Raymond Abellio

Beginning in 1974 he edited the Recherches avancées book series for Fayard.

Besides his literary career, under the influence of Pierre de Combas, he developed an interest in esoterism, and especially astrology. He was also interested in the possibility of a secret numerical code in the Bible, a subject that he developed in La Bible, document chiffré in 1950, and later in Introduction à une théorie des nombres bibliques, in 1984. He proposed in particular that the number of the beast, 666, was the key number of life, a manifestation of the holy trinity on all possible levels, material, animist and spiritual. He has also written on the philosophy of rugby football.

Abellio went to the École Polytechnique and then took part in the X-Crise Group. He advocated far-left ideas, but like many other technocrats, he joined the Vichy regime during the Second World War and became in 1942 secretary general of Eugène Deloncle's far-right Mouvement Social Révolutionnaire (MSR) party. He then participated in Marcel Déat's attempt of creating a unified Collaborationist party. In April and September 1943 he participated in the Days of the Mont-Dore, an assembly of collaborationist personalities under the patronage of Philippe Pétain. After the Liberation, he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment in absentia for Collaborationism, and escaped to Switzerland. However, he was pardoned in 1952 and went on to start a literary career.

Georges Soulès (11 November 1907 – 26 August 1986), known by his pen name Raymond Abellio, was a French writer.