Maître Philippe : un guérisseur énigmatique - Documentaire (Extrait)

In the middle of the 19th century, from the court of Russia to the occultists of the good old days, through the humble peasants of Lyon, a mysterious figure exerts his prodigious gifts and takes care of thousands of people. His name, Nizier Antelme Philippe, nicknamed Master Philippe. Who was this mysterious man who welcomed and healed up to 150 people a day at his home near Lyon? To go through the course of his life, we invited Serge Cayet, author and historian of esotericism, Jean-Pierre Braque, head of the History Chair of Esoteric Currents, as well as Pascal Bergeron, president of the association Master Philippe. Mr. Philippe, or Master Philippe according to his disciples, Nizier Philippe for the civil state, is a healer. He is a singular healer and he is an enigmatic healer. In his time, there were already a number of healers who were known in Lyon, but he distinguished himself very clearly from his fellow brothers, because his methods escaped all classification. He himself is a man of small origins. He was born in Savoie, in a small peasant family. Born with five children, he came to Lyon when he was a teenager, and from there his reputation grew until he reached the court of Russia of Nicolas II and Alexandra. Mr. Philippe is an atypical and exceptional character. The people who met him all testified to a character with an exceptional aura. And Mr. Philippe, coming from outside a small bourgeoisie, according to him mediocre, emanated something exceptional. And even his disciples refused for a long time to write about him, because they found him incapable of describing the character and his atmosphere. But of course there are other points of view on Mr. Philippe. There is the point of view of legal medicine, there is the point of view of official medicine of his time, there is the point of view of the authorities, there is the point of view of the French government. And these are points of view that are totally divergent. He emanated from him a particular radiance. According to most testimonies, in general, a lot of benevolence, a lot of kindness, a lot of generosity, both psychological and material. A desire to help people in general, not only in a therapeutic way, and to push people to help themselves and to help others, respecting a certain number of precepts, of practical morals, generally largely inspired, of course, by Christianity or the current Catholic morality of the time. He was someone who was facetious. He still is, by the way. He was someone who was human, who was close, who was very simple, and who addressed everyone, and who could speak as well with a tsar as with the simplest of the workers. Mr. Philippe was born in Savoie in 1849, that is, at a time when Savoie was Italian, then it will be French. France, at the end of the 19th century, is an extremely positivist France, that is, where science reigns, and men like Philippe are really considered, by men of science of his time, as charlatans, quite simply. It is a time when we are already beginning to legislate on the illegal exercise of medicine, for example. It is a time when there are extremely complex international relations between the governments of Europe, particularly extremely close relations between France, of President Émile Loubet, and Russia, of Tsar Nicholas II. What we need to know is that we associated Mr. Philippe a lot with esotericism, but in fact, he was the opposite. There is a confluence between currents, let's say, often strongly tinted with spiritualist perspectives, more or less confessionalized, or sometimes very little, sometimes more, such as magnetism, animal magnetism, curative magnetism, or galipnosis, which Philippe did not practice either, as well as other more occult aspects. At the time, France was discovering itself, that is, there was an enthusiasm for everything that is secret society, in certain bourgeois environments. We love to turn the tables, we love to be scared, and it is true that, in a way, Lyon has a particular aura in this field. Lyon is an industrial city, it is already the city of canoes, so there is an atmosphere in Lyon that is truly an atmosphere of workers. These are people who spend their time working, who suffer from all kinds of illnesses, that official medicine fails to cure, either because it is not capable of it, or because they themselves do not have the means to be cured. It is also a city that houses a certain number of characters, or that welcomes a certain number of characters, who are known in Paris, who begin to be known in Lyon, who begin to have a certain audience in Lyon. Books are published in Paris, they arrive in Lyon, these are books of occultism, for many, and Philippe is part of this context, of the renaissance of occultism at the time, in Paris, and in Lyon, which was the capital of occultism in the 18th century. There were a lot of people, a lot of senates, a lot of small groups, a lot of individuals, a lot of writers, sometimes even ecclesiastics, there were not only lay people, who had an affinity for these spiritualities, which could be very, very diverse. There are not only these aspects, there were also spiritualist trends in Lyonese art and culture, from the beginning of the 19th century, without a doubt, even before that, just think of the Illuminist Freemasons from the end of the 18th century, not to go back to the calendar, of whom Lyon was an extremely important centre. The Freemasons of the Rite of Rectification, the Freemasons of other rites, but even leaving aside Freemasonry, there were also, in the artistic and literary fields, quite marked spiritualist trends, sometimes quite Christian, others less, and this is what Joseph Buch called the mystical ecology of Lyon. Mr. Philippe was born in Savoie, in 1849, in a peasant family. He was the father of five children. It was a very modest family. This child, right away, the village priest, he sees that something is happening, because when a little classmate has health problems, he tells him to go sit next to Nizier, and right away the problems fly away. The only testimonies we have about his childhood are his own stories, and the stories of his brother, his brother Auguste. These are the only elements we have, so we have to take them with reserve. What do these testimonies say? That already from his childhood, this little boy is a singular boy, that he manifests quite particular gifts. His priest, it seems, would have told him, little boy, you must be possessed by the devil, and you must be badly baptized, or something like that, which means that already in his native language, we understood, around him, that he is a child who looks like no other. Until the age of 13, he kept the herd of his parents, and then he was sent to Lyon, to his uncle Vachot, where, in parallel to the work he did in the family butchery, he studied grammar. We can see that he has good disposition to do studies. When he is in Lyon, he has predispositions to heal, that is, he receives in different places, and these predispositions give him a certain aura, and precisely to enter, in quotation marks, into legality, he undertakes medical studies. The Lyon School of Medicine, at the time of Philippe, had about 300 students. Of these 300 students, there are two categories. The doctoral students, who will become doctors of medicine, and then a very particular category, which has now totally disappeared, which is called the health officers. And it is in this category that Philippe joins. You have to realize that at the time, official medicine was already quite compartmentalized compared to everything that is not official medicine, but that compartmentalization is not what we know today, and which has imposed, in particular, the creation of the order of doctors. Compartmentalization existed. Since the end of the 18th century, doctors have struggled a lot to delimit their professions, to take medicine out of the control of the Catholic Church, etc. Consciously or not, voluntarily or not, Philippe was led to surf a bit on both, even if it did not go very well with medicine in the ordinary sense of the word.