Almost nothing about Martinez de Pasqually's origins is settled, beginning with his name, which appears in the records in half a dozen spellings. He was probably born around 1727, possibly near Grenoble, to a family that may have been of Spanish or Portuguese descent, and speculation that the family had Jewish roots has never been proven or disproven. He surfaces reliably only in the 1750s, moving through the masonic lodges of southern France with a patent of authority he attributed to his father, and gathering around himself a circle of initiates for something considerably stranger than ordinary Freemasonry.
That something became the Order of Knight Masons Elect Priests of the Universe, the Elus Cohens, organized with temples at Bordeaux, Paris and Lyon during the 1760s. Its outer grades resembled the high degree Freemasonry of the day, but its inner work was theurgy: long, exacting ceremonial operations of evocation, performed at equinoxes with circles, names and hours minutely prescribed, whose goal was contact with angelic intelligences as proof and instrument of the soul's reconciliation with God. In 1772 Pasqually sailed for Saint-Domingue to secure an inheritance, leaving the order in the hands of deputies. He died at Port-au-Prince in 1774 with his treatise unfinished, his order barely institutionalized, and his influence, through two remarkable disciples, only beginning.