Electoral Brotherhood

The Élus Coëns, also called the Chevaliers Maçons Élus de l’Univers, are presented as an initiatory order founded by Martinez Pasqualis in 1765. In the novel’s compressed history of occult and Masonic groups, the order’s importance lies less in a sustained institutional career than in the promise of access to hidden knowledge: Pasqualis’s theurgical operations, Willermoz’s alchemical ambitions, and the repeated movement of seekers between organizations make the order part of an accumulating genealogy of secret traditions.

Foundation and Initiatory Practice

The chronology associates the order’s foundation with Pasqualis, a figure described in the narrative as an old pirate who practiced theurgy in a secret chamber. In those operations, angelic spirits appeared as luminous trails and hieroglyphic characters. The account gives no fuller constitution or membership structure, but this reported practice distinguishes Pasqualis’s circle from a merely public association: its authority rests on claimed contact with hidden spiritual forces.

The order belongs to a period when initiatory groups and Masonic lodges multiplied and overlapped. The narrative places Pasqualis’s activity alongside the growth of other rites and alliances, presenting the Élus Coëns not as an isolated body but as one stop in a shifting landscape of organizations promising access to deeper revelations.

Willermoz and the Great Work

Jean-Baptiste Willermoz took Pasqualis seriously. The narrator characterizes him as honest but naive, an enthusiast whose fascination with alchemy led him to imagine a Great Work reserved for the elect. Its goal was to discover the point of alliance among six noble metals by studying measurements contained in the six letters of God’s original name, which Solomon had supposedly disclosed to the elect. The order’s attraction thus connects ritual practice to a grand synthesis of metals, sacred language, and privileged knowledge.

Willermoz did not confine himself to one organization. He founded multiple orders and joined multiple lodges, continually seeking a definitive revelation and fearing that it might be hidden elsewhere. He joined Pasqualis’s Élus Coëns as part of this search. The pattern is significant: affiliation does not resolve uncertainty, but multiplies the possible locations of the secret.

Disappearance and Unfinished Succession

In 1772 Pasqualis left for Santo Domingo and disappeared from the account, leaving his affairs unresolved. The narrator speculates that he had acquired a secret he did not wish to share, but presents this as suspicion, not established fact. Pasqualis’s departure therefore supplies no confirmed revelation or orderly succession; instead, it leaves Willermoz and the order’s promise of knowledge suspended.

The novel uses this abrupt departure to show how gaps in the record invite further conjecture. Pasqualis’s disappearance is treated as an opening for interpretation, while Willermoz’s continued movement among lodges keeps the search alive without bringing it to a definitive conclusion.

Place in the Novel’s History of Secret Orders

The Élus Coëns appear within a sprawling history in which later narrators connect societies through succession, influence, and alleged hidden teachings. The order’s documented details are limited, but those details—secret theurgy, angelic signs, an alchemical project, and Pasqualis’s unexplained departure—fit the larger narrative pattern by which partial historical traces become material for a more comprehensive account of concealed traditions.

That pattern is also exposed as unstable. The story offers a possible secret behind Pasqualis’s departure, yet does not verify it; it gives Willermoz a serious intellectual and spiritual purpose, yet shows that each new affiliation can renew rather than satisfy the search. The Élus Coëns consequently function both as a historical-seeming group in the novel’s chronology and as an example of how the imagined continuity of secret knowledge is built from incomplete episodes.