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Concept
Emmanuel d'Hooghvorst
Summary
Baron Emmanuel van der Linden d'Hooghvorst (1914–1999) was a Belgian writer, spagyric philosopher and alchemist.
He was a disciple of Louis Cattiaux.
The eldest of a family of six children, son of Victor van der Linden d'Hooghvorst (1878–1942) and Marthe Descantons de Montblanc (1887–1978), Emmanuel d'Hooghvorst was born in Brussels on 30 April 1914.
He did his Greek-Latin humanities at Cardinal Mercier College in Braine-l’Alleud where he became a friend of the Russian-born future painter Nicolas de Staël. He then studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain.
Nicolas de Staël described Emmanuel d’Hooghvorst as his best friend. In 1935 the two of them made a four-month trip to Spain: "They stay with the locals: Nicolas pays with drawings and Emmanuel by washing dishes."
D'Hooghvorst then spent a year in the Belgian Congo as a gold prospector. Perhaps this is where he became interested, if not in alchemy, at least in chrysopoeia.
In April 1936, as a Catholic member of the movement Action Nouvelle, he published a violent pamphlet against Léon Degrelle – J’accuse Léon Degrelle – intended to reveal the intentions of rexism. He wrote: "The rexist campaign is a terrible exploitation of popular credulity. However, the public must be aware of Rex’s leader’s true personality, of his latest intentions and of the means he uses to achieve them."
During the Spanish Civil War, he was a war correspondent for the Belgian daily La Libre Belgique.
In 1939, he married Countess Elisabeth de Marnix de Sainte Aldegonde, who gave birth to four children.
Under the German occupation of Belgium in World War II, he was imprisoned twice by the Gestapo and then released. At that time he began to study classical literature in depth, especially Neoplatonism and Pythagorism. He often confessed later to his relatives that if he was not executed, as many of his friends involved in the Resistance were, it was because he had immersed himself in these studies.
Official source
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