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INTRODUCTION ix When a man comes to me and asks for the Truth, I go away and practise teaching the Differential Calculus toa Bushman ; and I answer the former only when I have succeeded with the latter. But to withhold the Alphabet of Mysticism from the learner is the device of a selfish charlatan. That which can be taught shall be taught, that that which cannot be taught may at last be learnt. ° 3. As a weary but victorious warrior delights to recall his battles—Forsitan haec olim meminisse juvabit—we would linger for a moment upon the difficulties of our task. The question of sacred alphabets has been abandoned as hopeless. As one who should probe the nature of woman, the deeper he goes the rottener it gets; so that at last it is seen that there is no sound bottom. All is arbitrary ;! with- drawing our caustics and adopting a protective treatment, we point to the beautiful clean bandages and ask the clinic to admire! To take one concrete example: the English T is clearly equivalent in sound to the Hebrew n, the Greek 71, the Arabic ~, and the Coptic "J, but the numeration is not the same. Again, we have a clear analogy in shape (perhaps a whole series of analogies), which, on comparing the modern alphabets with primeval examples, breaks up and is indecipherable. The same difficulty in another form permeates the question of gods. Priests, to propitiate their local fetish, would flatter him with the title of creator ; philosophers, with a wider outlook, would draw identities between many gods in order to obtain a unity. Time and the gregarious nature of man have raised gods as ideas grew more universal; sectarianism has drawn false distinctions between identical gods for polemical purposes. Thus, where shall we put Isis, favouring nymph of corn as she was? As the type of motherhood? Asthe moon? As the great goddess Earth? As Nature? As the Cosmic Egg from which all Nature sprang? For as time and place have changed, so she 1s all of these ! What of Jehovah, that testy senior of early Genesis, that lawgiver of Leviticus, that war-god of Joshua, that Phallus of the depopulated slaves of the Egyptians, that jealous King-God of the times of the Kings, that more spiritual conception of the Captivity, only invented when all temporal hope was lost, that medizval battle- ground of cross-chopped logic, that Being stripped of all his attributes and assimi- lated to Parabrahma and the Absolute of the Philosopher? | Satan, again, who in Job is merely Attorney-General and prosecutes for the Crown, acquires in time all the obloquy attaching to that functionary in the eyes of the criminal classes, and becomes a slanderer. Does any one really think that any angel is such a fool as to try to gull the Omniscient God into injustice to his saints Then, on the other hand, what of Moloch, that form of Jehovah denounced by those who did not draw huge profits from his rites? What of the savage and morose Jesus of the Evangelicals, cut by their petty malice from the gentle Jesus of the Italian children? How shall we identify the thaumaturgic Chauvinist of Matthew with the metaphysical Logos of John? In short, while the human mind is mobile, so long will the definitions of all our terms vary. 1 All symbolism is perhaps ultimately so; there is no necessary relation in thought between the idea of a mother, the sound of the child's cry ‘‘ Ma,” and the combination of lines ma. This, too, is the extreme case, since ‘‘ma”’ is the sound naturally just produced by opening the lips and breathing. Hindus would make a great fuss over this true connection; but it is very nearly the only one. All these beautiful schemes break down sooner or later, mostly sooner.