My Library

in glory again. They were the men who first discovered the significance of Fire; and that there was something deeper than Life in man; profounder than Intellect in the universe. Whatever of transcendant light now illumes the world, comes from the torches which they lit at the Fountain whence all light streameth upon that mystic mountain which they alone had courage and endurance to climb, and climbed, too, over a ladder whose rungs were centuries apart. Hermes Trismegistus, Egypt’s mighty king, and that other Hermes (Asclepius IX.), was an adept, a brother, and a Priest—as was Malki Zadek before him—that famous Pre-Adamite monarch, that Melchisedek, who was reputed to have been born of a Thought, and to have lived for countless ages. And so with the Greek Mercurius. Theirs, too, was that wondrous learning wherein Moses was skilled; and at their fountain the Hebrew Joseph drank. Nothing original in Thaumaturgy, Theology, Philosophy, Psychology, Entology, and Ontology, but they gave it to the world; and when Philosophers thought they had gained new thoughts and truths, the records of the Order prove them to have been old ages before the Adamic era of Chronology, and to have been the common property of the adepts. I have been led into these remarks and explanations, first, for the purpose of finally and authoritatively settling the vexed question