions in resonance with scientific advances, as he knew them through his training as an engineer and his broad culture. This is a reasoned attempt, even if it encountered evident limits in the author's practice in his time. Abellio was an explorer and initiator of a field still too little studied. In this, his thought plays a major role, still current, in the emergence of a new paradigm of knowledge, combining reason and intuition.
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Toulouse: the Minimes gate and its columns during Abellio's youth (1914)
View of the Pyrenean village of Seix (Ariège, France)
