viii INTRODUCTION
Religion is that made by Blavatzky. But though she had an immense genius for
acquiring facts, she had none whatever for sorting and selecting the essentials.
Grant Allen made a very slipshod experiment in this line; so have some of the
polemical rationalists; but the only man worthy of our notice is Frazer of the
Golden Bough. Here, again, there is no tabulation; for us it is left to sacrifice
literary charm, and even some accuracy, in order to bring out the one great point.
This: That when a Japanese thinks of Hachiman, and a Boer of the Lord of
Hosts, they are not two thoughts, but one.
The cause of human sectarianism is not lack of sympathy in thought, but in
speech ; and this it is our not unambitious design to remedy.
Every new sect aggravates the situation. Especially the Americans, grossly
and crapulously ignorant as they are of the rudiments of any human language,
seize like mongrel curs upon the putrid bones of their decaying monkey-jabber,
and gnaw and tear them with fierce growls and howls.
The mental prostitute, Mrs. Eddy (for example), having invented the idea
which ordinary people call “God,” christened it ‘“‘ Mind,” and then by affirming a
set of propositions about “ Mind,” which are only true of “ God,” set all hysterical,
dyspeptic, crazy Amurrka by the ears. Personally, I don’t object to people dis-
cussing the properties of four-sided triangles ; but I draw the line when they use a
well-known word, such as pig, or mental healer, or dung-heap, to denote the object
of their paranoiac fetishism. |
Even among serious philosophers the confusion is very great. Such terms as
God, the Absolute, Spirit, have dozens and dozens of connotations, according to
the time and place of the dispute and the beliefs of the disputants.
Time enough that these definitions and their inter-relation should be crystal-
lised, even at some expense of accepted philosophical accuracy.
2. The principal sources of our tables have been the philosophers and traditional
systems referred to above, as also, among many others, Pietro di Abano, Lilly,
Eliphaz Levi, Sir R. Burton, Swami Vivekananda, the Hindu, Buddhist, and
Chinese Classics, the Quran and its commentators, the Book of the Dead, and,
in particular, original research. The Chinese, Hindu, Buddhist, Moslem, and
Egyptian systems have never before been brought into line with the Qabalah;
the Tarot has never been made public. -
Eliphaz Levi knew the true attributions, but was forbidden to use them.!
All this secrecy is very silly. An indicible Arcanum is an arcanum that cannot
be revealed. It is simply bad faith to swear a man to the most horrible penalties
if he betray ..., &c., and then take him mysteriously apart and confide the
Hebrew Alphabet to his safe keeping. This is perhaps only ridiculous ; but it isa
wicked imposture to pretend to have received from the Rosicrucians manuscripts
which are to be found in the British Museum. To obtain money on these grounds,
as has been done by certain moderns, is clear (and I trust, indictable) fraud ; and
ever to have countenanced those frauds, of which he must surely have been aware,
seems hardly creditable to so earnest and venerable a student of the mysteries as
Dr. Wynn Westcott.? It is presumable, however, that he was the dupe of his fear
of, if not of his trust in, the Machiavellian Mystic of the Rue Mozart.
The secrets of Adepts are not to be revealed to men. We only wish they were.
1 This is probably true, though in agreement with the statement of the traducer of Levi's
doctrine and the vilifier of his noble personality.
® My correspondence with this gentleman has not tended to raise my opinion of his conduct.
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