The Morning of the Magicians

Do not let yourself get confused by the title, this book is neither a novel nor a poetry collection. Of course, you can read it as a novel and you will find a good story. But it’s a little more than that. Classified in the “essay” genre, this 500-page book is a journey in a fantastic realm: reality.

The fantastic quality of reality is the starting point of the two French authors: Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. The Morning of the Magicians introduces us to the Fantastic Realism concept which can be summed up as “reconsidering how we are used to perceiving and knowing reality”. It may seem a tiresome subject but they dealt with it with a lyrical style that can make you keep on reading just for the beauty of words. They approach several fields: sociology, psychology, science, alchemy. They visit the far past of mankind as well as his possible future and always with one thing in mind: to open up horizons. They raise questions such as “How would a Templar react if he were transported in our time?” or “Could civilizations, technically more evolved, have existed in the past?”, but this is just a mere sample.

The book, published in 1960, popularized some esoteric knowledge and thus encouraged the rise of the New Age movement and eventually became a part of it. To see only this aspect of the book is damageable as the authors are, above all, presenting a way of thinking, of connecting the dots – of freeing the thoughts from Reason.  The examples given in the book are only a medium on which they apply their vision. As they say: “We only want to ignite a movement, others will come after us and they will investigate to determine the part of truth in this book.”

About Jacques Bergier:

Jacques Bergier is one those people that make you think extraterrestrials do exist. Hergé created a character (in the “Vol 714 pour Sydney” volume of the adventures of Tintin) directly inspired from Jacques Bergier: Mik Ezdatinoff who is in contact with extraterrestrials. Jacques Bergier was a chemist engineer (he worked on nuclear chemistry), journalist, spy (after having been a resistant and deported during the WWII) and a writer. Member of the Mensa association, he was a polymath with an eidetic (or photographic) memory.

“We need to see the old things with new eyes.”

Jacques Bergier