The Morning of the Magicians

Le Matin des Magiciens was a book written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier in 1960 or in October 1959. It was first published in English in 1963 with the title The Morning of the Magicians. A German edition was published with the title Aufbruch ins dritte Jahrtausend (Departure into the third Millennium).

The book was a general overview of the occult and the works of Charles Fort. Le Matin des Magiciens was highly influential in the way it presented occult subjects to a populist audience and spawned many books imitating its style.

The English edition, The Morning of the Magicians, became an international best seller, with over 800,000 copies sold worldwide. The book was a collaboration of ideas spanning a wide variety of subjects from Nazi occultism to supernatural phenomena and the place of mankind in the universe relative to traditional philosophical positions.

It also temporarily renewed interest in the works of Arthur Machen.

Contents

The first part of the preface is a refutation of the notion of social and historical progress, hold in the form of an autobiographical essay by Louis Pauwels. His father belonged to the generation of romantic socialists, whose idols were Victor Hugo, Romain Rolland and Jean Jaurès. Pauwels expressed his disdain of that generation's notion of progress by referring to a quote from Où va la monde? the French translation of a work by Walther Rathenau, whom he describes as the first victim of the Nazis.