This journal is part of one of the most extraordinary stories of modern occultism.

In 1908, so
the legend goes, a young man by the name of Mario Fille encountered an old hermit ("Pere
Julien," in the story) near Rome who entrusted him with a manuscript.

Years later, about 1920, Fille and a friend, Cesare Accomani, studied the manuscript and
found that it described a mathematics-based method of consulting an oracle--the Oracle of
Astral Force--which put the user directly in contact with a Rosicrucian "centre d'emission"
that was located in the Himalayas.

This center was headed by three sages who lived in Agartha (the subterranean center first
"revealed" by Louis Jacolliot and by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, the patron of the
French Belle Epoque occult revival!).

In 1929, Accomani (under the pseudonym "Zam Bhotiva") revealed the secret in Asia
Mysteriosa: l'Oracle de Force Astrale Comme Moyen de Communication avec "Les Petites
Lumieres d'Orient" (Paris : Dorbon), and the Bulletin des Polaires was started the next year to
further its goals.

The Fraternite Polaire that was begun to exploit the method and teachings of the oracle
(supplemented by mediums) included Ferdinand Divoire, "Jean Dorsenne" (Jean Troufleau,
1892-1944), Maurice Magre (1877-1944), Jean Marques-Riviere, Henri Meslin--and Rene
Guenon, whose "Des Centres Initiatiques" appeared in the issue of the Bulletin for March
1931, although Guenon was disillusioned with the answers received through the Oracle.

Although the method of consulting the oracle and its legend are impressively complex, the
results, so far as we can tell from the journal, are not, and amount to little more than the
standard output of innumerable mediums in the preceding 80 years, coupled as time went on
with the usual occult disquisitions on various subjects, like Enrico Contardi-Rhodio's story of
encountering the Comte de Saint-Germain, which figures in Foucault's Pendulum. By the
mid-1930s the journal focused on the Cathars, Montsegur and the Grail, while the first two
years of the journal regularly carried reports of London seances conducted by Bhotiva and the
English medium Grace Cooke with the spirit of Arthur Conan Doyle (who supported the
Oracle of Astral Force).

Despite this banal material, the journal's recurring recourse to Nordic or Polar symbolism (to
which the journal's name refers) and the claim of contact with an ancient, hidden Western
center of initiation were more serious and found a certain resonance among occultists before
World War II.

With the issue of January 1933 the journal changed its title to Les Cahiers de la Fraternite
Polaire. On the Polaires generally, see Joscelyn Godwin, Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science,
Symbolism, and Nazi Survival (Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press, 1993). The relationship of
Grace Cooke to the Polaires was not direct; rather, her controlling spirit, "White Eagle" (an
American Indian spirit, complete with headdress) claimed to be in contact with the same
center that animated the Polaires.
Cooke, nonetheless, had considerable contact with the Polaires besides the seances with
Conan Doyle: in 1931 she participated in the pilgrimage of the Polaires to the Chateau of
Lorat in search of the Cathares and the Grail, and in 1934 she helped to start a branch of the
Polaires in England.

On Cooke and the Polaires and her role in starting the White Eagle Lodge and in channelling
Arthur Conan Doyle, see L.P. (Leslie Price), "The Final Conan Doyle Mystery," Psypioneer
1/5 (September 2004): 33-35, and The Story of the White Eagle Lodge (Liss, Hampshire,
England: White Eagle Publishing Trust, 1986).

In 1936 Cooke and the White Eagle Lodge published their own journal, Angelus, which
became in time Stella Polaris.

This journal in its last years increasingly avoided discussion of the Oracle and turned to the
selfless pursuit of world peace by synchronized meditation twice a day, supplemented by
reports on the Polar groups around Europe. The journal was said by Conan Doyle's spirit to
have had a circulation of 10,000. NYPL; University of Texas; BNF; BM Lyon.