Luz Astral.
Quincenario Teosofico.
No Hai Religion Mas Elevada Que la Verdad
1907-1913 Semimonthly
Valparaiso, Casablanca, Chile. Language: Spanish.
Editor: Valentin Cangas.
15/512, January 1, 1907-1913.
2 pesos, 4-6 pp.

This was a Theosophical journal with contributions by and excerpts from Annie Besant, Walter R. Old, Roso de Luna, D.A. Courmes, Anna Kingsford, J.C. Chatterji, Yogi Ramacharaka, and others, and with elements of the common vegetarianism and opposition to vivisection of the period. Extensive review of periodicals around the world and especially in South America. The numbering of the issues is curious. No. 512, Ano 15, indicates a start date for the journal in 1891 or 1892, although publication of the journal in this form seems to date only from 1906, and no reference to its history or antecedents survives in the journal. In January 1907 it confirmed that it had only been about a year since the "Luz Astral"Centro de Estudios Psiquicos had been begun, with a sanitarium and to treat the sick by the "fluido magnetico y el naturista hidroterapico." Almost certainly behind this confusion lies the scandal of the first coming of Theosophy to South America in 1892, a scandal that has caused an embarrassing silence that clouds all accounts of early Theosophy and Theosophical journals in the area.

All agree that the first lodge of the Theosophical Society in South America was "Luz,"started in Buenos Aires on January 7, 1893, with Antonia Martinez Royo as president. What is passed over in silence is that Antonia was the mistress and mesmeric subject of Alberto Sarak, Conde de Das (1844/1868-1919), who actually started the lodge. On him, see the notes under Teososia en La Plata, Radiant Centre, Radiant Truth, Etoile d’Orient.. He was a scoundrel, a cad, and a bounder, jailed in and expelled from many countries in Europe and expelled from the Theosophical Society in Spain. Sarak and Antonia arrived in Argentina in late 1892, one step ahead of the Spanish and Belgian police, where Sarak, under the name "Dr. Martinez" acquired from India a charter for the "Luz" lodge in 1893, only to be expelled from the society yet again later in the year. He then (without Antonia, who ended up in a lonely grave on the Pampas) began a long, complicated pilgrimage through the Americas, starting numerous Theosophical societies, sanatariums to treat the ill with "fluido magnetico y el naturista hidroterapico," and journals along the way, always one step ahead of his latest exposure. Behind the version of Theosophy he openly espoused was a peculiar variety of practical occultism that prepared the way for the later coming of the likes of Arnoldo Krumm-Heller, who was one of his disciples. This journal, in claiming antecedents dating back to the 1890s, did not trace its origins to any particular journal, but the only possible ones (Teosofo, in La Plata, and La Verdad, in Rosario, Argentina) are both connected to Sarak. Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile.

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