"Zohar," asked him: "Would it not have been better if man had never been born, rather than that he should be born with the faculty of sinning and angering God?" And the master replied: "By no means, for the universe in its actual form is the best thing in existence. Now, the law is indispensable to the maintenance of this universe, otherwise the universe would be a desert; and man in his turn is indispensable to the law." The disciples understood and said: "Assuredly God did not create the world without cause; the law is indeed the raiment of God; it is that by which He is accessible. Without human virtue, God would be but miserably arrayed. He who does evil soils in his soul the raiment of God, and he who does good puts on the divine splendor." 1 We should indeed be gracious were we more exacting than these obliging and respectful disciples.

Another question of the utmost importance, that of eternal punishment, is likewise evaded. Logically, a pantheistic religion cannot admit that God could chastise and eternally torture a portion of Himself. The "Zohar" certainly says somewhere: "How many souls and spirits. are there eternally wandering, who never again behold the courts of heaven?"

But in another section it expressly teaches 1 "Zohar"; I, 23-a-b.

the doctrine of transmigration; that is, the gradual purification of the soul by means of successive existences; and it bases this doctrine, obviously borrowed from the great religions of an earlier period, on certain passages of the Bible; among others, on Ecclesiastes, Chap. IV, v. 2, in which we read: "Wherefore I praised the dead which are already dead more than the living which are yet alive." "What is meant," asks the "Zohar," "by the dead which are already dead?" They are those who have already died once before this; that is, they were no longer bound on their first pilgrimage through life. Now, it is obvious that the doctrine of a purifying transmigration must necessarily exclude eternal punishment.

5

The "Zohar," then, as I have already stated, is a vast anonymous compilation which, under the pretext of revealing to the initiate the secret meaning of the Bible, and especially of the Pentateuch, decks out in Jewish clothing the confessions of ignorance of the great religions of an earlier period, loading these garments with all the new and complicated adornments provided by the Essenes, the Neoplatonists, the Gnostics, and even the first few centuries of Christianity. Whether it admits the fact or not, it is, in respect of the most im

portant points, plainly agnostic, as is Brahmanism. Like Brahmanism, it is also pantheistic. For the "Zohar" likewise the creation is rather an emanation; evil is matter, division or multiplicity, and good is the return to the spirit and to unity. Lastly, it admits the transmigration of souls and their purification, and therefore Karma, as well as the final absorption into the divine; that is, Nirvana.

It is interesting to note that we have here for the first time-for other statements have not come down to us-an esoteric doctrine proclaiming itself as such; and this doctrine has nothing more to teach us than that which we were taught, without reticence and without mystery at all events, at the outset,—by the primitive religions. Like the latter, with its wholesale admissions and its expedients, different in form but identical at heart, for passing from non-existence to existence, from the infinite to the finite, from the unknowable to the known, it follows the same rationalistic tradition that strives to explain the inexplicable by plausible hypotheses and inductions, to which we might give another shape and other names, but which, taking them on the whole, we could not, even to-day, perceptibly improve. At most we might be tempted to renounce all explanation whatsoever and extend our confession of ignorance to include the sum total of

the origins, the manifestations, and the purposes of life. Perhaps this would be the wisest

course.

It shows us that it is highly probable that no secret doctrine ever was or ever could be other than secret; and that the loftiest revelations which we have ever been vouchsafed were always elicited from man by man himself.

The importance assumed by this secret doctrine during the middle ages may readily be imagined. Known only to a few initiates, wrapped up in incomprehensible formulæ and images, whispered "from mouth to ear" in the midst of terrible dangers, it had a subterranean radiance, a sort of gloomy and irresistible fascination. It surveyed the world from a far loftier point of view than that of the Bible, which it regarded as a tissue of allegories behind which was hidden a truth known to it alone; it yielded to mankind, through the thickets of its fantastic and parasitical vegetation, the last echoes of the noble precepts, of human reason at its dawn.

A

CHAPTER IX

THE ALCHEMISTS

I

LL the occultism, alchemy, or hermetism of the middle ages proceeds from the cabala and the Alexandrian version of the Bible, with the addition, perhaps, of certain traditions of magical practice which were very widespread in ancient Egypt and Chaldea.

From the theosophical and philosophical portion of this occultism we have nothing to learn. It is merely a distorted reflection, an extremely corrupt and often unrecognizable repetition of what we have already seen and heard. The mysterious paraphernalia with which it surrounds itself, which fascinates and deludes the beholder at the very outset, is merely an indispensable precaution to conceal from the eyes of the church the forbidden statements, perilous and heretical, of which it is full. The occult iconography, the signs, stars, triangles, pentagrams, and pentacles, were at bottom mnemonics, passwords, puns, or conundrums, which allowed confederates to