Octave Béliard

Octave Béliard (12 December 1876 – 24 June 1951), was a French medical doctor, occultist and writer of science fiction. He was one of the co-founders of the Groupement des écrivains médecins in 1949.

Biography

Octave Béliard was born at Paimbœuf in Loire-Atlantique, the son of Luc-Célestin Béliard, a master mariner, and Octavie-Agathe (née Metagy). After studying in Ancenis and Nantes, he became a doctor. In 1896, when he was only twenty years old, Béliard was initiated into Martinism and attended the Les Temps Nouveaux lodge in Nantes, where he met Auguste Chauvet, a friend and physician of Saint-Yves d'Alveydre. Chauvet, an attentive reader of the works of Saint-Martin, had presented to the lodge Les Temps Nouveaux a long speech entitled "Claude de Saint-Martin (the Unknown Philosopher), interpretation of his true doctrine and its application as a basis for sociology", a text that he published in 1905 under the pseudonym of "Saïr".

In 1903, Béliard married Jeanne Rabjeau, a woman from Anjou, and settled in Montjean-sur-Loire for some time. His inclinations were more towards literature than medicine, and he regularly wrote articles for the Revue du théâtre Graslin and for the Nantes mondain. He eventually gave up the practice of medicine and moved to Paris. In 1907, he published with his friend Léo Gaubert Le Périple. Albert-Louis Caillet presents this book as a "most detailed work on occultism and its different branches, and which enjoys the highest esteem among the initiated". Afterwards, he wrote several short stories, among which we will mention: Adventures of a Traveler Who Explored Time (1909), The Wonderful Past (1909), and A Polar Exploration at the Ruins of Paris (1911).

In 1920, after the World War I, Octave Béliard published Sorcières, rêveurs et démoniaques, a study on superstitious beliefs and practices in history. In it, he discusses the origins of witchcraft in antiquity, its development in the Middle Ages, esotericism in the eighteenth century and contemporary occultism. A scrupulous historian, he also relates facts that he himself has observed and the work of great scholars. But Béliard was more of a novelist than a historian, and his book La Petite-Fille de Michel Strogoff (Michel Strogoff's granddaughter) earned him the Jules Verne Prize in 1927, which honored science fiction authors.

In parallel to his work as a writer, he was passionate about the mysteries of occultism. World War I put an end to the great period of Martinism, which hardly survived the death of Papus in 1918. The Order broke up into small groups. Béliard turned to other horizons, and in 1921, with Auguste Chauvet and Léo Gaubert, he tried to create the Order of the Knights of Christ, the Order of the Grail, tiny groups that never really existed, although he remained in contact with his Martinist friends. In January 1921, accompanied by Victor-Émile Michelet and Han Ryner, he gave a conference on the theme "Pain" at La vie morale in Paris. Finally, Octave Béliard joined Michelet and Augustin Chaboseau, who, far from the disputes of those who presented themselves as successors to Papus, perpetuated the Martinist tradition within a small group. From 1931, this group became the Traditional Martinist Order (OMT). Beliard, chancellor of the Order, was a member of the Supreme Council.

During this period he participated in the activities of the group Atlantis, headed by Paul Le Cour (1861–1954). At the fifth Platonic banquet organized by the magazine Atlantis in 1932, he gave a lecture on "Immortality in Egypt" and published Au long du Nil the same year. His return to Martinism seemed to revive his interest in metapsychology, and in 1933 he published Magnetism and Spiritism. In 1936, he wrote for the magazine Mesures, "L'Annonce du Nouvel Homme". This study is divided into two parts. The first is an introduction to Saint-Martin's thought, in which Béliard insists on the recurrence of the word man in four of the major works of the self-styled Unknown Philosopher: L'Homme de désir, Le Nouvel Homme, Ecce Homo and Le Ministère de l'homme-esprit. The second part of the article proposed characteristic excerpts from The New Man, each introduced by a title composed by Octave Béliard himself. These texts, he sayd, presented "the self-creation of our spiritual being, whose repairer, in his human existence, provides the exact and living model of the new man, son of the man of desire."

During World War II, Octave Béliard was appointed commander and chief physician of the Fénelon Hospital in Vaujours. However, the hospital remained a project, and Béliard was forced to return to civilian life. The death of his wife Jeanne in the middle of 1942 plunged him into despair. He tried to forget his grief by returning to the study of Egyptian hieroglyphs. During this period, he frequented the Louvre and worked on the elaboration of a dictionary of Egyptian hieroglyphs. It was during this period that he met the Egyptologist Christiane Desroches Noblecourt.

After the war, his Martinist friends invited him to join them in re-launching the Traditional Martinist Order, whose activities, like those of all initiatory movements, had been banned by a decree of the Vichy government. Béliard was not very enthusiastic. Indeed, over time, he came to doubt the existence of an initiatory transmission from Saint-Martin himself.

In June 1945, during the meeting organized by Augustin Chaboseau to decide on the possible resumption of the Order's activities, two tendencies emerged. Some thought it unnecessary to keep a ritual and initiatory form, and proposed to transform the Order into a society for the study of Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin. Béliard, like the majority of the members present, was in favor of this choice. A second group wished to continue the activities of the Traditional Martinist Order. In the end, it was the latter group that won the day. However, if the OMT resumed its activities, those who did not opt for this direction founded the association of the Friends of Saint Martin in September.

Béliard remained divided. Out of friendship for Chaboseau, he remained in the OMT, but also participated in the activities of the Friends of Saint-Martin. However, his position changed a few months later. Chaboseau, Grand Master of the OMT, died on January 2, 1946. Octave Béliard felt that he was free of his commitments and preferred to distance himself from the Order. At the end of the year, in December 1946, he asserted his position in an article entitled "À propos d'un livre récent" ("About a recent book"), published in Les Cahiers de l'homme-esprit, the first issue of the Friends of Saint-Martin magazine. The book he refers to is the one just published by Robert Amadou, Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin et le martinisme. In his article, Béliard openly criticized the existence of an initiation stemming from Saint-Martin, whose history Robert Amadou summarized in the third chapter of his book. The latter quickly took his side, recognizing that the matter was open to question. Béliard then seemed to become more involved in the Friends of Saint-Martin. A few months earlier, on August 26, 1946, he had been commissioned by the association to give a speech at the ceremony that formalized the discovery of the birthplace of the Unknown Philosopher in Amboise.

After this period, he devoted himself again to writing and published several stories, including: L'Étrange Histoire de Françoise, La Hantise, La Seconde Vie, La Ville de rêve, Le Bouddha, Le Charmeur de bruits, Le Décapité vivant (The Living Beheader), Le Karma, Le Roseau de Tout-Ankh-Amon (The Reed of All-Ankh-Amon), Spiritisme (Spiritualism), Un dîner au Majestic (A Dinner at the Majestic), Visite de nuit (A Night Visit), Le Sac de serge verte (A Bag of Green Serge) and Le Seuil.

In 1950, Octave Béliard returned more directly to esotericism by publishing À propos d'occultisme. This text shows the distance he has taken with a subject that he now observed with a scientific approach. He approached the study of psychic phenomena by situating himself in the movement of metapsychics. He announces that he favors the study of facts and concludes his article by underlining that these experiences leave him skeptical.

As he indicated in his correspondence with Victor-Émile Michelet, Béliard distrusted "heretical" movements, wanting to be faithful to the "inner church". By this position, he revealed himself as a Martinist in the sense that Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin understood it. His literary activities earned him the titles of honorary vice-president of the Association of Fighting Writers and member of the Society of People of Letters.

He died on June 24, 1951 in Paris.

Works

Monographs

• Sorcières, rêveurs et démoniaques (1920; 1981)
• Magnétisme et spiritisme (1933)
• Au long du Nil (1932)

Selected articles

• "Docteur Doyen," Les Hommes du Jour, No. 99 (11 Décembre 1909)
• "Madame Pierre Curie," Les Hommes du jour, No. 108 (12 février 1910)
• "Sur le Chemin des Dames," Lecture pour tous (1917)
• "L'Immortalité en Égypte," Atlantis, No. 44 (1932)
• "L'annonce du Nouvel Homme," Mesure, No. 4 (1936)
• "A propos d'occultisme," Bibliographie et annuaire international des sciences psycho-pyschiques et occultes, (1950)

Novels

• Le périple (1907; with Léo Gaubert)
• Méditation sur la douleur
• Les caquets du docteur
• L'amour et l'immortalité
• Les sorciers
• Las Maravillas del Cuerpo Humano
• La petite-fille de Michel Strogoff
• Le message mystérieux (1928)
• Le marquis de Sade (1928)
• Les Petits Hommes de la pinède (1929)
• Le Décapité vivant et autres histoires d'outre-vie (1944)
• La vie tragique de Danton (1946)
• Au long du Nil
• La femme... comme l'eau

Nouvellas

• Aventures d'un voyageur qui explora le temps (1909)
• Le passé merveilleux (1909)
• La découverte de Paris (1911)
• Une exploration polaire aux ruines de Paris (1911)
• Décapité vivant et autres histoires d'outre-vie (1949)

References

• Després, Elaine (2019). "Ère Glaciaire Cosmique et Crise Sémiotique chez Octave Béliard." In: Claire Barel-Moisan & Jean-François Chassay, eds., Le Roman des Possibles: l'Anticipation dans l'Espace Médiatique Francophone (1860-1940). Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, pp. 445–62.

External links

• Works by Octave Béliard at Gallica
• Octave Béliard at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database