Autobiography of Jorge Ángel Livraga

Published in Almenas nº 1-18 of New Acropolis. Internal document.

Introduction

As announced in No. 1 of “ALMENA”, I intend to develop the theme of our relationship with the Hierarchy and of how we came into the world 24 years ago. Being the Founder, these simple pages will acquire the value of a historical document as time passes. In view of this evidence I feel compelled to write something that my Personality strongly rejects, but which is necessary for the understanding of events and so that in the future there are no major distortions in the knowledge of my own Life, which could have repercussions in a distortion of the whole Work. I refer to writing a sort of biography, a brief account of my existence, from my earliest childhood to the steps of what in time would become the New Acropolis International Organization.

Saving the abyssal differences between H.P.B. and myself, I propose to prevent from now on some future R. Guénon and his followers from inventing a tortuous and false beginning for the origins of our Movement. Thus, despite the repugnance that the subject arouses in my Personality, I feel impelled to write about Myself. I am accustomed to sacrificing the pleasant in the name of what is necessary. Once again I do it. I obey Orders like any of you.

Out of a principle of Ethics I will confine myself to my own life and relate those things that may be of interest for a better understanding of the process. I will limit myself to those things that may be important and worth knowing.

Part One: My childhood (1)

I was born on September 3, 1930 in the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, into a family of Italian immigrants. My parents, Don Ángel and Doña Victoria, had been born in Argentina, but my grandparents had been born in Italy, on the paternal side near Milan and on the maternal side near Genoa.

I came into the world shortly before midday at my paternal grandfather’s home, on Ciudad de La Paz Street at number 800 in the residential neighborhood of Belgrano. A few days later a bloody revolution broke out that overthrew the paternalist center-left regime of Yrigoyen. The first doctors who attended me were brought to the house through the barricades; fighters flew over the city. I was born normally and did not suffer from premature illnesses.

A few months later I was moved to the house at Amenábar 863, which my father, a civil engineer, had designed.

Argentina was then experiencing a period of prosperity and my early childhood passed within an upper-middle-class family, with the typical characteristics of the “new rich.” A toy room was arranged for me and I slept in a kind of small bed in my parents’ room. I have a very vague, pinpoint memory of that. I remember our car, a sand-colored convertible with black fenders. Also a chalet on an island in El Tigre, a town set in the delta of the Río de la Plata about 30 or 40 km from Buenos Aires. I have been told that as a baby I clung to a stuffed bear and that I began to speak very early, although I was late to walk alone. I do not remember that. The first thing that comes to mind in this life is sitting in the car with my legs dangling without touching the pedals and trying to steer the wheel. I also remember the motor launch that took me from time to time to the island in the delta; I loved that experience.

I grew up with a very reserved character and spent hours alone, observing and dreaming in front of the huge planters on the roof of my house, which was 20 meters long. From what I have been told and recall, I do not think I “played” exactly like an ordinary child. I disliked other children and always preferred to be near adults, for example, at my father’s large drawing table, scribbling with his compasses and ruling pens; with his German “Faber” pencils with which I very soon devoted myself to drawing, generally ships and human figures in combat. I do not remember drawing animals at that time. Although I liked them, and thanks to my father’s friends at the Buenos Aires Zoo, I had access to play with tiger, lion and bear cubs. I never feared animals. A friend of mine at the Zoo was a large monkey called “Chakma”, a kind of chimpanzee with huge canines and sizable build. I fed him by hand when my elders did not see me. The first time they caught me doing it they were horrified, until they understood that the big monkey did me no harm and, on the contrary, showed his fierce teeth to anyone who tried to move me away from him. I loved animals so much in my early childhood that I had many of them, even a penguin in my parents’ bathtub, which was soon forbidden. I had very crowded fish tanks and a large cage where parrots flew and partridges walked. I do not remember worrying about their food; but I would spend hours watching them and began to dream of distant lands.

My father was not religious and my mother only superficially so. Weekly we still went to the church, of which what impressed me most were the images and the high ceilings. They tell me I was baptized in the Catholic faith in the neo-Gothic church of “Nueva Pompeya” and that I cried a lot when they sprinkled me with holy water. They resolved the problem by giving me my maternal uncle Ángel Rizzi’s car key fob to play with.

I do not remember any religious impression or experience in my early childhood. I saw and touched dead relatives from a very early age. They did not impress me greatly. These experiences were imposed by my father, very “machista”, who wanted me not to be afraid of anything. In truth I was not. I remember seeing the dead with curiosity, as if they were garments taken off by the deceased, whom I thought must continue living somewhere else. But I accepted it naturally. What really impressed me was the grieving of the mourners. They bothered me and I tried to flee from them.

I always loved silence and, in some way, solitude. I felt vivid curiosity about my surroundings, but I saw them depersonalized, like the immense display cases of those museums I began to love from a very early age. Their still, silent objects always attracted me.

I have the sense, as I try to remember my earliest years, of a great psychological distance from my surrounding world. I do not recall having loved much anything or anyone and, contrary to what happens with children, I felt no need for affection. And if I had an emotional life, it was always poured out to a greater degree toward animals and objects, feeling an indifferent rejection of human beings. In some way I did not feel like a human being nor did I believe I had a likeness to them, beyond the form, which did not concern me.

Part One: My childhood (2)

Around the age of four I often lived with my paternal grandmother. She had a large house in the Palermo neighborhood with an uncovered backyard where lemon trees were grown, vegetables planted and there were chicken coops. In truth, it was a rustic estate and there my sixty-something grandmother lived as in the distant Po countryside, of which she so often spoke to me.

At first light she would go to Mass and on her return she would awaken the whole small family. She stood practically all day working, and lay down healthily tired among her pictures of saints and deceased loved ones, to whom she lit an oil lamp for each. She was rich enough to afford another kind of existence, but she knew only that one, and was serenely and placidly happy with it.

In a little house in the back lived a great-uncle of mine, her nephew, some ten years younger than she, who had been an anarchist, one of those practical-romantics of the late nineteenth century. They had occasional arguments about the validity of religion, until my grandmother appeased him by reminding him that she was his aunt, and he, who always addressed her respectfully as “Usted”, shut up immediately and returned to his work on the land. He mocked her beliefs, but he respected and loved her to such an extreme that when she, many years later, died, he followed her to the grave, never recovered from the loss of his aunt. Strange anarchists those of that era!

I played by digging large holes in the ground, filling them with water and making my little boats float in them, some built by myself with wood I found there. For me, that house and its rustic backyard were a place of wonders. I would spend hours watching insects and plants. I began to draw birds on large sheets of drawing paper with pencil. Then I colored them imitating what I saw.

The hens and their, to me, strange property of laying eggs attracted my attention. I never understood how or why they did it, but I did not ask about it because I had grown accustomed to enigmas and in a way did not want to hear the disenchanted answers of adults. One morning I discovered that by placing a finger on their beak and wishing them to sleep, they would immediately fall over with their feet up. Then I would blow on them and they would wake up. I was hypnotizing them, but it seemed the most natural thing in the world, until one day my grandmother surprised me and “raised the roof”, for apparently an indirect ancestor of mine, whom they called in Italy “El Maguito”, had made a living levitating from roof to roof in his little town, healing animals and people. The challenge of a priest—against what were thought to be diabolical powers—cost him his life when he tried to fly from the bell tower of the Duomo in Milan. My grandmother remembered him from what she had been told as a child, and she had inherited his “miraculous medal”, in which “San Gnop” was depicted. I do not know who this mysterious saint was, also called “Lord of the Worms.” Today I believe that the medal in question could well have been a simple early-Christian coin.

The thing is she called my father by telephone, who, on hearing the story, laughed thinking that grandmother was senile. He reproached her for letting me deceive her with my games, taking advantage of her being a simple peasant (my father was very proud of his university education and his love of mathematics, of his scientific culture). Then they invited me to go to the chicken coop and repeat the experiment before them. My grandmother with the rosary in her hands, and my father enjoying in advance the failure of my trick before a qualified observer. I put all the hens to sleep. I remember vaguely that they shook them in incredulity at what they saw. I was a little annoyed by the publicity given to the matter and refused to wake them, until I received an imperative order from my father to do so. Then, almost carried, he took me to the car waiting for him at the door, while my grandmother withdrew to pray in her dark room, before her beloved saints and departed. The matter was not discussed further, but a few days later they took me to my doctor, Dr. Rioja, to have me examined. I now realize that they must have told him the adventure and the elderly physician, trained in the pragmatic schools of the early century, must not have believed them, certifying only that my health was good. But it was not so good: I frequently caught colds and influenza and suffered high fevers. They say I delirious. As I was an only child, the house convulsed each time it happened, and the long-suffering and prestigious Dr. Rioja rushed to medicate me. He and my father got along very well, for both had a sharply scientific and positivist mentality.

I would have been five years old when I suddenly fell ill with influenza one winter and the fever rose to 40°C or more. I was at the Amenábar house and the maidservants, my mother and father tiptoed around while they refreshed my forehead with cold cloths. They also wrapped me in large damp towels. They began to give me several painful injections a day. Today I deduce that I must have had a beginning of pneumonia. One evening the fever rose even more, I almost lost my sight and had difficulty breathing, my back hurting terribly. General alarm spread. I vaguely remember my mother running and shouting, “Call Dr. Rioja!”

I was momentarily alone in the room. Suddenly, to the right of the large bed on which they had laid me, a figure appeared standing, bathed in golden light, with arms crossed over the chest (years later I learned it was an Egyptian figure). He extended an arm and touched my forehead. I was not afraid and I told the people who entered my room when I called them to tell them what I had seen. The doctor came and attributed it to the fever. I saw concern in everyone. The next morning I had no more fever and there was no trace of my illness. I got up and went out to play in the yard. The phenomenon was attributed to a reaction to some medicine.

Part One: My childhood (3)

I myself soon forgot what had happened to me and took it almost naturally, although I could not explain it then. Nor did I care to explain it, and that trait of not worrying about what appears to be “supernatural” accompanied me all my life.

Since I was four I could count and I knew the alphabet by heart. I could read, although I knew the Italian language better, in the form of the Milan dialect, than Spanish. At best I mixed the two, as I heard my elders speak at table during long occasions when I had the opportunity to listen.

After the age of five, my personal tastes intensified strongly. Making maneuvers and changing my father’s car wheels, drawing—now in color—observing nature avidly, especially animals and plants, and a growing passion for travel. The latter led me to begin building a large raft made of crate wood and poles in my backyard (without calculating that it was so large I could not get it out). With this raft, which consumed many of my daily hours and thousands of reused nails that I straightened myself, I planned to go to places… “very far away”… like “India and Montevideo”…

My father, who obviously had not been born to child pedagogy, nevertheless had an infinite delicacy that time to show me the impossibility of my project and together we dismantled it, replacing it with a very small one, with a candle, which we would launch into the Río de la Plata to let it disappear on the horizon. Thus we worked, I think, for a week and I do not remember having cried, although I did very much want to, for for the first time in this incarnation the evident failure of a Dream had struck me. Months later the small raft floated laboriously away from the coast and they began to give me many model ships of all kinds, surely responding to that hobby I had shown and that, in some way, never left me. When I first saw the sea I must have been about six years old; I remember crying without knowing why. It was at the seaside resort of Mar del Plata. I spent hours looking at the horizon, beyond the waves and the sand, so tempting for the games of children my age. I acknowledge that I must have tested my parents’ patience and capacity for understanding, for although I was always a very obedient and circumspect child, I was also rare and atypical to the extreme.

It was decided, to my great joy, that I would not start Primary School at age six, as was customary, but at seven. For some reason I never understood, I felt a strong aversion to going to school and being with other children and I intuited that with that step my way of life, my childhood, would sink. I had a real horror of becoming an “adult.” To be inserted into an environment I sensed would be aggressive. The fact of growing up, which was celebrated by my family, made me horribly sad. In my Amenábar house I had a room full of toys; there were hundreds, and I tried to play alone with my ships and cars, with my little planes, with devouring appetite. I was aware that later my life would change and I would no longer be able to do it the same way.

I returned to my grandmother’s house and there I experienced the last strange phenomenon of my childhood. It was something simple, but it determined that my stays at that house, with its large garden of vegetables and fruit trees, were reduced to sporadic visits.

There was a lemon tree full of ripe lemons and my grandmother gave me a basket and pointed out a long pole to try to harvest as many as possible. They left me alone and the problem of how to do it exactly presented itself, for the fruits were numerous and, to me, very high up. I stood under the tree and strongly wished the lemons would fall to the ground; I raised my arms as if to gather them and a large number of fruits fell at my feet. I did not attach importance to it, thinking I would later retrieve the ones still on the tree with my air rifle… but I did not perceive that my grandmother was watching me… and again the theme of “El Maguito” arose and what had happened to me when I unconsciously hypnotized the hens was reproduced.

I believe that there my childhood properly ended. Afterwards I had to go to school, doing the first year at a convent school on Avenida Cabildo in Buenos Aires. I vaguely remember suffering a great deal, including an accident when I fell onto a stone bench where I lost part of my teeth and was badly injured. I became silent. I rejected and was rejected by the other children. The “homework” I had to do at home, with the perpetual assistance of my mother, was a true martyrdom, except when I had to draw. My exercise books are still preserved and are very neat and pretty… but they do not reflect that almost terrifying inner sensation I felt when doing them. A change, a year later, to a State School did not improve matters. There I learned the first bad words and the first filth of life; I saw the weak robbed and beaten. A strange, powerful and atavistic force began to manifest more clearly within Me. I isolated myself from the environment and it was only a sort of “robot” who went to school. Occasional little friends ended up appearing to me as objects.

Part One: My childhood (4)

I vividly remember the destabilization of my life as I grew. And my confrontations with my surroundings.

The State Primary School, which when I write still exists at Avenida Federico Lacroze and Cabildo in Buenos Aires, seemed to me to be an authentic prison. To make matters worse, my father, with his liberal ideas, did not want to continue sending me to a fee-paying religious school. At that time in Argentina, the State Schools were attended by children drawn from the middle class and below and from their customs to their clothes they had nothing to do with mine. I still seem to hear the jeers and mocking whistles of my little classmates when, in my impeccable white tunic (there called “guardapolvo”), starched, and my blue silk bow tie with white dots, I climbed into the large black family car that waited for me.

I never felt identified with them. To be completely frank, as I have set out to be in beginning this micro-biography, with very few exceptions I felt genuine disgust for that vociferous, unkempt and violent infant mass. When, passing by the “Ritz” confectionery, they bought me a packet of sweets to share with them, I did so… but in my way: I threw them far away (they were among the most expensive, wrapped in colored papers with representations of the fruit that flavored them) and it was a amusement for me to watch them rush, pushing and striking one another moved by greed. The one that remained for me I would later give to my dog, a large German shepherd. My parents learned much later that I did not eat sweets. They also learned much later that I was not a… “normal” child.

The psychology of most parents is curious; they always expect their children to be something “out of the ordinary” and when one is born to them, they insist on “normalizing” it. My grandmother told me something I still do not know if it is true. She said that when a she-wolf mates with a dog and wolf-puppies and dog-puppies are born, she waits to see how they drink water and that by the way they do so she knows whether wolves or dogs were born, killing the latter, since her instinct tells her that when they grow, they will be enemies of the wolves… Nature is ruthless, but wise.

Thus I grew up among foolish wolves who let me grow. I, who would write so many Articles against the dogmatic Church… was taught to write in Spanish by a nun. I, who combatted all my life Materialist Liberalism and despised Democracy, was schooled and formed by teachers who held those tendencies, beginning with my own father.

I was a mediocre pupil; terrible at mathematics although very good in history and literature. Yet my culture astonished my elders, for in a self-taught manner I read several hours a day what I fancied, especially astronomy, paleontology, zoology, botany, physics, history, archaeology, verse and prose. I also produced exquisite scientific drawings representing cells, classifications of fungi, varieties of birds from distant countries. But they were drawings “For Me”… that I do not recall my schoolteachers ever seeing. I was not yet ten years old when I professionally collaborated on a series of technical drawings that my father submitted as projects for new highways, roads, with their schematic sections, descriptions of drains, subbases, etc. My father became increasingly my companion despite the abysses opened by his violent character and my nascent haughtiness, contempt for vulgar outbursts, and family quarrels.

In truth, my father lived for Me, since his economic position allowed it, and his greatest Love was his son. I constituted his pride and his fulfillment in life… but perhaps he would have liked an un-enigmatic child. And one who would settle for less. When he made me a kite and we went to the countryside to fly it, I ended up insisting that he buy me a model airplane.

My father tried to teach me sports, especially violent ones like boxing, but although I did not avoid them, I practiced mechanically and there was such coldness and contempt in my gaze that soon training gear and punching bags disappeared. I did like rowing, sailing in general, and I had many ship and submarine models.

The outbreak of World War II coincided with my birthday. We were buying toys downtown Buenos Aires when we heard the siren of the newspaper La Prensa announcing that Great Britain and France had declared war on Germany over its invasion of Poland. I had turned nine.

Argentina continued to live at its own pace. It was a distant war and was treated with complete lack of drama. My family was Italian but clung to the past. We sang by the piano “Giovinezza” but Mussolini seemed to them a character from operetta; some because they were old-style monarchists and others because they were, like my own father, liberal democrats. For Me, unconscious of human suffering, it was an interesting episode that I read about in the pages of the London News, with its striking photographs. An avalanche of war toys filled my room. The phenomenon of war, utterly dehumanized as that of mere machines in combat, came to interest me greatly and having bought hundreds of small armed vehicles, cannons and other miniatures to scale, I organized and resolved intricate battles. I aided myself with small rockets that I buried in the potting soil as mines. At first I sided with the “Allies”… because they were losing.

Part Two: My adolescence

I have used the term “Adolescence” for mere communicative convenience with you, for strictly speaking I do not remember nowadays such marked changes in my life. Only a kind of anguish at realizing that I ceased to be a child, not so much because I did not know exactly what awaited me, but rather because I knew with certainty all that I was losing. The adult world had never pleased me and I saw myself obliged to enter it gradually. A bio-temporal process, with forces greater than mine, pushed me… but I remained the same inside… there in my Interior…

My taste for reading had led me to go from a thorough article about the tablets of Easter Island, in whose photographs I worked for several weeks in various attempts to identify the glyphs, to a little book on “how to read cards”, that is, to know the future through a deck of cards. I did not believe much in those things, but alone I would make the cards run across the large dining table in my house and I was frankly pleased once when I thought I read that I would die at age fifteen. I was so disgusted with adult life.

Later I learned that my intuition about those cards had not been entirely false… Only that it was not I who would die physically at fifteen.

From the hated Primary School I went to the abhorred National or Secondary School. If in the first I had felt uncomfortable, in the second I had to resort to the limits of my strength to remain “normal.” The adolescent youths of my time seemed to me as scoundrels as those of now, with the difference that then I had to endure their rudeness, their obscene conversations and their foolish sniveling. The mediocrity, if not the nullity, of my teachers bored me and there were very few exceptions.

Of the subjects I studied I was interested in History, although I sensed it deformed. I took pleasure in Literature and whenever I could I devoted many hours to reading the Spanish Classics and also to scribbling pages with verses and essays on Politics and descriptive and narrative prose. Of the authors translated into Castilian, the one who influenced me most was Chateaubriand, and to a lesser extent Byron. I was also interested in religion, although in my student years, in Peronist Argentina, the absurd division was made between those who studied “Religion” and those who studied “Morals”, the latter being all disparagingly labeled “Jews”. That displeased me and seemed absurd, even because I knew that almost none of those who had chosen “Morals” were of Jewish origin, but simply children of non-Catholic parents. Yet the subject managed to awaken flashes of curiosity in my Soul. In truth, I no longer believed in what my Catholic grandmother or my liberal father had taught me. I had to find a path for Myself and that often excited me. My stance on the religious question was somewhat skeptical and I tried not to deny nor to affirm anything that my reason could not support. I did retain, however, a few grand mystical elements intrinsic to which I did not dare to question myself, such as the very existence of God and, in some way, the immortality of the Soul and the primacy of all that is good over all that is evil.

My continuous reading had led me to know to some extent the Greek, Roman and especially the Egyptian pantheons, for which I felt a para-rational inclination. My reflections made me see that what was at stake was a sort of Divine Essences that assumed geopolitical and historical forms and pletoric attributes of popular or cultural character that imposed places and times. This naturally led me to see in Christianity one more form of Faith, as transitory as the others.

My family’s habits led me to take Communion and Confirmation, but I had done so with the same inner absence with which I did many things. My inner world was increasingly disconnected from my surroundings. No protests, quiet but inexorable.

When the Second World War ended, faced with the defeat of the Axis powers, my old sympathies for the Allies inverted in polarity and von Runstedt’s counter-offensive filled me with enthusiasm. That so few fought against so many awakened in Me a hidden fiber and made it resonate powerfully. Military themes and a love of weapons became very alive. What I would later call “Instinct of Power” awakened, and in the face of certain sexual revelations I opted without struggle for absolute chastity, not out of morality but out of rejection of what I considered signs of animality and vulgarity. The concepts of strength and chastity were for Me inseparable. And when they pointed out that an Alexander had not been precisely chaste, I did not mind, for I thought how far he might have gone had he been. But that tense and nevertheless natural evolution was to suffer a kind of cataclysm. The event that ended my adolescence and what we might call my early youth.

I had just turned fifteen.

Part Three: My youth (I)

My 15th birthday was one of the saddest of my life, or at least so I remember it now. Several factors combined: one, the main fact that my father, so strong and corpulent, began to be struck down by an illness that the doctors already hinted was incurable, a sort of uremia-leukemia. Another, for Me, was the evident fact that I had entered the adult world. The customary jokes and the handing over of house and car keys, which from then on were at my disposal, with great pats from my small but fervent family, seemed a ridiculous masquerade to me. If I did not intend to change my way of life nor to “escape” anywhere… what use did I have for the house keys? As for the car, we had a chauffeur and besides, apart from not being old enough for the official driver’s license, I had never been denied use of the automobile.

As I was already “adult” I was fully entrusted with the more or less close probability of my father’s death and the typical machismo of an Italian family of those years pushed me to begin to take responsibility and to prepare to be “the man of the house.”

The first thing I did was obtain my driver’s license, passing the test with an ease that did not do honor to one who had driven cars since childhood. Then, with a very cold mind, I set about preparing my own mother and my grandmother and the other women of the family so that they could endure my father’s long, terribly painful agony without adding with their lamentations greater despair to the matter. I do not know, nor did I ask then, whence came that serene, outwardly cold force that gave me an air of enormous psychological maturity and even a certain contempt and “cynicism” in the face of the terrible problem we were living through. Today I believe it was an atavistic necessity to survive in the face of adversity, but I do not remember realizing it at the time, nor even now am I entirely sure of it. Did I receive “Help” from my “invisible Friends”? It is possible.

As 1946 advanced my father’s state became frankly agonizing. He suffered indescribably and the few moments when, by virtue of sedatives and remedies, he enjoyed full lucidity, he shared them with me playing dominoes or explaining to me extremely difficult mathematical problems in which he took delight. The subject of his impending death he never addressed directly before me, but he spoke as if both of us knew it without doubt.

So as not to introduce another conflictual element into my house I did not suspend my studies, but I cared nothing for my Baccalaureate nor for my personal future.

I saw my father suffer so much and could so plainly observe the moral and physical demolition of all who surrounded him over months that I came, not only to accept that he was dying, but to wish that he would die as soon as possible. I had become cold and my eyes were almost always dry even in the many moments when despair surrounded me, amid screams, crying and the constant smell of “Hospital” that had taken over my house. The wolf-dog that had been given to me as a child, called Rin-tin-tin and which I called Rinti, began to howl at night sowing terror. Quite frankly I say that I made him stop more than once with a kick. A new force grew by leaps and bounds in Me and a remarkable power to disguise my emotions and crush them within Me.

One night, finally, my father’s titanic body, reduced to skin and bones, could resist no more and at dawn he died, apparently without being aware of it. The family convulsion was tremendous. My eyes remained dry and I fulfilled my already deceased father’s greatest wish: to behave like a “Man” in adversity. I state this without vanity because it was very natural for me to play that role.

On June 4, 1948 I was in the first carriage, still horse-drawn, that accompanied my father’s body to the cemetery; to the great family vault or “Pantheon” of green onyx. I attended the Mass “In corpore insepulto” with the attitude of watching a play. I still did not know it… But I had become totally atheist.

The interior change that had been produced in Me was terrible and within a few weeks I needed medical assistance for my nerves, for I had lost the will to eat and to sleep.

I recovered and left my studies. I became solitary and taciturn. Sitting at my father’s desk, I would leaf through his multicolored plans and his many papers and notebooks full of mathematical formulas for hours, or sitting behind the wheel of the big black car in the garage, an inner voice kept repeating to me that paper or leather had lasted longer than my father. I began to feel disgust and to quietly mock the family’s religious beliefs. For Me at that time everything ended with death. I felt no anguish, but a dull despair accepted as part of the stupid destiny of existence. I was strongly convinced that every religious form was a mere escape from the most important reality. For Me the only one then: that everything ends with death; that there was no God and that morality was only a form of elegance.

My youth (II)

Without my recent convictions changing, a very rapid mutation of deep roots began within Me. My father’s death had left me “mutilated” but at the same time had flung wide the doors of freedom.

I took advantage of the summer to go to a distant country estate of a maternal uncle. There I truly learned to ride and became skilled in the handling of hunting and defense weapons. I liked solitude, but it was no longer the contemplative solitude of my peaceful childhood, but that felt upon the saddle of a robust steed galloping without direction across the immense lonely pampas. A thousand small adventures hardened my body and Soul… although at that time the second term would have been excluded from my conception.

I sold the big black car and bought a Ford V-6 “coupé-club” with two carburetors with which I took part in some race preparations and rallies. I loved danger. I recall that one of my practices was to drive the car at high speed across a railway bridge without side rails, supporting only the wheels on the slippery metal rails. But I had great luck and considerable skill, for I never had an accident. I also practiced competitive rowing and occasionally sailing. I loved to “lose myself” alone in the labyrinth of channels of El Tigre, a place near Buenos Aires where the Paraná discharges into the Río de la Plata in a complex delta.

From the National Secondary School I no longer attended I drew some occasional companions for adventures, boys of good means and as idle as I. They brought me a virgin world; that of non-popular music. “Concerto in Warsaw”. “Pictures at an Exhibition” later led me to deep immersions in Beethoven and Wagner. I spent hours listening to records. I also made brief incursions into nationalist youth organizations and founded “CADEL”, the Argentine Center of Free Students, which later would group thousands of people. I discovered myself to be a good promoter and organizer, with great capacity for work and concentration on a point or nucleus of effort. I ate little and slept little. Something was fermenting violently within Me, but then I did not even suspect what it might be.

Peronism had reached its apogee in Argentina and, although its coarse and leftist forms mixed with an insulting nationalism deeply displeased me, its spirit of defiance toward the world attracted me. I never joined any Political Party, but I collaborated with the CGT (General Confederation of Labor) at university level on urbanization plans for workers. Those plans failed, since the workers, not previously prepared, lifted the wooden floors of their houses to light the fire for their barbecues.

Having experimented with so many experiences in a couple of years, deeply changed, I decided to take the pending exams to enter the University, in the Faculty of Medicine.

With my few companions I also discovered the world of fashionable books among young people. I read Kafka and Sartre, Marx and Hitler, Kant and Max Scheler. But, although some points interested me, none of these authors convinced me totally, for I saw all of them starting from certain “a prioris”, seeming to me too fantastic and unproductive, inevitably returning after long elucubrations to the same starting point from which they were convinced before beginning their reasoning. These “Closed Circles” of reasoning and assertions seemed to me vicious and lacking verifiable truth. I preferred to return to my old readings of verse, literature and novels, which at least delighted my need for adventure.

As I had to take language exams and found great difficulty with English I decided to take lessons from a private teacher. That was going to bring me into the arms of my Destiny… But then I did not suspect it.

My English teacher turned out to be a German called Schmidt, already elderly, short and stout, with a constant and enigmatic smile, who told me he had lived in Tibet and traveled extensively in his life. That made him attractive to me from the first moment, because he fitted perfectly with my dreams of traveling to mysterious countries and living dangerous adventures.

One afternoon I entered his large house turned into a language academy to formally begin the lessons, but to my astonishment he did not resort to the conventional books, but presented me with voluminous manuscripts written in Sanskrit and Tibetan. He translated his teachings into English and Spanish and in a few hours spoke to me of the origin of Man, of reincarnation and of other esoteric matters. To show me what “Maya” was, he told me to take a pencil that I saw on his desk, but when I put my hand on it I could not find it. That wondrous world made me reconnect with my Inner Being and when I left his house I was another. I did not know it then either, but the one you now know as “JAL” had been born.

My youth (III–XVI)

The remaining sections of the autobiography (Youth III to XVI) continue narrating Livraga’s esoteric apprenticeship with Professor Schmidt, his entry into the Theosophical Society, the construction of an Egyptian “Crypt” in the basement of his house, his correspondence with Jinarajadasa and Sri Ram (world presidents of the T.S.), his practices of astral projection and alchemy, the closure of the Esoteric School in 1950, and finally Sri Ram’s instruction to create a new movement separate from the T.S. With that he sold his automobile, launched the magazine “Theosophical Studies”, and founded New Acropolis at the age of 27, with an initial group of 12 people in his home at Amenábar 863, Buenos Aires.

My youth was left behind and what you now know as “JAL” was born. Why tell you more? I have not said everything that happened in those first years… but what I have told you is true, simply and plainly true. I leave to the Gods the responsibility to have mercy on my Soul if I made mistakes. And if they do not have mercy, I do not care. NEW ACROPOLIS is underway…; in its XXVI Triumphal Year, its Solar Eagles rise over more than 80 Headquarters in 34 Countries. I have excellent Disciples and thousands of young people work for the Ideal and shout my Name. Can I ask for more? I think not; my Work is almost finished and whatever remains of my physical life belongs entirely to the Ideal. Forgive me if I did not tell you everything… I am a Son of the Secret and to that Secret I refer… to the Great Mystery of why and how We, the Acropolitans, are going to change History to forge a New and Better World.

— Almenas nº 1-18. Jorge Ángel Livraga