The "Great Game" by Jacques Bergier

"Lover of the Unusual and Scribe of Miracles" (as his visiting card stated), co-author with Louis Pauwels of the cult book "The morning of the wizards", explorer of infinite spaces, cosmonaut of inner space, scientist, agent secret, visionary, alchemist: all the faces of Jacques Bergier in his autobiography, "I'm not a legend", just published in Italian by Bietti publisher.


di Marco Maculotti

β€œThe whirling of the stars also releases nuclear energy, so that divine justice is restored. "
- J. Bergier, "I'm not a legend"

"Progress transforms us. We always build already extraordinary tools, we capture ever more powerful energies. Well, this leads us to our center, into the inner space, where we will discover and activate ultra-forces. The circle of power closes. The primitive stage of the technique is magic. Even the last. "
- J. Bergier and L. Pauwels, "Blumroch the admirable"

We already discussed the great influence exercised by Jacques Bergier (born Jakov Michajlovič Berger) in bringing to France some of the biggest names in contemporary Anglophone science fiction, we already discussed some time ago, on the occasion of the release for the types of Il Palindromo of his Admiration, translated into Italian with the title Praise of the fantastic.

Less known - but no less worthy of being analyzed - is the biography of the co-author of the key text of "magical realism" The morning of the wizards, "Revolutionary work, crossroads of modernity and tradition, tombstone thrown on the" twentieth century jailer and executioner of the fantastic "". The credit this time is to be given to Bietti editions, and above all to Andrea Scarabelli, author of the gloss just reported and editor of the most recent Italian editorial news on Bergier: I am not a legend, Italian edition of the autobiography (Je ne suis pas une legende) published in France in 1976, the year preceding that of his death.

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Science and science fiction

In Bergier's life there was not only the "Magical realism" and a passion for science fiction: to the detriment of his famous maxim according to which the only interest of science lies in its supplying ideas to science fiction [p. 148], equally noteworthy were the scientific researches and the consequent applications that he carried out in the early Thirties, together with Alfred Eskenazi and AndrΓ© Helbronner (first teacher in France who taught physico-chemistry, assassinated by the Nazis in Buchenwald in 1944) .

Scarabelli writes that "Bergier refused to separate science from the miraculous and believed that, if properly trained, the imagination could intercept fragments of reality located in the future" [p. 290]. In this regard, similarly to Lovecraft regarding the discovery of Pluto ea Villiers-de-l'Isle-Adam who theorized "advertising in the sky" over a century in advance, Bergier foresaw the advent of nuclear energy, which he called "the second discovery of fire" [p. 49], and the automation of man and society: in 1937 he sketched the letterhead of the future company he was about to set up, writing: Β«Robotization of every industry. Civil, military and ecclesiastical automata "[p. 56]. About ten years later he realized that [p. 151]:

« science fiction had become reality. Nuclear energy, rockets and robots had entered the concrete world: in short, the universe that awaited us was not the one described by the great utopias, but that of science fiction, as exciting as it is fragile, which could have collapsed and sunk like Atlantis. "

While dreaming of "a new empire of the atom" [p. 73], Bergier looked at uranium fission as a terrible "error of progress": it would have been better to experiment with light nuclear energy, not based on uranium. He saw in these "decisions from above" the imprint of the hidden operators behind the scenes of history, of which he spoke in his books attributable to the vein of "magical realism" and alternative reality: in this sense he gives a second example, stating that if the Sterling engine, capable of burning any substance, rather than the internal combustion one, had been commercialized, "All the oil wars would have been avoided and today, in 1976, France would be an independent country, not an Arab colony" [p. 61].

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His prophecies also affected the Second World War, which he experienced firsthand: in an article published in the magazine The Germanic soldier in the Mediterranean announced is "Hamburg would have been destroyed by a firestorm". He could not have imagined that shortly thereafter this would really come about, when the Allied forces unleashed a real "firestorm" on Hamburg by means of a massive bombardment with incendiary devices: a phenomenon of unprecedented dimensions "if not in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Β». When asked by British secret agents how he had obtained the information on the operation before the attack, Bergier replied calmly that it had been a "simple intuition" [p. 103].

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The advent of Nazism and the Second World War

The political commitment was of great importance, deriving above all from having been segregated, as of Jewish origin as well as a foreign spy, in the concentration camps of Neue Bremm (in 1943) and Mauthausen (in 1944 at the end of the war). Among his ancestors he mentions a "legendary" rabbi named Jacob and a cousin named Anatole who in 1918 personally participated in the execution of Emperor Nicholas II; and again the maternal uncle Azrael, nicknamed "Angel of Death" [p. 24]. During his life, Bergier developed the conviction that "Jewish culture, as well as Celtic, constitutes a link with great civilizations of the past superior to ours" [p. 30].

During his stay in the concentration camps, Bergier used traditional "yoga-like" techniques to manipulate time and resist torture, however, obtaining an inexplicable immunity to the effect of hallucinogenic drugs that were administered to enemy secret agents to make them confess: a real "biological enigma", as Bergier himself defines it [p. 86]. Writes the anthropologist Claudine Brelet, cited by Scarabelli in her essay in the appendix [p. 302]:

β€œThe torturers forced him to spend hours and hours naked in the snow. So, him he escaped mentally through a series of mathematical operations, following a concentration technique similar to that practiced by the Tibetans, and with the same result: the snowflakes evaporated on contact with his skin. "

"If imprisonment - like all of reality - is only a dimension of consciousness" Scarabelli concludes, "then it is possible to escape inwardly"[P. 304]. Subjected to torture Bergier went into a coma twice, and both times he had the same vision: β€œA dark landscape, with even blacker houses and trees. Imagination? A near-death soul journey? " he wonders him, going with his mind to Tibetan book of the dead, which he had read years before being locked up in Neue Bremm. With these premises and this background cultural, Bergier lived the experience of confinement as an initiatory test: "I underwent a change" he writes, "I broke a barrier, immersing myself in the bloodbath of rites of passage" [pg. 123].

Among other things, in his memoirs, Bergier remembers Wernher von Braun - German engineer and scientist who, at the end of the war, was brought thanks to thePaperclip operation in the United States, where he actually led NASA to the moon landing - like a real killer, cryptically asserting that his future is "as dark as the way time passes" [p. 93]. This cryptic affirmation can perhaps be put in relation with his belief, already expounded there The morning of the wizards, according to which in the extermination camps the Nazis would have made real ritual sacrifices that could be framed within a supposed cultual framework of the insane "Nazi religion" [p. 113] ("[...] I sensed ideas that historians and sociologists never seemed to have noticed: Hitlerism was not only a political movement but, above all, a religion" [p. 140]; "I am convinced that Hitlerism was, among other things, a cursed religion and that the Nazi massacres were human sacrifices intended to attract the attention of Other deitiesΒ» [p. 239, note 15]).

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"This religion has never been studied," he wroteΒ The morning of the wizardsΒ [p. 294], "Neither the church, nor rationalism, any other church, has allowed it. We are entering an age of knowledge in which such studies will become possible because the reality that reveals its fantastic face, ideas and techniques that seem aberrant, despicable or hateful, will appear useful to us to understand an increasingly less reassuring reality ". And again [p. 324]: "Politics is but an external manifestation, the practical and momentary application of a religious vision of the laws of life on earth and in the cosmos. For humanity there is a destiny that ordinary men could not conceive, and of which they could not bear the vision. This is reserved for some initiates Β».

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Political commitment, the "hidden war" and the "Great Game"

Despite being politically on the left - which, however, did not prevent him from admiring politicians from opposing factions, for example. Nixon [p. 155] - his relationship with communism was nevertheless ambivalent; "Bergier saw red every time he was told about XNUMX and certain anarchist movements" remembers his friend François Richaudeau [p. 294], and Bergier himself identifies this particular historical moment as "the revenge of the foolish on the intelligent, of the incapable on the capable, of the losers on the winners" [p. 196]. Joining the French Communist Party was the aforementioned Eskenazi, his experimental companion in his youth, whose ideas he describes as "very close" to his [p. 54]. Nonetheless, Bergier regrets the unfair treatment of the prof. Jean Thibaud, his professor of nuclear physics at the Sorbonne, who never achieved the well-deserved fame precisely because he was not a member of the Party [p. 51]. Furthermore, while considering it the "more serious" political faction, firmly rejects "the iron discipline and its being more a religion than a political movement in the strict sense" [pg. 46].

As part of the (geo) political commitment, Bergier also covered, with the code name of The Sorcerer ("The Sorcerer"), roles of primary importance within the so-called "Occult War": the one, so to speak, implemented by the secret services, behind the scenes of known history. He undertook this activity especially after the end of the Second World War, dealing in particular with the "Search for war criminals, investigations into German military secrets, espionage and counter-espionage" [p. 141]. With an above average intellect, from an early age the young Jacques sensed that the narration of the facts that reaches the general public is only a minimal reflection of the real events and of the issues that directed their staging. He was only eleven when [p. 31]:

Β«Reading the front pages of the newspapers, I understood [Γ¬] that the idea of ​​invisible governments and secret forces that rule the world, which I had approached thanks to literature, was essentially true. It was a trauma of which he still suffers the consequences. In this world, as he said Kipling in Kim, therefore a Great Game was taking place. Behind the political or military puppets there were really occult powers. He swears [Γ²] to [s] and himself that one day he will [bbe] participated in the Great Game. "

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The "Magic Realism", alchemy and the meeting with Fulcanelli

During a trip to Prague he found himself in front of a door, in "via degli Alchimisti", is [p. 141]:

Β« according to the legend it gives on the Sheol, the Jewish hell. She is firmly bolted: neither the Nazis nor the Communists have dared to unhinge her. It is said that it was crossed only once, in the XNUMXth century, by three men: one never returned, the other went mad, while the third said he had met himself. Β»

It is in these moments that the purely biographical aspect seems to be suddenly invaded by the "magical realism" that introduced Bergier to fans of science fiction, esotericism and alternative reality. The legend underground of the door of via degli Alchimisti - of which it exists a mirror-image South American version, with reference to the entrances to the mysterious underground tunnels dug by a civilization older than the Incas, accesses closed only in the last few centuries following tragic events halfway between historical news and folklore - can only bring to Bergier's mind on the one hand the theosophical-Nazi theories, which he resumed in The morning of the wizards, concerning the survival of ancient civilizations atlantides in an underground dimension (the "Hollow Earth"), on the other hand, it can only stimulate reflections on the otherworldly destiny of those who were for years his executioners, for whom he undoubtedly hoped for the painful consummation in the flames of Sheol, according to the tradition of his ancestors.

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Another of these moments in which Bergier's biography is tinged with "magical realism" was the encounter, narrated in the chapter dedicated to alchemy, with Fulcanelli, mysterious author of The mystery of the cathedrals e The Philosopher's Mansions, which came close to ours by virtue of its research on nuclear energy. β€œHis searches,” he told him, β€œare extremely dangerous. One day they could lead us to the atomic bomb Β». When Bergier replied that this would be desirable to put an end to the great conflict in progress, Fulcanelli hermetically closed: "Maybe ... unless it destroys the entire civilization, which has happened several times in the past ..."[P. 158]. This statement was later confirmed in a cryptic way by both Frederick Soddy The interpretation of the RadiumΒ both by him who, referring to the ancient Indian texts of the The Bhagavad Gita and Mahabharata, was the "father" of the atomic bomb: Julius Robert Oppenheimer.

[Youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lb13ynu3Iac&w=800&h=600%5D


Editions consulted:

  • Jacques Bergier,Β I am not a legend, Bietti, Milan 2019
  • Jacques Bergier,Β Praise of the fantastic, The Palindrome, Palermo 2018
  • Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels,Β The morning of the wizards, Mondadori, Milan 1963