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The Creation of a Universal System:   Saint-Yves d’Alveydre and his Archeometer by Joscelyn Godwin

First Revelation: The Vattanian Alphabet

Saint-Yves learned this from Haji Sharif (or “Hardjji Scharipf”), his Sanskrit teacher. Haji came from Bombay and lived in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. The lessons took place three times a week, beginning on June 8, 1885, and continued with a few interruptions at least until November 12, 1886. Sometimes the Marquise was also present. These lessons, written out very carefully by Haji, are in the Sorbonne Library (MS. Carton 42); they are also interesting for the information they contain on “Agartha,” which I have treated elsewhere.

Already in the first lesson, which Haji entitled “Secret and sacred method of a guru for his Dwija” (twice-born), Vattan was mentioned as “the primitive source of all the languages in the world.” On October 25, 1885, Haji wrote Saint-Yves’ name and title in these characters. As Haji also knew Hebrew (and Arabic), he was evidently the source for the equivalents of the 22 letters of Vattan with those of Hebrew—crucial for the Archeometer—and with part of the Sanskrit alphabet.

As for the sources from which Haji got this Vattanian alphabet, totally unknown to philologists, it is a mystery. Certainly he belonged to some secret Brahmin society, which Saint-Yves chose to imagine as a great university, and in the end as the subterranean realm of Agartha.

Could there be some connection with the language and alphabet of “Senzar” that H. P. Blavatsky and other Theosophists were mentioning at almost exactly the same time, but which has never been revealed?

For Saint-Yves, according to his interpreters in the Gnose articles, “This [Vattanian] alphabet, which was the original script of the Atlanteans and of the Red Race, whose tradition was transmitted to Egypt and India after the catastrophe in which Atlantis disappeared, is the exact transcription of the astral alphabet [...] The primordial alphabet of the Atlanteans has been preserved in India, and it is through the Brahmins that it has come down to us.”

But their presentation of such facts is so much woven in with concepts reminiscent of Fabre d’Olivet that I cannot believe in them as coming from Haji Sharif, any more than the fantasies of the underground world which Saint-Yves wrote as Mission de l’Inde.

Table 1 shows this alphabet, with its equivalents.