Thursday, May 6, 2010

The Indomitable Jacques Bergier and The Morning of the Magicians

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THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, coauthored by Louis Pauwls and Jacques Bergier in 1960, was a seminal book in my woo-woo education. As one Amazon reviewer has written, it is one of the few books that dared to ask such questions as:

Are we all in a collective conspiracy to hide the truth, is science such a conspiracy? Do secret societies exist and do they have an influence upon history? What special knowledge did the ancients possess that we may not possess now? What role did secret societies play in the origins of Nazism, and in the Nazi Black Order? How were the Nazis able to rise to power and what did such a phenomenon represent amidst our modern world? What is the historical meaning of the atomic bomb? What does the future promise for our civilization? And, Do [sic] supermen live amongst us men, and if so, have they always? 

The paperback copy that I had was already ten-years old when it came into my hands in the seventies and I had not read anything else by Bergier until my forum friend Geoff  gifted me with SECRET WEAPONS, SECRET AGENTS this past winter.  First published in 1956, it tells of how the French underground alerted the Allies to the nature of the Pennemunde weapons research. 

Bergier was later captured, imprisoned in a concentration camp, and tortured on a daily basis, but he never broke and never gave up anyone in his network. For this he gained the eternal admiration and respect of warriors like Mr Twigsnapper, no slouch in the courage department himself and this 1955 picture of Twigsnapper, Townsend and four sailors in front of Fouquet's in Paris, (discussed in a previous post) was taken just down the street from Msr. Bergier's office, and the original photo has a  Msr. Bergier's underground ID code on the back in penciled numbers, leading me to wonder if he was not the photographer.


Now a new edition of THE MORNING OF THE MAGICIANS, released in 2007, is introducing a whole new generation of readers to the same extraordinary suppositions and conjectures that piqued my interest so many years ago. It would be most wonderful if Mr Bergier's returning popularity  encouraged some adventurous publisher to release new translations of his other work as well. I think they would find an audience eager to read them.

2 comments:

Dan said...

Eternal Man, by Pauwels and Bergier is worth a read too.

"We are older and wiser than we know."

There is a hardcover copy available on Amazon for $1.93.

A Rose...yada yada said...

Thanks, It looks very interesting and I just ordered a copy.