Mensajero de Acuarius

Los Angeles: Gran Fraternidad Universal, 1983. 12mo in tan illus stapled wraps; illus, 124p, bib. Mild soiling to wraps else tight and very good thus. Paperback.

A biographical sketch in Spanish of "El Yoghi de Acuarius". Rare. No copies located in WorldCat; none traced in the trade at the time of cataloguing. In Spanish. | Raynaud de la Ferrière was born in Paris, 18 January 1916,; he was raised in Brussels after his family moved there when he was two. He took a degree in mining engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain, then returned to France, where he worked as a psychologist and turned to astronomy and astrology. On 21 March 1948 — the date on which he held that the vernal point entered the constellation Aquarius, inaugurating the Age of Aquarius — he founded the Gran Fraternidad Universal (Universal Great Brotherhood) in Caracas. It was constituted as a deliberately non-sectarian body, studying all philosophies and religions impartially and professing none, and it became one of the most widely established esoteric movements in the Spanish-speaking world. Over the following years he travelled through some forty-three countries, delivering more than two thousand lectures and founding Study Centres of Universal Wisdom, ashrams, initiatic colleges and yoga institutes. He reached the United States in 1949, speaking at Carnegie Hall and before Masonic and Theosophical audiences in New York; Mexico became one of the movement's principal centres, and Mexican houses — Editorial Diana among them — issued his Grandes Mensajes and much of the rest of his output for the Latin American readership. He died on 27 December 1962, aged forty-six. His work passed to his disciple David Ferriz Olivares, under whom the Brotherhood both spread and divided, and its branches continued to publish him from Caracas, Mexico City and the United States for decades afterwards.| Guru, Latin America. Spiritual Movemments; New Age