country. But since then, despite many perilous attempts, of which the latest and best known was that of Sven Hedin, no explorer had succeeded in reaching the holy city. One may say, therefore, that of all the countries in the world Tibet was the most mysterious, the most illusive.

On the announcement of the sacrilegious expedition strange happenings were anticipated by the world of occultists. I remember the confidence, the serene certainty with which one of the sincerest and most learned of them told me, early in the year 1904: "They do not know what they are attacking. They are about to provoke, in this place of refuge, the most terrible powers. It is virtually certain that the last of the trans-Himalayan adepts possess the secret of the formidable etheric or sidereal force, the mash-maket of the Atlanteans, the irresistible vril of which BulwerLytton speaks: that vibratory force which, according to information contained in the 'AstraVidya,' can reduce a hundred thousand men and elephants to ashes as easily as it would reduce a dead rat to powder. Extraordinary things are about to happen. They will never reach. the inviolable Potala!"

And what happened? Nothing whatever; at least, nothing of what was anticipated. After long diplomatic negotiations, in which

the incapacity, unintelligence, senility, and bad faith of the Chinese, and the childish cunning of the college of lamas were revealed in a most disconcerting fashion, Colonel Younghusband's force, consisting chiefly of Sikhs and Gurkhas, proceeded to enter the country. In those rugged regions, the most inhospitable in the world, on the high frozen plateaus of the Himalayas, desolate and uninhabitable, they had to overcome unheard-of difficulties; and in passes which a handful of men, under good leadership, would have rendered unassailable, they were met more than once by the unskilful though courageous resistance of the dalailama's soldiery, filled with fanatical valor by the mantras and spells of their priests, but armed with match-locks and inferior native artillery. At length the British force drew near to Lhasa; and for five days the distracted abbots of the great monasteries solemnly cursed the invaders, set thousands of prayerwheels turning, and resorted to the supreme incantations: all to no avail. On August 9 Colonel Younghusband made his entry into the capital of Tibet, and occupied the holy of holies, the house of God, the Potala; an immense and fantastic structure which soars upwards from the hovels of the city, resembling, with its terraces, its flat roofs, and its buttresses, a fortress, a piled-up mass of Italian

villas, a barracks with innumerable windows, and certain American sky-scrapers. The dalailama, the thirteenth incarnation of divinity, the Buddhist pope, the spiritual father of six hundred millions of souls, had shamefully taken to flight and made good his escape. The con

vents and sanctuaries, swarming with monks -there were more than thirty thousand of them, indifferent and resigned-were explored; but nothing was found save the relics of the noblest religion ever known to mankind, finally rotting and dwindling into puerile superstitions, mechanical prayer-wheels, and the most deplorable witchcraft. And thus collapsed the final refuge of mystery; thus were surrendered to the profane the ultimate secrets of the earth.

CHAPTER VII

THE GNOSTICS AND THE NEOPLATONISTS

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I

EAVING aside Plato and his school,

whose theories are so well known that we need not recall them here, we shall now leave the comparatively limpid waters of the primitive religions to enter the troubled eddies which succeed them. As the simple and aweinspiring conceptions whose very altitude hid them from view were lost to sight, those which followed them, and were but their shattered or distorted reflections, became more turbid and increased in number. It will suffice to pass them rapidly in review; for to judge by what we know, or rather by what we know that we cannot know, they no longer have very much to teach us, and can but fruitlessly confuse and complicate the confession of the less knowable and the consequences which proceed therefrom.

Before the reading of the hieroglyphs, the discovery of the sacred books of India and Persia, and the labors of our own scientific metapsychologists, the only sources of occultism were the cabala and the writings of the Gnostics and Neoplatonists of Alexandria.

It is not very easy to locate the cabala chronologically. The "Sefer Yezireh," as we know it, which is as it were the entrance to the cabala, seems to have been written about 829 A. D., and the "Zohar," which is the temple, about the end of the thirteenth century. But many of the doctrines which it teaches go back very much further: namely, to the Babylonian captivity, and even to the bondage of the Israelites in Egypt. From this point of view, then, we must place it before the Gnostics and the Neoplatonists; but on the other hand it has borrowed so much from the latter and they have influenced it so greatly that it is almost impossible to speak of it until we have said something of those to which it owes the best and the worst of its theories.

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It is true that these Jewish traditions, for their part, mingled their abundant streams with those of the other Oriental religions which from the first century to the sixth invaded the Greek and Roman theosophy and philosophy, causing men to call in question and to examine more closely the beliefs and theories by which they had lived. There was in the intellectual world, and above all in Alexandria, whither flowed all races and all doctrines, a strange force of curiosity, restlessness,