Cruz Astral, La.
Revista Mensual de Estudios Psicologicos y Ciencias Ocultas.
No hay religion mas elevada que la Verdad / Hacia Dios por el bien y la ciencia / Fuera de la Caridad no hay salvacion
1904 --1913 Monthly
San Pedro, Coahuila, and then Mexico, D.F., Mexico .
Language: Spanish.
Editor: Manuel Vargas Ayala, director propietario; Jose Romano Munoz, jefe de redaccion; Dr. Arnoldo Krumm Heller. et al., redactores.
1/1, 1904-1913. (Vol. 2, no. 17 is February 1906.)
Sent free of charge to those who request it; 12 pp.

The issue for November 1912 was published in Mexico City and is called no. 1 of a second series. The journal's interim activity is unknown but there would appear to have been a hiatus between 1906 and the resumption of publication in 1912. Kardecist spiritism had come to Mexico in the late 1860s and early 1870s when General Refugio I. Gonzales had started the Sociedad Espirita Central of Mexico, translated Kardec, and started the first journal, La Ilustracion Espirita in Guadalajara. Ayala was an avid spiritualist and reformer and the founding president of the Himavat Branch of the Theosophical Society in Coahuila in 1906. He was aided in producing this journal, both financially and with extensive contributions, by Francisco I. Madero (1873-1913), who also was from Coahuila. Madero, who was part of one of Mexico's wealthiest families, had encountered spiritualism while at school in Paris in the early 1890s and had started the Circulo de Estudios Psicologicos de San Pedro in Coahuila in 1900, for which he was the writing medium. He and Ayala were active in the Club Democratico Benito Juarez in Coahuila (he mediated the spirit of Juarez, among others) in opposing the increasingly dictatorial behavior of President Porfirio Diaz, and Madero challenged Diaz in the election of 1910. When Diaz was re-elected yet again in a dubious contest Madero fled to the United States and raised the revolution, enlisting Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata for a time in his cause. After Diaz resigned under pressure, Madero was elected president in 1911 -- the same year his Manual Espirita was published under the pseudonym "Bhima." In 1913, caught in the twilight zone between conservatives and more radical revolutionaries, Madero was captured and killed in Mexico City. Nostalgic modern scholars have called him "the Glorious Innocent," only part of which title seems appropriate. This journal seems to have ceased the same year. The mottoes of the journal reflect both Kardecist and Theosophical influences, and Madero wrote strongly in defense of spiritism in contrast with Theosophy, but the journal bears little resemblance to the standard Spanish-language Kardecist publications of the era and rather emphasized the Western understanding of Eastern wisdom. Madero (as "Arjuna") published as a supplement to this journal his translation (from the French) of the Bhagavad Gita, and the journal regularly discussed vedanta, karma, "Literatura Aria, Fragmento del Upanishad," the Kabbalah (Madero's family was originally Portuguese Sephardi, which may have affected his interest), "Poder del Pensamielto: Magnetismo Curativo," Swami Vivekananda, rational diet, etc., and carried excerpts from and advertisements for the books of the standard Neo-Theosophists of the period. One of the editors of the journal, both in 1906 and on its revival, was Arnoldo Krumm Heller (1876-1949), a German who was later to found the Fraternitas Rosicruciana Antiqua. On him see the note under Der Rosenkreuzer. He is said to have met Madero in 1905 (whom he described as an "important Hermetist, a fine orientalist and an excellent Freemason") and was his personal physician and participated in the revolution on Madero's side until his murder, when he transferred his energies to Venustiano Carranza -- but perhaps not his loyalties, since he was during all this period a German Naval Intelligence agent and spy, in which capacity he strove to distract the United States from the German involvement in the Mexican situation and played a major military role in the defeat of Pancho Villa by the Carrancistas. Krumm Heller wrote in the journal both under his own name and as "Huiraocha" and contributed an obituary of Franz Hartmann. More significantly, perhaps, Krumm Heller had since the 1890s been a disciple of Alberto de Das, Count de Sarak (whose astral body would appear before him to give instructions). He had joined Sarak's Centro Esoterico Mexicano / Iniciados de Tibet in Washington, D.C., in September 1902 and may have been the person responsible for preparing the way in Mexico City for the visit of Sarak there in August 1903 -- at which Madero is said (without citation) to have joined the Center. On Sarak see the notes under Bulletin of the Oriental Esoteric Center/Society, The Radiant Centre, and L'Etoile d'Orient, and the note under La Luz, published by the Center in Mexico City in 1903 although edited from the United States.

More significantly still in showing the variety of occult practice underlying this journal and its adherents is a pamphlet No Fornicaras: Instrucciones solo para ocultistas, published by Huirachcha/Krumm Heller in 1912, the only surviving copy of which has recently come to light in Madero's library, inscribed by Krumm Heller to "To [Illustrious?] and Powerful Brother Don Francisco I. Madero with the respects of Huiracocha, S.I., R+" -- Superior Inconnu [Martinist] and Rosicrucian. While Krumm Heller later propagated a system of sexual magic based on the preservation, transmutation and raising up of the sexual energy, this book sets out a system of sexual control and utilization explicitly based on the teachings of the H.B. of L. and intended to develop man's innate powers: "There exists . . . a secret society ‘The Hermetic Brothers of Luxor' who distribute among those affiliated with it manuscripts that contain great secrets by which they obtain mysterious powers."

"The development of the latent powers in man, the conquest of practical magic, is the aspiration of everyone who has read Hermetic works, who has seen the works of an initiate."

"Sexual potency is the life, the power, the force."

"Advanced initiation leads us to a state of feeling all the pleasures of love without contact, and then begins the true introduction to high magic, then we elevate ourselves to demigods."

"Love is the driver of the material act as the creative force of all existence, is the key of success of material and intellectual life, is the key by which man can enter the amphitheater of transcendental science and elevate himself to the divine plane."

The journal noted in 1912 that it was distributing 4,000 copies but that number seems exaggerated and only fragmentary copies exist at the University of Texas, Austin.

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