The Rosicrucian Papers of Sissarrad G. Balyan
Ian Whittlesea
297mm x 210mm
168pp
Softcover
Edition of 500
2025
ISBN: 978-1-912458-22-6
Published by The Everyday Press / theeverydaypress.net
The Rosicrucian Papers of Sissarrad G. Balyan were bought on eBay for £10, where they were described as 'Rosicrucian magazines etc'. I was the only bidder. They were sold as part of a house clearance on the Isle of Sheppey, from the final address of the much-travelled engineer Mr Balyan. I'd long been interested in the American revival of Rosicrucianism and its strangely banal manifestation of 'scientific mysticism' that combined pyramid selling, pulp advertising and perpetually deferred self-realisation. The artist and judoka Yves Klein was an adherent of this brand of Rosicrucianism, taking a correspondence course while a teenager in Nice. There is some debate as to whether this was with the AMORC Rosicrucians of San Jose or with Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Fellowship of Oceanside, California. Balyan's papers are mostly from the AMORC, but there is a much-read copy of Heindel's The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception among them.
The papers came in a large, slightly damp, cardboard box that smelled strongly of cigarettes and incense. Most of them date from 1950-57 when Balyan lived in Egypt, but there are a few later documents from Rome, Cypress and England. It is ironic that Balyan was sending monthly to California for its deracinated version of esotericism while living in Alexandria, the ultimate source of so many occult traditions and notorious haunt of gnostics and cabalists. Among the magazines and ephemera, in a bundle held together by a rotted elastic band, were the Egyptian postcards with an inverted triangle stamped on the back. The diagrams in the ring binder all seem to derive from illustrations in the Rosicrucian Digest and the loose pencil drawings were in a folder labelled Rosicrucian Certificates. There is no indication of who made them, or whether the serious and hieratic young man depicted is Balyan himself, a friend or a lover.