Art Magic

Setting the question of evidence aside, however, or leaving it only as a subject of warfare between contentious factions of materialists and creedists, our part is to examine into the methods by which the communion between man and the invisible worlds of being transpire.

Mere opinions concerning the facts of the phenomena, furnish no clue to their means of occurrence.

Spirits come and go, apparently by no law analogous to those which govern human action.

Beings of an order wholly different in their essential nature, and similar only in form and intelligence to man, interpenetrate his atmosphere like the magical appearance of the lightning's flash, and disappear in the same inexplicable mystery.

Sounds, sight, movements, impressions, sometimes appealing to man with the subtle semblance of a vision, sometimes compelling him by a force he cannot resist, all captivate his senses, sway his soul, and fill him with awe and wonder.

The commonplace and secularizing modes of spiritual intercourse that have prevailed throughout the second half of our present century, have doubtless tended to strip the world of supernaturalism of its terrors, as well as much of its exaltation and spiritual beauty, still it has effected a wonderful revolution in man's intellectual appreciation of spiritual existence, confirming him in knowledge upon subjects that were before divided between myth and superstitious credulity, and bringing under the dominion of reason and judgement problems that were deemed heretofore insoluble upon any other ground than the assumption of miracle.

In treating of nature as of the visible and sensuous universe, and super-nature as of the invisible and spiritual, we are no longer driven to the necessity of premising our philosophy with an if, and such events really transpired, or leaning upon the authority of some great Sage or world-renowned Pundit, before we can demand acceptance for our facts.

However commonplace or even puerile many of the phases of modern Spiritual communion may be, however foolishly that communion may have been abused, by making it the shibboleth for the introduction of all sorts of subversive ideas into social, religious, and even political life, the immense flood of light it has diffused upon the great problems of life, death, immortality and the nature of the human spirit, rank it as one of the most revolutionary and powerful revelations that have been vouchsafed to man since the closing up of the Oriental and Mythological Dynasties.

It is as much by the positive, sensuous demonstrations afforded to us in this great modern Spiritual outpouring, as through a study of ancient or mediaeval records, that we are enabled to present the composite but absolute philosophy of Spiritism recited in this Section; but here let us premise, that we do not propose to pause in our definitions to say - this is Artephius, and that is Plato; thus argued the Fire Philosophers of the middle ages, and thus mused the Cabbalists of antiquity. Now as heretofore, our reference to authority must be sought for in the context of the work, rather than in the list of names cited.

Man is a Microcosm or Universe in little - as such, he is the conservator of all forces, the image of all objective forms, the embodiment of all subjective ideas, and the connecting link between all existences, higher and lower than himself.

In himself, taken to pieces by chemistry and analyzed by the display of his powers and relations to the invisible world, he is a trinity of elements, namely: Body, spirit and soul. His body is a conservator of all the powers and functions of matter; his spirit, the animating principle, is made up of all the forces we vaguely call life; his soul is the pure Deific, and immortal essence whose attribute is Will or Intelligence. It is the attempt to analyze these three elements, which has formed a groundwork of philosophy, and a theme of learned speculation, for thousands of years.

Judging from effects rather than assumed causes, may we not believe with the "Fire Philosophers" of the middle ages, that the soul is like its source - the Central Sun of being - in its nature and essence pure, unalloyed, Spiritual Light?

That it is the invisible and infinitely sublimated Spirit of Fire - not the gross visible element that can be seen, felt, and apprehended by the senses - but that wonderful innermost light, which, whilst it reveals and proves all things in its own manifestation, is itself invisible, unknown, and uncomprehended?

It is this essential, innermost and divine principle of soul which survives all change, which is neither subject to decay nor disintegration; which is the spark derived from Deity - the Alpha and Omega of being - and the link which unites the Creature to the Creator.

Encompassing this divine essence of soul, and clothing it as a spiritual body, is the subtle and refined element which, in its effects, is force; in its action, through organic bodies, is life; and in its all-pervading influence throughout the realms of space, is vaguely termed magnetism and electricity.

It is the second of that grand trinity of principles, whose union constitutes man a living being.

It is this element which we described in our first section, as recognized throughout the Universe, by the apparent duality of its modes, called attraction and repulsion, or centrifugal and centripetal force. As it is in the realm of this all-pervading life principle that we find our sole explanation of the various magical operations of a spirit power, we must dwell somewhat at length upon a description of its character and functions.

It has often been stated by Seers and illuminated "Sensitives," that there were many layers or strata of this spiritual body, of more of less attenuation, in proportion to their distance from the soul, or nearness to the physical body. These rings, or spheres, are called, collectively, the Astral Spirit, from the fact that the element itself is derived, like the pure essence of the soul, from the great Spiritual Sun of the Universe, from whom emanate, and to whom return all rays of light, heat, force, motion, power and being that fill the Universe of forms. This Astral Spirit is often mis-called in modern phraseology, the "magnetic body," the "nerve aura," "magnetism," "electricity," etc. Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, who writes equally in the spirit of ancient Cabbalism, and still later Gnosticism, terms this element in man, "The Spiritual body," a phase which corresponds well to the still more correct expression of "The Astral Spirit." In organic bodies we shall continue thus to term it; in the realms of space it is more proper to speak of it as the "Astral light." It is to the Universe of inorganic forms, what the Soul is to the body, its spirit - life or animating principle.

The Rosicrucians - a sect who obtained much notoriety about the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but of whose actual origin, tenets and very existence, no reliable information has ever been generally circulated - maintained that the last analysis of the Supreme Being would fail to discover any other existence than that of a Central Spiritual Sun - an Infinite, Eternal, uncreated and incomprehensible One alone, whose attributes were light and heat, whose manifestation was the Universe, revealed by light, energized into forms, suns, systems, worlds, men and things, by that spiritual heat whose last gross external exhibition is fire.

In this sense, the term repulsion, which has been treated as an attribute of matter, is accounted for by the energy with which heat burns, consumes, disintegrates, and drives off one particle from another; whilst attraction, also supposed to be an attribute of matter, is but the natural cohesion of particles, upon which the restless energy of heat either does not act, or becomes modified by the solidarity of the masses acted upon. Thus then, repulsion is the one universal law of motion, which itself is produced by heat; and attraction is only the absence of heat, not a true force.

Inertia is the only property of matter in this category - heat or repulsion its counteracting force attraction, the exhibition of the vis inertia of atoms.

We do not care to dismiss these propositions without a farther elaboration of their basic idea, and for this purpose we propose to offer a few excerpts from one of those writers who has assumed the office of describing the principles of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood. As far as the opinions of this remarkable association can be defined in language, the quotations selected will give a fair idea of their views on the subject under discussion:

"If the above abstractions are caught by the thinker, it will appear no wonder that the ancient people considered that they saw God, that is, with all their innermost possibility of thought - in Fire - which Fire is not our vulgar, gross Fire, neither is it even the purest material or electric fire, which has still something of the base, bright light of the world about it; but it is an occult, mysterious, supernatural Fire - not magnetic - and yet a real, sensible mind. It is the inner Light, the God, containing all things, the soul of all things, into whose inexpressibly intense, all-consuming, all-creating, divine, though fiery essence, and all the worlds in succession will fall back into whose arms of Immortal Light on the other side, as again receiving them, the worlds driven off into space and being heretofore, by the Divine energy will again rush back to him." ......

"The hollow world, in which that essence of things called Fire, plays, in its escape in violent agitation - to us combustion - is deep down within us, deep sunken inside of the time stages of which we are, in the flesh, rings of being, subsidence of spirit."

......"Narrowly considered, it will be found that all religions transcend up in to this spiritual Fire-floor, on which, so to speak, the phases of time were laid. Material Fire, which is brightness, as the matter upon which it preys is darkness - is the shadow of the true Spirit Light, which invests itself in fire as a mask, in which alone it can act possibly on matter. Thus material light being the opposite rather than the expression of God, the Egyptians - who were undoubtedly acquainted with the Fire revelation - could not represent God as light - material light. They therefore expressed their idea of Deity by darkness. Their adoration was paid to darkness, for in this they bodied forth the image of the Eternal." ......"Though fire is an element in which everything inheres, and of which it is the life, still it is itself an element existing in a second non-terrestrial, non-physical, ethereal fire, in which the first, or terrestrial coarse fire, flickers, waves, brandishes, consumes, destroys. The first is natural, material, gross; but this familiar element, seen and known in the natural world as fire, is contained in a celestial unparticled, infinitely extended medium - which celestial fire is its matrix, and of which, in this human body, we know nothing."

We here interrupt these excerpts - rendered chiefly as fragmentary representations of Rosicrucian ideas on the Deity - to interpret the obscure language of the writer, and state that the celestial fire referred to in the above passage, is the all-pervading element we have described, which, in its action through space, is termed the Astral Light, and in its investiture of the soul as a spiritual body, is termed the Astral Spirit. The innermost of the Rosicrucian Celestial Fire, like that of the human spirit, is the incomprehensible essence of light, not its substance, Soul. Robert Fludd, a Rosicrucian mystic of the middle ages, teaches that the Macrocosmos, or great Universe of intelligible and intelligent forms, is divided into three principal regions, which are denominated the Empyreum, the Aethereum, and the Elementary region. Each are filled with Celestial Fire, and traversed by innumerable oceans of Astral Light, but the quantity and quality of these divine elements diminishes as these subdivisions of space recede farther from the Central Source of all.

It is the union of the Celestial Fire and astral Light which constitutes the Soul of the Universe.

The Rosicrucian biographer proceeds to say:

"There are three ascending Hierarchies of beneficent Angels whose nature is of the purer portion of the Celestial Fire, and these are divided into nine orders. - These threefold Angelic Hierarchies are: The Teraphim, the Cherubim, and Seraphim; also, there is a correspondential realm of darkness, divided into nine spheres- the residuum of being, peopled with mighty but adverse Angels, who boast still, of the relics of their lost or eclipsed condition, once all light and heavenly glory." ......"The Elementary region includes the earth, man, and his belongings, also the lower creatures. This sphere is the flu, subsidence, ashes of the ethereal fire, and man himself is the microcosm or indescribably small copy of the macrocosm, or the great world. This earth having been produced by the contention of light and darkness, has denseness in its innumerable heavy concomitants, which contain less and less of the original divine light and heat, and thicken and solidify, until it is rent apart, torn, disintegrated and distributed into forms, by the still prevalent action of the Divine element of invisible fire.

"The inner jewel of light is never absent, even from the grossest atom, and though it may take ages to evolve, still will this divine light, ever tending to purify, refine, and elevate, alchemically convert base things into fine, gross matter into ethereal, and the earth itself into a radiant and gloriously spiritualized planet. Unseen and unsuspected, there is a divine ethereal spirit, an eager fire, confined as in prison, struggling through all solid objects, which are imbued with more or less of this sensitive life, as they are more or less refined, through the changing purgations of fire. Thus all minerals in this spark of light have the rudimentary possibility of plants, and growing organisms; plants have rudimentary sensibilities, which might in distant ages transmute them into locomotive creatures, and all vegetation might pass off, into new and independent highways of being, as their original spark of life-light, thrills, expands, and urges nature forward with more informed force, and directed by the unseen Angelic Ministers of the Great Original Architect."......"it is with terrestrial fire that the Alchemist breaks asunder the atomic thickness of visible nature, which, yielding up its secret destiny, of unlimited progress, sinks into the fiery furnace, in its basest proportions, to arise thrice purified, and forced upwards on the pathway of a higher round of the ladder.

"It is with the celestial fire that the Rosicrucian bursts asunder the bonds of error and darkness that hold the soul in a material prison-house. He becomes the Pontifex (bridge maker), which conducts the Soul across the dark waters of ignorance from the realms of the known to the unknown, from the gates of matter to the bright roads of Spirit; from earthly blackness to celestial light, from the visible fires of purgation to the invisible soul light of eternity."

Our readers may pardon us for interblending so many fragments of Rosicrucian musings with the practicalities which we profess to aim at, but to the genuine student of the occult sciences, it may not be uninteresting to learn something of the real opinions of a sect to whom so much that is false and mythical has been attributed. As God is the solvent for all the problems of pious ignorance, so electricity plays the same part in the realm of unexplained phenomena. The name of the Rosicrucians seems to have been borrowed in the same sense, and applied by superstitious and utterly misinformed babblers to cover up all the occult mysteries which science could not explain, and bigotry feared to tamper with.

It is something to know ourselves - not less to be truly known by others.

We do not press these fragments of Rosicrucianism on the reader's attention for the mere purpose of citing abstract opinions with which we have especial sympathy, but we feel that, to the interior sense of the profound thinker, they have a deeper significance than any other theories that have yet been advanced concerning the wonderful phenomena of Deity, life and being. Allowing for the varied modes of expression which prevail in different countries, and at various epochs of time, these opinions present a very fair, though necessarily condensed abstract, of the philosophies of the Cabbalists, Gnostics, Pythagoreans, Platonists, and many of the most enlightened of the Greeks, Romans and early Christians.

In giving a brief and practical summary of these theories, we find that, whilst the soul or innermost of the man is a Divine emanation from Deity, the body or outermost is an aggregation of material atoms, vitalized by the Astral Spirit, which serves as the life principle to the body, the ethereal body of the soul, and forms the connecting link between the soul and the body. This Astral Spirit accompanies the soul at Death, when the union of the two forms the spirit. The more sublimated portions of this Astral body adhere to the soul, and grosser and coarser layers form the outer covering or body of the spirit.

It is in this luminous Astral Spirit, this concentration of all force, life, heat, motion and imponderable essence, this invisible, "supernatural fire," as the ancient Theosophists termed it, that the power resides to make spirits visible to mortal eyes, to exhale force, so that they can lift bodies, make sounds, and produce all the manifestations by which spirits and mortals commune with each other. The heat generated in this Astral Spirit gives life and motion to the body; the light, which is its substance, colors the various tissues and fluids, and causes them to reflect the grosser rays of light in the atmosphere, so that they can become visible.

Once more we will suggest, that the Astral Spirit in the human structure is analogous, though differing in degrees of attenuation and force, to the Astral light in the realms of space. It is the spiritual principle of the earth, galvanism, magnetism, motion throughout its rocks, plants, minerals, waters, and gases.

It is the restless, ethereal fire that forces asunder the most mobile particles of fluid, and disperses them into gases; it separates the still finer particles of gases, and distributes matter into ether. it is not, as some have asserted, ether per se, but it is the principle of motion which rolls oceans of ether into undulatory waves, and causes it to become the carrier of light and heat. When its swift winged rays encounter opposite currents, when moving with inconceivable energy through one body it meets with its counterpart in opposing motion, the fierce concussion results in combustion; this mighty shock eliminates flame or lightning, and in the all-devouring action of the material fire, the surrounding particles are consumed. Destruction by fire, or what is called electricity then, is the material exhibition of two contending bodies, moving in opposite directions under the energetic action of the spiritual fire. In its primal condition, the Astral light of the Universe is like that of the Spiritual body in man, invisible, latent, inscrutable, unknown, except by its effects in life, warmth, and motion. In its external and last analysis, it is the consuming fire, and its action is to reduce all things back again into their own invisible essence; thus it is the Alpha and Omega of being, the first and the last; Deity.

The Astral Spirit in man is not a single original element, like the Soul, it is a combination of all the imponderables of the Universe. its first derivation or original essence is from the Sun and planetary system. Ether, air, atmosphere, earth, with all its freight of organic and inorganic life, combine to send off emanations which make up the sum of the wonderful structure called the Astral Spirit in man. It is a true cosmos of the Universe, and upon its exterior form is engraved all the sand grains of character, motives, powers, functions, vices, virtues, hopes, and memories, which the Soul has gathered up in its process of growth through the material body; hence it is as much a perfect microcosm of the individual's mind within, as of the visible and invisible Universe without. Not a deed, word, or thought which has helped to make up the sum of a human life, but what is photographed upon the spiritual body of the man, with as much fidelity as the mind of the Creator is written, in starry hieroglyphics upon the glittering skies. it keeps as faithful a record, as true a doomsday book, and pronounces as sure a judgment upon human life and conduct as ever the Egyptian Osiris could have done, in his sternest moods of God-like justice.

In many layers of graduated ethereal essence are felt by Sensitives as rings, or spheres. Those nearest the body are perceived as life spheres, and these change with the body's changes, and in its decay and death, recede, and become the outermost of the new born Soul's envelope. Those most interior to the body, and nearest the Soul, are the Sun spheres, and connect the Soul with the Solar and Astral influences, under which the individual was launched into being.

These interior spheres, too, change in response to Solar and planetary changes, and thence they affect the mind, influence the character, and constitute the links of connection by which the stars act upon the individual's destiny. As man's Astral Spirit is aggregated from so many forces in the Universe, so it is subject to the influence of changes occurring in every department of Nature.

The state of the earth, atmosphere, and aromal emanations given off in different seasons of the year - all these, with their changing influences, contribute to form the essence of the embryonic being ere it sees the light. The inherited tendencies of mind, body and spirit imposed by parental law, impart to the life germs their own peculiar idiosyncrasies. The physical sustenance, mental temperament, the very employments and thoughts of every mother, combine, also, to impress, with fateful images, their unborn offspring; but above all, the order of the planetary scheme, and the conjunction with every star sustains, first to the Sun, next to the earth, and finally to each other at the moment of mortal birth, must determine the nature of every spirit, and shape the springs upon which hinge the framework of human character.

Admitting then, the Soul's origin in Deity, and the Astral spirit's origin in the solar system, how vastly momentous upon the newly-born being's character and organization must be the solar and planetary influences which prevail in the hour of the germ's inception, through every stage of embryonic life, and at the very moment when, drawn by solar and planetary influence from the darkness of its embryonic prison, it is launched in space as a living creature!

Ages ago, the ancient astronomer discovered that all the vast crystal vault of the skies, the illimitable fields of space dotted over with millions of fiery blossoms, seemingly so fixed, so calm, so immobile in their solemn silence and mysterious beauty, were all moving! Moving on in constant but still ever-changing orbits. The certainty of these stupendous changes was absolutely determined by the discovery of that remarkable motion called "the precession of the equinoxes," a motion which, in a given period of time, varying between two and three thousand years, swept the blazing sun of the solar system, with all its planetary hosts, from one sign of the Zodiac to another. Later on - in fact, up to our own time - astronomical observations have determined that all the stars of the sidereal heavens, gorgeous field of space, filled with the march of suns and systems, speed on with a momentum so tremendous, that the mind of man shrinks back, awestruck, at the attempt to trace, those footprints of fire through spaces, wherein millions of miles are measured by hours and minutes. Whilst the external aspect of these spangled heavens changes but little to the eye of the observer during many centuries of time, the real permanence of the scheme is only apparent. "Only constant in eternal unrest," might be traced in every glittering point of the sideral heavens. Ever the same in the fixidity of matchless order, ever changing in the spiral circles of ascending progress. If this be so, as Science proves it is, how inevitably must the endless changes of the Macrocosm affect the nature of the Microcosm, and man, the world in little, partake of the infinite variousness which discourses so eloquently through the epic of the starry skies!

There cannot be two planetary conjunctions in the field of space which, in all respects, exactly duplicate each other; and this is the reason why those creatures, launched every second into human life, under the influence of ever-varying astral changes, must differ so widely from each other in all the essentials of physical, mental, intellectual and spiritual states. As the planets seem to return to stated points, and re-enact their mystic conjunctions in the shining pathway of the Zodiac, so there seem to be recurrences of certain types of character, and duplicates of certain facial lineaments.

Viewing the valley of the then from the mountain heights of the now, we are fain to give up this stereotyped opinion, and own that history only repeats itself in generalities, not in particulars, and that there is not a wave which beats on the shores of earth that ever returns with just the same force as those that have gone before - no never! And all this change in the planetary order is effected by the unceasing energy of the life that is throbbing, and burning, and blazing on in its mad career of eternal unrest, in the midst of every starry road, and thrilling down and pulsating through the very central heart of every starry world; and all this ceaseless movement, heard in the echoing feet of the tramping ages, is due to that same life spirit, burning up, shriveling into ashes, and scattering into dust the forms of the past, in order that their liberated spirits may become incarnate in all the fresher, fairer forms of the ages that are to be!

The consideration of these diffusive generalities are not irrelevant to our subject; on the contrary, they need to be thought out and appreciated ere the unaccustomed thinker can apprehend why the motions of a single point of fire, gleaming through the immensity of space, can affect the character and destiny of an individual removed from its orbit by incalculable sums of distance; why all nature, animate and inanimate, moves, acts and speaks with an universal chord of sympathy connecting the whole' why flights of birds, wheeling high in air, the motions of a dancing butterfly, a quivering sunbeam, a crawling worm, humming insect, or even the falling of a leaf, or the murmur of a wave, may discourse deep meanings in the ear of a true student of nature, and utter portents of immutable fate to illuminated scholars who have learned to interpret all the undertones of creations, and spell out its hieroglyphical inscriptions.

When we hear how Chaldean Soothsayers perceived the destines of nations, in the smoking ashes of the burnt offering; how Roman Augurs interpreted the issues of life and death from the flight of birds; how Persian Magi read the words of fate inscribed on the starry pages of the skies; or Hebrew priests discovered mystic meanings in the glittering luster of Urim and Thummim; we know that these men were simply natural philosophers, and had studied the occult side of nature with as much understanding, and perhaps more devotion, than the nineteenth century Scientists accord to the mastery of the known and the visible.

For thousands, perhaps for tens of thousands of years, it was the office of the best and wisest men of every succeeding generation, to devote a lifetime to the study of nature, and that in her profoundest depths, and through all the mazes and windings of her supernatural relations with the visible and invisible spheres of being around her. Ever let it be remembered, too, that the ancient philosopher brought to this sublime study a body as thoroughly prepared as a mind; a physique fitted by temperances, chastity and purity to allow full sway to the mind which inhabited it, and is so often cramped by inharmonious physical states.

When we come to lay down the conditions under which alone magical rites can become effective, and describe the life-long discipline which the powerful magian must pursue, in order to become one, we shall put to shame the self-indulgent, intemperate, and too often dissolute habits of the present age - habits which not even the sacred assumption of Priestly office seems always to impose restraint upon. And yet this same self-indulgent and luxuriant age, looks back with contempt on the asceticism of the ancient Priest, whilst those who profess to believe in all the miraculous records of Jewish history, treat those of every other nation of antiquity with scornful denial. As to Magic, why as something which can be taught, "it may be true," and perhaps even become a fashionable amusement, provided always that book-learning, and a superficial digest of the opinions of others, can point out the royal road to power, and convert tinsel drawing-rooms into the halls of Walhalla, wine and cigars into the Alembic of Alfarabi, gilded mirrors into the divining crystal of Dee, and extrait de bouquet into the elixir vitae of St. Germain. A few pages of Cornelius Agrippa, which no modern "Exquisite" would take the trouble to translate himself, ought, in modern estimation, to be quite sufficient to make a magician, and teach fine ladies to summon Slyphs and Undines for the amusement of an idle hour, just as a few pigments of Latin, an essay done into bad Greek, and worse Hebrew, by a professional college drudge, for the benefit of his rich paying patron, is sufficient passport to those holy orders of our modern priesthood in which God, Angels, Spirits, the immortal soul's origin, destiny, and powers, together with all the glories, marvels and mysteries of the boundless and eternal Universe, are the themes which demand interpretation.

The most supervidial retrospect of the lives, education and preparatory methods of discipline enforced upon the ancient priesthood, invest that body with the true dignity of men in "holy order;" but how do these compare with the careless, laxy system of mere book-learning, which in our own time is deemed all-sufficient to grind out a priest, the man who, of all others, should be bound by his sacred office to interpret the mysteries of being, nay, who should be deemed unworthy of that office, so long as mysteries remain unsolved.

Nature has not secrets from her true votaries. She sternly veils spiritual entities from the rude gaze of materialism, and refuses to render up any knowledge beyond the plane from which the inquiry originates. The Chemist, Geologist, Astronomer, and other disciples of the natural sciences, coldly set to work to examine Nature through her known formulae of physical laws; aught that transcends these they will none of, hence the occult side of Nature is an unexplored realm to them, and yet they are prompt enough to acknowledge that that occult side exists, through their sneer is loud and long against those who claim to have mastered its mysteries.

It is because the experience of past ages, conducted through thousands of years of study, by aid of carefully prepared conditions, has been devoted to the occult in Nature, that the ancients transcend the moderns in this respect, as much as modern science, in the direction of utilitarianism, transcends the colossal but cumbrous grandeur of antique civilization. There lives not now upon the face of the earth, one human being, save perchance, a solitary adept of the old order, or a very pure and highly endowed spirit medium, who, in respect to the understanding of true Theosophy, Theurgy, and every department of spiritual science, is fit to hold the office of Priest to the people, or instruct humanity in those grand truths which lie beyond the ken of physical science. It is to show the results of opinions which arise from countless ages of research into occult truths, that this section has been written. It is to present to the candid and bold thinker, the fruits of that knowledge which was gathered in through the discipline of asceticism, fasting, and prayer, and the study of the whole Universe, not less in the realm of soul and spirit, than in body and function, that we now write. Despite these treasures of mind, garnered up through thousands of years, if ye will, but it is thus alone that the Universe has ever yielded an answer to the soul's urgent questioning; thus alone can man ever solve the mystery of his being, and that of his planet.

To point the way, we have written; to show the kernel of the mighty fruit of the tree of occult knowledge, will these pages be devoted. But he who would eat of that fruit understandingly, must first plant the tree with his own hands, tend and culture it with a philosopher's patience, and then, and then alone, will it yield to his taste the true knowledge of good and evil, then only will he eat for himself, and not through the senses of another.

We shall conclude this section by another brief excerpt from the pages of the author whose definitions of Rosicrucianism we have given above:

"It is reasonable to conclude, at a period when knowledge was at the highest, and when human powers were, in comparison with ours at the present time, prodigious, that all these indomitable physical efforts - such gigantic achievements as those of the Egyptians, were devoted to a mistake? That the myriads of the Nile were fools, laboring in the dark, and that all the magic of their great men was forgery? or that we, in despising that which we call their superstitious and wasted power, are alone the wise? Not so. There is much more in these old religions than in the audacity of modern denial, in the confidence of these superficial science times and in the derision of these days without faith, we can in the least degree suppose.

"We do not understand; then why should we venture to deride these ancient times?"