source, to ascend the course and unravel the underground network of that great mysterious river which since the beginning of history has been flowing beneath all the religions, all the faiths, and all the philosophies: in a word, beneath all the visible and every-day manifestations of human thought. It is now hardly to be contested that this source is to be found in ancient India. Thence in all probability the sacred teaching spread into Egypt, found its way to ancient Persia and Chaldea, permeated the Hebrew race, and crept into Greece and the north of Europe, finally reaching China and even America, where the Aztec civilization was merely a more or less distorted reproduction of the Egyptian civilization.

There are thus three great derivatives of primitive occultism, Arya-Hindu or AtlantoHindu: (1) the occultism of antiquity-that is, the Egyptian, Persian, Chaldean, and Hebrew occultism and that of the Greek mysteries; (2) the Hebrew-Christian esoterism of the Essenes, the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists of Alexandria, and the cabalists of the middle ages; and (3) the modern occultism, which is more or less permeated by the foregoing, but which, under the somewhat inaccurate label of occultism, denotes more especially, in the language of the theosophists, the spiritualism and metapsychism of to-day.

3

As for the sources of the primary source, it is almost impossible to rediscover them. Here we have only the assertions of the occultist tradition, which seem, here and there, to be confirmed by historical discoveries. This tradition attributes the vast reservoir of wisdom that somewhere took shape simultaneously with the origin of man, or even if we are to credit it, before his advent upon this earth, to more spiritual entities, to beings less entangled in matter, to psychic organisms, of whom the lastcomers, the Atlantides, could have been but the degenerate representatives.

From the historical point of view we have absolutely no documents whatever if we go back a greater distance than five, or six, or perhaps seven thousand years. We cannot tell how the religion of the Hindus and Egyptians came into being. When we become aware of it we find it already complete in its broad outlines, its main principles. Not only is it complete, but the farther back we go the more perfect it is, the more unadulterated, the more closely related to the loftiest speculations of our modern agnosticism. It presupposes a previous civilization, whose duration, in view of the slowness of all human evolution, it is quite impossible to estimate. The length of this

period might in all probability be numbered by millions of years. It is here that the occultist tradition comes to our aid. Why should this tradition, a priori, be despised and rejected, when almost all that we know of these primitive religions is likewise founded on oral tradition-for the written texts are of much later date, and when, moreover, all that this tradition teaches us displays a singular agreement with what we have learned elsewhere?

4

At all events, even if we have need of occult tradition to explain the origin of this wisdom, which to us, with good reason, has a savor of the superhuman, we can very well dispense with it in all that concerns the essential nature of this same wisdom. It is contained, in all its integrity, in authentic texts, to which we can assign a place in history; and in this connection the modern theosophists, who profess to have had at their disposal certain secret documents, and to have profited by the extraordinary revelations with which the adepts or Mahatmas, members of a mysterious brotherhood, are supposed to have favored them, have taught us nothing that may not be read in the writings accessible to any Orientalist. The factors which distinguish the occultists-for example, the theosophists of Blavatski's school, which

dominates all the rest-from the scientific Indianists and Egyptologists are in nowise connected with the origin, the plan, and the purpose of the universe, the destiny of the earth and of man, the nature of divinity, and the great problems of ethics; they are, almost exclusively, problems touching the prehistoric ages, the nomenclature of the emanations of the unknowable, and the methods of subduing and utilizing the unknown energies of na

ture.

Let us first of all consider the points upon which they are agreed; which are, for that matter, the most interesting, for all that deals with the prehistoric era is of necessity hypothetical and the names and functions of the intermediary gods possess only a secondary interest; while as for the utilization of unknown forces, this is rather the concern of the metapsychical sciences to which we shall refer in a later chapter.

5

"What we read in the 'Vedas,'" says Rudolph Steiner, one of the most scholarly and, at the same time, one of the most baffling of contemporary occultists; "What we read in the 'Vedas,' those archives of Hindu wisdom, gives us only a faint idea of the sublime doctrines of the ancient teachers, and even so these are

not in their original form. Only the gaze of the clairvoyant, directed upon the mysteries of the past, may reveal the unuttered wisdom which lies hidden behind these writings."

Historically it is highly probable that Steiner is right. As a matter of fact, as I have already stated, the more ancient the texts, the purer, the more awe-inspiring are the doctrines which they reveal; and it is possible that they themselves are, in Steiner's words, merely an enfeebled echo of sublimer doctrines. But if we are not gifted with the vision of a seer we must be content with what we have before our eyes.

The texts which we possess are the sacred books of India, which corroborate those of Egypt and of Persia. The influence which they have exerted upon human thought, if not in their present form, at least by means of the oral tradition which they have merely placed on record, goes back to the beginnings of history, has extended itself in all directions, and has never ceased to make itself felt, but as regards the Western world their discovery and methodical study are comparatively recent. "Fifty years ago," wrote Max Müller in 1875, "there was not a scholar in existence who could translate a line of the 'Veda,' the 'ZendAvesta,' or the Buddhist 'Tripitaka,' to say nothing of other dialects or languages."