Balanza, La.
Periodico quincenal, organo [general] official de la Escuela Magnetico Espiritual de la Comuna Universal.
Nueva Era / Siempre Mas Alla / Solo las Obras Hacen Fe / Solo Eloi esta es la Ley
1932--1950s? Semimonthly
Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Language: Spanish.
Editor: Maestro Fundador Joaquin Trincado.
Publisher: Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal.
1/1, January 1, 1933. (Vol. 1, no. 5, is March 1933.) Apparently 272 issues appeared.
$ oro 4.00 a year.

This journal was the official organ of the Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal (EMECU), an organization that is almost completely unknown in English-speaking countries (with the exception of the border regions of Texas) but was enormously influential in Mexico and Central and South America and in the Spanish Caribbean. It continues today and at its peak was said to have 50,000 adherents in some 185 branches ("catedras"), many with their own journals, one of which claimed a circulation of 4,000. The school was founded in Buenos Aires in 1911 by Joaquin Trincado Mateo (1866-1935), a Spanish born, possibly Basque, Jesuit-educated electrical engineer who had immigrated to Argentina in 1903. After a financial collapse and bankruptcy brought on by his defense of his patent for electrical home heating, he suffered from depression, contemplated suicide and turned to spiritualism. Repulsed by the "phenomenal" spiritualism he encountered, he started a small "oratorio" with a few mediums and discovered his own abilities in automatically transcribing the wisdom of "superior spirits," the "hermanos del Espacio" (a common term at the time in Spanish for the superior spirits) who wrote through him. He called this "Espiritismo Luz y Verdad" and made the truths revealed through these superior spirits the foundation of the Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual de la Comuna Universal (EMECU) which he founded in September 1911 after a lengthy illness and confinement. The next year, he claimed to have visited the "Orient of Jerusalem," where he was instructed by the ancient and wise Essene Masters ("los guardians esenios de la Escuela cabala"), who had preserved within their families the Mosaic Kabbalah. These masters then sent him out to reveal that wisdom to the world.

The spirits played a leading role in this Espiritismo Luz y Verdad. The Heraldo del Espiritismo, one of the first branch journals of the EMECU, noted the spirits as editors and listed as collaborators "the elevated spirits that form the initiating nucleus and all the disincarnated brothers who intend to impart their teachings and light to their incarnate brothers, always taking into account that their communications are conformed to the most moral principles and to the doctrines practiced and preached by the supreme Spiritual Guide of this Planet." That guide to whom the doctrines of the spirits were to conform was Trincado.

Trincado was a socialist, Freemason, freethinker, anticlerical and rabid anti-Catholic, and a self-avowed rationalist, and his teachings were an olla podrida of science, materialism, rationalism and Kardecism, combined with the lost occult history of the human race on earth and of the spirits throughout the infinite other universes, all overlaid with Trincado's dominant desire to organize and order humanity communally according to the truths revealed to him. As Trincado taught in his published writings, there is only one substance -- Magnetismo Espiritual -- material, eternal and everlasting and extended throughout unlimited myriads of worlds. God -- not the god of religions, but "Eloi" -- is a vibratory center of this magnetic universe and is the father and creator of man's soul ("Eter, Alma o Electricidad"), which, somehow, is co-eternal with Eloi, and once "individualized" can progress, incarnation after incarnation, forever and forever, without transcendence or end -- "Siempre mas alla," as one of the school's mottos proclaimed. `

As a true Kardecist, Trincado saw himself at the end of a long chain of incarnations -- Seth, Jacob Braman, Confucius, Moses, et al. -- going back most recently to Atlantis, 87 centuries ago, but beyond that through 45 million centuries, during all of which time 29 Titan missionaries (27 plus Adam and Eve) strove to bring man on to the true path of progress. This long history led to the New Era heralded by Trincado's founding of the EMECU in September 1911 and marked by the Mexican Revolution following Francisco I. Madero's assassination in 1913. This intermediate, revolutionary period would culminate in a new geological cataclysm, like that which had sunk Atlantis, in which continents would sink and others emerge, leaving a renewed, more beautiful earth peopled by men free of social injustice and religious prejudices -- and living the Universal Communal existence Trincado envisioned. The constant refrain of the EMECU was:

El Universo Solidarizado
El Mundo todo Comunizado
La LEY es una. La substancia una
Uno es el principio. Uno es el fin
Todo es Magnetismo Espiritual

The Ley/Law above all is Universal Love and its purpose was the "Comuna Universal" (Universal Commune) -- though this benign universalism was overshadowed in the present era at least with a form of racism which promoted the Spanish language and mixed-race "mestizos" (the new Adamic Race) to a favored position in the transition to the New Era. Within this Commune, all human activity was to be organized, in a manner reminiscent of John Murray Spear's utopian endeavors, into eight departments, each with its own minister:

Hacienda y Provisor
Fomento y Obras
Orden e Investigacion
Relaciones y Instruccion
Educacion y Moral Instructor de educacion infantile
Ciencias, Artes y Literatura
Higiene y Facultativo
Infancia y Maternidad

Each locality was to form its own "Catedra" or "Sub-Catedra," over which were provincial, regional and national catedras, each with its own "Celador" (or warden), directors, secretaries, etc., and mediums, and all beholden in turn to the "Catedra Central" in Buenos Aires with Trincado at its head: "All executive power of the School, material, moral and spiritual, stems invariably and exclusively from the Maestro Director General." Although it is difficult to envision the functioning of something as complex as Trincado's system, the EMECU had 185 catedras at the time of his death in 1935 and achieved some success in proselytizing.

The most notable disciple of Trincado was Augusto Calderon/Cesar Sandino (1895-1934). Sandino is remembered today because of his adoption by the "Sandinistas" of Nicaragua, who garbed themselves in his mantle without adopting his anti-communism or his reverence for Trincado. He was an enthusiastic adherent of the EMECU, especially its millennial and racial (Indo-Hispanic -- he was a mestizo) aspects and was National Celador of the order for Nicaragua. In a manifesto issued three years before his assassination Sandino announced that he and his wife Blanca were the reincarnations of Adam and Eve and that his generals were the reappearance of the 27 Titans who would lead in the final battle to lead the world, beginning with Nicaragua, into the new, perfect era. Trincado also founded colonies in Argentina where his ideas could be put into practice, one of which, Colonia Jaime, continues today.

On the instructions of the "hermanos del Espacio," Trincado added to the EMECU a Union Hispano-Americo Oceanica (UHAO) on Columbus Day, 1920 or 1921, with its own seven-color "universal banner" to support the movement toward a Pan-Hispanic utopian brotherhood. It continues today after a fashion. He also started an Orden del Templo Azul Racionalista (OTAR) in 1925 for normal-school teachers and a Circulo Defensor del Maestro, which, by its name, must have been directed opposing attacks on Trincado. By 1926, as an eminent Trincadian scholar has noted, "he was issuing truly vitriolic attacks, not only against Jews and Christians, but against scientists who rejected his 'science' and, especially, against his former Spiritist colleagues who rejected his Occultic ideas." He similarly denounced the Communists for the same reason.

After Trincado's death Maestra Mercedes Riglos Cosis de Trincado, his wife, whom he married in 1916 according to the "Ley Organica del Codigo de Amor Universal," became Director General of the EMECU, and she passed the torch to their oldest son, Juan Trincado Donato (d. 1992).

The journals published by the EMECU were almost exclusively limited to local and regional news of the movement, copies of organizational documents, occasional messages and excerpts from Trincado, and standardized advertisements for his books. Only occasionally do the journals mention Alan Kardec, whom the EMECU increasingly saw merely as a precursor of Trincado, or give messages from the catedras' mediums -- though they do make room for written communications from Joseph of Arimathea and from Enrico Caruso and others. As the movement aged it became more radical politically (Universo in the 1980s proclaimed: "Abajo las fronteras: Por una sola Nacion Mundial Comunalista: Sin Dinero, Sin Fronteras y Sin Propriedad Privada" -- a sentiment that had lain dormant in the movement from the beginning) and increasingly reverted to the Kardecist norm while becoming more open to the vagaries of New Thought, UFOs, sex with spirits, etc. University of Florida, Gainesville (1 issue); EMECU archives, University of Texas, Austin.

EME de la CU periodicals. Unlike many other movements, the Escuela Magnetico-Espiritual came late (1933) to publishing its own official journal, La Balanza, but Trincado's many regional catedras strove (and still strive online) to make up the deficit, and there were undoubtedly far more of these journals than is shown here.

El Heraldo de Ultratumba --> Heraldo del Espiritismo luz y ciencia. Mexico, D.F., Mexico. 1923-1975 (?)
Luz y Verdad. Tucuman, Argentina. 1927-1934
Moises. Trenel, La Pampa, Argentina. 1927-1933
Luz y Verdad. Laredo, Texas. 1928 (?)
Luz y Ciencia. San Antonio, Texas. 1931
La Balanza. Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1932-1950s
Justicia. Mexico, D.F., Mexico. 1942-2012 (?)
Triangulo. Havana, Cuba. 1950-1955
Voz Informativa del Centro de Estudios Filosoficos Cuahtemoc. , D.F., Mexico. 1952-1978
Siempre mas alla. Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, Mexico. 1954-1958
Conocete a ti Mismo. Mexico, D.F., Mexico. 1956.
Alerta: Organo de difusion de la Sub-Catedra "Atanasio Girardot." Maracay, Aragua Aragua, Venezuela. c.1971
Universo. Maracaibo, Zulia, Venezuela. Bimonthly 1972? 12/137-8, 3d era, January-February 1984.
Revista Ancla. Cuxur, Colombia. 2010, current online
Hermanos del Heraldo. Mexico, D.F., Mexico. 2019, online