My Library

life itself! Was it not very singular? I have wondered, time and again, how such things could be, and intensely so when he has been revealing to me some of the loftier mysteries of the Order; when talking of Apollonius of Tyanæ, the Platonists, the elder Pythagoreans; of the Sylphs, Salamanders and Glendoveers; of Cardan, and Yung-tse-Soh, and the Cabalistic Light; of Hermes Trismegistus, and the Smaragdine Tables; of sorcery and magic, white and black; of the Labyrinth, and Divine policy; of the God, and the republic of gods; of the truths and absurdities of the gold-seeking Hermetists and pseudo-Rosicrucians; of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and the Alexandrine Clement; of Origen and Macrobius, Josephus and Philo; of Enoch and the preAdamite races; of Dambuk and Cekus, Psellus, Jamblichus, Plotinus and Porphyrius, Paracelsus, and over seven hundred other mystical authors. Said he to me one day, “Do you remember laughing at me when I first began to talk about the Rosicrucians? and you asserted that, if such a fraternity existed, it must be composed either of knaves or fools, laughing heartily when informed that the order ramified extensively on both sides of the grave, and, on the other shore of time, was known in its lower degrees as the Royal Order of the Foli, and, towering infinitely beyond and above that, was the great Order of