Part 2 — CHAPTER I. (continued 2)

“Finally, we learn, by the last three Sephiroth, that the Universal Providence, that the Supreme artist is also absolute Force, the all-powerful cause, and that, at the same time, this cause is the generative element of all that is. It is these last Sephiroth that constitute the natural world, or nature in its essence and in its active principle, Natura naturans.”[56]

This kabalistic conception is thus proved identical with that of the Hindu philosophy. Whoever reads Plato and his Dialogue Timæus, will find these ideas as faithfully re-echoed by the Greek philosopher. Moreover, the injunction of secrecy was as strict with the kabalists, as with the initiates of the Adyta and the Hindu Yogis.

“Close thy mouth, lest thou shouldst speak of this (the mystery), and thy heart, lest thou shouldst think aloud; and if thy heart has escaped thee, bring it back to its place, for such is the object of our alliance” (Sepher Jezireh, Book of Creation).

“This is a secret which gives death: close thy mouth lest thou shouldst reveal to the vulgar; compress thy brain lest something should escape from it and fall outside” (Agrouchada-Parikshai).

Truly the fate of many a future generation hung on a gossamer thread, in the days of the third and fourth centuries. Had not the Emperor sent in 389 to Alexandria a rescript—which was forced from him by the Christians—for the destruction of every idol, our own century would never have had a Christian mythological Pantheon of its own. Never did the Neo-platonic school reach such a height of philosophy as when nearest its end. Uniting the mystic theosophy of old Egypt with the refined philosophy of the Greeks; nearer to the ancient Mysteries of Thebes and Memphis than they had been for centuries; versed in the science of soothsaying and divination, as in the art of the Therapeutists; friendly with the acutest men of the Jewish nation, who were deeply imbued with the Zoroastrian ideas, the Neo-platonists tended to amalgamate the old wisdom of the Oriental Kabala with the more refined conceptions of the Occidental Theosophists. Notwithstanding the treason of the Christians, who saw fit, for political reasons, after the days of Constantine, to repudiate their tutors, the influence of the new Platonic philosophy is conspicuous in the subsequent adoption of dogmas, the origin of which can be traced but too easily to that remarkable school. Though mutilated and disfigured, they still preserve a strong family likeness, which nothing can obliterate.

But, if the knowledge of the occult powers of nature opens the spiritual sight of man, enlarges his intellectual faculties, and leads him unerringly to a profounder veneration for the Creator, on the other hand ignorance, dogmatic narrow-mindedness, and a childish fear of looking to the bottom of things, invariably leads to fetish-worship and superstition.

When Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, had openly embraced the cause of Isis, the Egyptian goddess, and had anthropomorphized her into Mary, the mother of God; and the trinitarian controversy had taken place; from that moment the Egyptian doctrine of the emanation of the creative God out of Emepht began to be tortured in a thousand ways, until the Councils had agreed upon the adoption of it as it now stands—the disfigured Ternary of the kabalistic Solomon and Philo! But as its origin was yet too evident, the Word was no longer called the “Heavenly man,” the primal Adam Kadmon, but became the Logos—Christ, and was made as old as the “Ancient of the Ancient,” his father. The concealed WISDOM became identical with its emanation, the Divine Thought, and made to be regarded coëqual and coëternal with its first manifestation.

If we now stop to consider another of the fundamental dogmas of Christianity, the doctrine of atonement, we may trace it as easily back to heathendom. This corner-stone of a Church which had believed herself built on a firm rock for long centuries, is now excavated by science and proved to come from the Gnostics. Professor Draper shows it as hardly known in the days of Tertullian, and as having “originated among the Gnostic heretics.”[57] We will not permit ourselves to contradict such a learned authority, farther than to state that it originated among them no more than their “anointed” Christos and Sophia. The former they modelled on the original of the “King Messiah,” the male principle of wisdom, and the latter on the third Sephiroth, from the Chaldean Kabala,[58] and even from the Hindu Brahma and Sara-âsvati,[59] and the Pagan Dionysus and Demeter. And here we are on firm ground, if it were only because it is now proved that the New Testament never appeared in its complete form, such as we find it now, till 300 years after the period of apostles,[60] and the Sohar and other kabalistic books are found to belong to the first century before our era, if not to be far older still.

The Gnostics entertained many of the Essenean ideas; and the Essenes had their “greater” and “minor” Mysteries at least two centuries before our era. They were the Isarim or Initiates, the descendants of the Egyptian hierophants, in whose country they had been settled for several centuries before they were converted to Buddhistic monasticism by the missionaries of King Asoka, and amalgamated later with the earliest Christians; and they existed, probably, before the old Egyptian temples were desecrated and ruined in the incessant invasions of Persians, Greeks, and other conquering hordes. The hierophants had their atonement enacted in the Mystery of Initiation ages before the Gnostics, or even the Essenes, had appeared. It was known among hierophants as the Baptism of Blood, and was considered not as an atonement for the “fall of man” in Eden, but simply as an expiation for the past, present, and future sins of ignorant but nevertheless polluted mankind. The hierophant had the option of either offering his pure and sinless life as a sacrifice for his race to the gods whom he hoped to rejoin, or an animal victim. The former depended entirely on their own will. At the last moment of the solemn “new birth,” the initiator passed “the word” to the initiated, and immediately after that the latter had a weapon placed in his right hand, and was ordered to strike.[61] This is the true origin of the Christian dogma of atonement.

Verily the “Christs” of the pre-Christian ages were many. But they died unknown to the world, and disappeared as silently and as mysteriously from the sight of man as Moses from the top of Pisgah, the mountain of Nebo (oracular wisdom), after he had laid his hands upon Joshua, who thus became “full of the spirit of wisdom” (i.e., initiated).

Nor does the Mystery of the Eucharist pertain to Christians alone. Godfrey Higgins proves that it was instituted many hundreds of years before the “Paschal Supper,” and says that “the sacrifice of bread and wine was common to many ancient nations.”[62] Cicero mentions it in his works, and wonders at the strangeness of the rite. There had been an esoteric meaning attached to it from the first establishment of the Mysteries, and the Eucharistia is one of the oldest rites of antiquity. With the hierophants it had nearly the same significance as with the Christians. Ceres was bread, and Bacchus was wine; the former meaning regeneration of life from the seed, and the latter—the grape—the emblem of wisdom and knowledge; the accumulation of the spirit of things, and the fermentation and subsequent strength of that esoteric knowledge being justly symbolized by wine. The mystery related to the drama of Eden; it is said to have been first taught by Janus, who was also the first to introduce in the temples the sacrifices of “bread” and “wine” in commemoration of the “fall into generation” as the symbol of the “seed.” “I am the vine, and my Father is the husbandman,” says Jesus, alluding to the secret knowledge that could be imparted by him. “I will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until that day that I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”

The festival of the Eleusinian Mysteries began in the month of Boëdromion, which corresponds with the month of September, the time of grape-gathering, and lasted from the 15th to the 22d of the month, seven days.[63] The Hebrew festival of the Feast of Tabernacles began on the 15th and ended on the 22d of the month of Ethanim, which Dunlap shows as derived from Adonim, Adonia, Attenim, Ethanim;[64] and this feast is named in Exodus (xxiii. 16) the feast of ingatherings. “All the men of Israel assembled unto King Solomon at the feast in the month Ethanim, which is the seventh.”[65]

Plutarch thinks the feast of the booths to be the Bacchic rites, not the Eleusinian. Thus “Bacchus was directly called upon,” he says. The Sabazian worship was Sabbatic; the names Evius, or Hevius, and Luaios are identical with Hivite and Levite. The French name Louis is the Hebrew Levi; Iacchus again is Iao or Jehovah; and Baal or Adon, like Bacchus, was a phallic god. “Who shall ascend into the hill (the high place) of the Lord?” asks the holy king David, “who shall stand in the place of his Kadushu קדשו”? (Psalms xxiv. 3). Kadesh may mean in one sense to devote, hallow, sanctify, and even to initiate or to set apart; but it also means the ministers of lascivious rites (the Venus-worship) and the true interpretation of the word Kadesh is bluntly rendered in Deuteronomy xxiii. 17; Hosea iv. 14; and Genesis xxxviii., from verses 15 to 22. The “holy” Kadeshuth of the Bible were identical as to the duties of their office with the Nautch-girls of the later Hindu pagodas. The Hebrew Kadeshim or galli lived “by the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings for the grove,” or bust of Venus-Astartè, says verse the seventh in the twenty-third chapter of 2 Kings.

The dance performed by David round the ark was the “circle-dance” said to have been prescribed by the Amazons for the Mysteries. Such was the dance of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges xxi. 21, 23 et passim), and the leaping of the prophets of Baal (1 Kings xviii. 26). It was simply a characteristic of the Sabean worship, for it denoted the motion of the planets round the sun. That the dance was a Bacchic frenzy is apparent. Sistra were used on the occasion, and the taunt of Michael and the king’s reply are very expressive. “The king of Israel uncovered himself before his maid-servants as one of the vain (or debauched) fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself.” And he retorts: “I will play (act wantonly) before יהוה, and I will be yet more vile than this, and I will be base in my own sight.” When we remember that David had sojourned among the Tyrians and Philistines, where their rites were common; and that indeed he had conquered that land away from the house of Saul, by the aid of mercenaries from their country, the countenancing and even, perhaps, the introduction of such a Pagan-like worship by the weak “psalmist” seems very natural. David knew nothing of Moses, it seems, and if he introduced the Jehovah-worship it was not in its monotheistic character, but simply as that of one of the many gods of the neighboring nations—a tutelary deity to whom he had given the preference, and chosen among “all other gods.”

Following the Christian dogmas seriatim, if we concentrate our attention upon one which provoked the fiercest battles until its recognition, that of the Trinity, what do we find? We meet it, as we have shown, northeast of the Indus; and tracing it to Asia Minor and Europe, recognize it among every people who had anything like an established religion. It was taught in the oldest Chaldean, Egyptian, and Mithraïtic schools. The Chaldean Sun-god, Mithra, was called “Triple,” and the trinitarian idea of the Chaldeans was a doctrine of the Akkadians, who, themselves, belonged to a race which was the first to conceive a metaphysical trinity. The Chaldeans are a tribe of the Akkadians, according to Rawlinson, who lived in Babylonia from the earliest times. They were Turanians, according to others, and instructed the Babylonians into the first notions of religion. But these same Akkadians, who were they? Those scientists who would ascribe to them a Turanian origin, make of them the inventors of the cuneiform characters; others call them Sumerians; others again, respectively, make their language, of which (for very good reasons) no traces whatever remain—Kasdean, Chaldaic, Proto-Chaldean, Kasdo-Scythic, and so on. The only tradition worthy of credence is that these Akkadians instructed the Babylonians in the Mysteries, and taught them the sacerdotal or Mystery-language. These Akkadians were then simply a tribe of the Hindu-Brahmans, now called Aryans—their vernacular language, the Sanscrit[66] of the Vedas; and the sacred or Mystery-language, that which, even in our own age, is used by the Hindu fakirs and initiated Brahmans in their magical evocations.[67] It has been, from time immemorial, and still is employed by the initiates of all countries, and the Thibetan lamas claim that it is in this tongue that appear the mysterious characters on the leaves and bark of the sacred Koumboum.

Jacolliot, who took such pains to penetrate the mysteries of the Brahmanical initiation in translating and commenting upon the Agrouchada-Parikshai, confesses the following:

“It is pretended also, without our being able to verify the assertion, that the magical evocations were pronounced in a particular language, and that it was forbidden, under pain of death, to translate them into vulgar dialects. The rare expressions that we have been able to catch like—L’rhom, h’hom, sh’hrum, sho’rhim, are in fact most curious, and do not seem to belong to any known idiom.”[68]

Those who have seen a fakir or a lama reciting his mantras and conjurations, know that he never pronounces the words audibly when preparing for a phenomenon. His lips move, and none will ever hear the terrible formula pronounced, except in the interior of the temples, and then in a cautious whisper. This, then, was the language now respectively baptized by every scientist, and, according to his imaginative and philological propensities, Kasdeo-Semitic, Scythic, Proto-Chaldean, and the like.

Scarcely two of even the most learned Sanscrit philologists are agreed as to the true interpretation of Vedic words. Let one put forth an essay, a lecture, a treatise, a translation, a dictionary, and straightway all the others fall to quarrelling with each other and with him as to his sins of omission and commission. Professor Whitney, greatest of American Orientalists, says that Professor Müller’s notes on the Rig Veda Sânhita “are far from showing that sound and thoughtful judgment, that moderation and economy which are among the most precious qualities of an exegete.” Professor Müller angrily retorts upon his critics that “not only is the joy embittered which is the inherent reward of all bona fide work, but selfishness, malignity, aye, even untruthfulness, gain the upper hand, and the healthy growth of science is stunted.” He differs “in many cases from the explanations of Vedic words given by Professor Roth” in his Sanscrit Dictionary, and Professor Whitney shampooes both their heads by saying that there are, unquestionably, words and phrases “as to which both alike will hereafter be set right.”

In volume i. of his Chips, Professor Müller stigmatizes all the Vedas except the Rik, the Atharva-Veda included, as “theological twaddle,” while Professor Whitney regards the latter as “the most comprehensive and valuable of the four collections, next after the Rik.” To return to the case of Jacolliot. Professor Whitney brands him as a “bungler and a humbug,” and, as we remarked above, this is the very general verdict. But when the Bible dans l’Inde appeared, the Société Académique de Saint Quentin requested M. Textor de Ravisi, a learned Indianist, ten years Governor of Karikal, India, to report upon its merits. He was an ardent Catholic, and bitterly opposed Jacolliot’s conclusions where they discredited the Mosaic and Catholic revelations; but he was forced to say: “Written with good faith, in an easy, vigorous, and passionate style, of an easy and varied argumentation, the work of M. Jacolliot is of absorbing interest ... a learned work on known facts and with familiar arguments.”

Enough. Let Jacolliot have the benefit of the doubt when such very imposing authorities are doing their best to show up each other as incompetents and literary journeymen. We quite agree with Professor Whitney that “the truism, that [for European critics?] it is far easier to pull to pieces than to build up, is nowhere truer than in matters affecting the archæology and history of India.”[69]

Babylonia happened to be situated on the way of the great stream of the earliest Hindu emigration, and the Babylonians were one of the first peoples benefited thereby.[70] These Khaldi were the worshippers of the Moon-god, Deus Lunus, from which fact we may infer that the Akkadians—if such must be their name—belonged to the race of the Kings of the Moon, whom tradition shows as having reigned in Pruyay—now Allahabad. With them the trinity of Deus Lunus was manifested in the three lunar phases, completing the quaternary with the fourth, and typifying the death of the Moon-god in its gradual waning and final disappearance. This death was allegorized by them, and attributed to the triumph of the genius of evil over the light-giving deity; as the later nations allegorized the death of their Sun-gods, Osiris and Apollo, at the hands of Typhon and the great Dragon Python, when the sun entered the winter solstice. Babel, Arach, and Akkad are names of the sun. The Zoroastrian Oracles are full and explicit upon the subject of the Divine Triad. “A triad of Deity shines forth throughout the whole world, of which a Monad is the head,” admits the Reverend Dr. Maurice.

“For from this Triad, in the bosoms, are all things governed,” says a Chaldean oracle. The Phos, Pur, and Phlox, of Sanchoniathon,[71] are Light, Fire, and Flame, three manifestations of the Sun who is one. Bel-Saturn, Jupiter-Bel, and Bel or Baal-Chom are the Chaldean trinity;[72] The Babylonian Bel was regarded in the Triune aspect of Belitan, Zeus-Belus (the mediator) and Baal-Chom who is Apollo Chomæus. This was the Triune aspect of the ‘Highest God,’ who is, according to Berosus, either El (the Hebrew), Bel, Belitan, Mithra, or Zervana, and has the name πατηρ, “the Father.”[73] The Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva,[74] corresponding to Power, Wisdom, and Justice, which answer in their turn to Spirit, Matter, Time, and the Past, Present, and Future, can be found in the temple of Gharipuri; thousands of dogmatic Brahmans worship these attributes of the Vedic Deity, while the severe monks and nuns of Buddhistic Thibet recognize but the sacred trinity of the three cardinal virtues: Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, professed by the Christians, practiced by the Buddhists and some Hindus alone.

The Persian triplicate Deity also consists of three persons, Ormazd, Mithra, and Ahriman. “That is that principle,” says Porphyry,[75] “which the author of the Chaldaic Summary saith, ‘They conceive there is one principle of all things, and declare that is one and good.’” The Chinese idol Sanpao, consists of three equal in all respects;[76] and the Peruvians “supposed their Tanga-tanga to be one in three, and three in one,” says Faber.[77] The Egyptians have their Emepht, Eicton, and Phta; and the triple god seated on the Lotos can be seen in the St. Petersburg Museum, on a medal of the Northern Tartars.

Among the Church dogmas which have most seriously suffered of late at the hands of the Orientalists, the last in question stands conspicuous. The reputation of each of the three personages of the anthropomorphic godhead as an original revelation to the Christians through Divine will, has been badly compromised by inquiry into its predecessors and origin. Orientalists have published more about the similarity between Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Christianity than was strictly agreeable to the Vatican. Draper’s assertion that “Paganism was modified by Christianity, Christianity by Paganism,”[78] is being daily verified. “Olympus was restored but the divinities passed under other names,” he says, treating of the Constantine period. “The more powerful provinces insisted on the adoption of their time-honored conceptions. Views of the trinity in accordance with the Egyptian traditions were established. Not only was the adoration of Isis under a new name restored, but even her image, standing on the crescent moon, reappeared. The well-known effigy of that goddess with the infant Horus in her arms has descended to our days, in the beautiful artistic creations of the Madonna and child.”

But a still earlier origin than the Egyptian and Chaldean can be assigned to the Virgin “Mother of God,” Queen of Heaven. Though Isis is also by right the Queen of Heaven, and is generally represented carrying in her hand the Crux Ansata composed of the mundane cross, and of the Stauros of the Gnostics, she is a great deal younger than the celestial virgin, Neith. In one of the tombs of the Pharaohs—Rhameses, in the valley of Biban-el-Molouk, in Thebes, Champollion, Junior, discovered a picture, according to his opinion the most ancient ever yet found. It represents the heavens symbolized by the figure of a woman bedecked with stars. The birth of the Sun is figured by the form of a little child, issuing from the bosom of its “Divine Mother.”

In the Book of Hermes, “Pimander” is enunciated in distinct and unequivocal sentences, the whole trinitarian dogma accepted by the Christians. “The light is me,” says Pimander, the DIVINE THOUGHT. “I am the nous or intelligence, and I am thy god, and I am far older than the human principle which escapes from the shadow. I am the germ of thought, the resplendent WORD, the SON of God. Think that what thus sees and hears in thee, is the Verbum of the Master, it is the Thought, which is God the Father.... The celestial ocean, the Æther, which flows from east to west, is the Breath of the Father, the life-giving Principle, the HOLY GHOST!” “For they are not at all separated and their union is LIFE.”

Ancient as may be the origin of Hermes, lost in the unknown days of Egyptian colonization, there is yet a far older prophecy, directly relating to the Hindu Christna, according to the Brahmans. It is, to say the least, strange that the Christians claim to base their religion upon a prophecy of the Bible, which exists nowhere in that book. In what chapter or verse does Jehovah, the “Lord God,” promise Adam and Eve to send them a Redeemer who will save humanity? “I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” says the Lord God to the serpent, “and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”

In these words there is not the slightest allusion to a Redeemer, and the subtilest of intellects could not extract from them, as they stand in the third chapter of Genesis, anything like that which the Christians have contrived to find. On the other hand, in the traditions and Manu, Brahma promises directly to the first couple to send them a Saviour who will teach them the way to salvation.

“It is from the lips of a messenger of Brahma, who will be born in Kuroukshetra, Matsya, and the land of Pantchola, also called Kanya-Cubja (mountain of the Virgin), that all men on earth will learn their duty,” says Manu (book ii., slokas 19 and 20).

The Mexicans call the Father of their Trinity Yzona, the Son Bacab, and the Holy Ghost Echvah, “and say they received it (the doctrine) from their ancestors.”[79] Among the Semitic nations we can trace the trinity to the prehistorical days of the fabled Sesostris, who is identified by more than one critic with Nimrod, “the mighty hunter.” Manetho makes the oracle rebuke the king, when the latter asks, “Tell me, O thou strong in fire, who before me could subjugate all things? and who shall after me?” And the oracle saith thus: “First God, then the Word, and then ‘the Spirit.’”[80]

In the foregoing lies the foundation of the fierce hatred of the Christians toward the “Pagans” and the theurgists. Too much had been borrowed; the ancient religions and the Neo-platonists had been laid by them under contribution sufficiently to perplex the world for several thousand years. Had not the ancient creeds been speedily obliterated, it would have been found impossible to preach the Christian religion as a New Dispensation, or the direct Revelation from God the Father, through God the Son, and under the influence of God the Holy Ghost. As a political exigence the Fathers had—to gratify the wishes of their rich converts—instituted even the festivals of Pan. They went so far as to accept the ceremonies hitherto celebrated by the Pagan world in honor of the God of the gardens, in all their primitive sincerity.[81] It was time to sever the connection. Either the Pagan worship and the Neo-platonic theurgy, with all ceremonial of magic, must be crushed out forever, or the Christians become Neo-platonists.

The fierce polemics and single-handed battles between Irenæus and the Gnostics are too well known to need repetition. They were carried on for over two centuries after the unscrupulous Bishop of Lyons had uttered his last religious paradox. Celsus, the Neo-platonist, and a disciple of the school of Ammonius Saccas, had thrown the Christians into perturbation, and even had arrested for a time the progress of proselytism by successfully proving that the original and purer forms of the most important dogmas of Christianity were to be found only in the teachings of Plato. Celsus accused them of accepting the worst superstitions of Paganism, and of interpolating passages from the books of the Sybils, without rightly understanding their meaning. The accusations were so plausible, and the facts so patent, that for a long time no Christian writer had ventured to answer the challenge. Origen, at the fervent request of his friend, Ambrosius, was the first to take the defense in hand, for, having belonged to the same Platonic school of Ammonius, he was considered the most competent man to refute the well-founded charges. But his eloquence failed, and the only remedy that could be found was to destroy the writings of Celsus themselves.[82] This could be achieved only in the fifth century, when copies had been taken from this work, and many were those who had read and studied them. If no copy of it has descended to our present generation of scientists, it is not because there is none extant at present, but for the simple reason that the monks of a certain Oriental church on Mount Athos will neither show nor confess they have one in their possession.[83] Perhaps they do not even know themselves the value of the contents of their manuscripts, on account of their great ignorance.

The dispersion of the Eclectic school had become the fondest hope of the Christians. It had been looked for and contemplated with intense anxiety. It was finally achieved. The members were scattered by the hand of the monsters Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, and his nephew Cyril—the murderer of the young, the learned, and the innocent Hypatia![84]

With the death of the martyred daughter of Theon, the mathematician, there remained no possibility for the Neo-platonists to continue their school at Alexandria. During the life-time of the youthful Hypatia her friendship and influence with Orestes, the governor of the city, had assured the philosophers security and protection against their murderous enemies. With her death they had lost their strongest friend. How much she was revered by all who knew her for her erudition, noble virtues, and character, we can infer from the letters addressed to her by Synesius, Bishop of Ptolemais, fragments of which have reached us. “My heart yearns for the presence of your divine spirit,” he wrote in 413 A. D., “which more than anything else could alleviate the bitterness of my fortunes.” At another time he says: “Oh, my mother, my sister, my teacher, my benefactor! My soul is very sad. The recollection of my children I have lost is killing me.... When I have news of you and learn, as I hope, that you are more fortunate than myself, I am at least only half-unhappy.”

What would have been the feelings of this most noble and worthy of Christian bishops, who had surrendered family and children and happiness for the faith into which he had been attracted, had a prophetic vision disclosed to him that the only friend that had been left to him, his “mother, sister, benefactor,” would soon become an unrecognizable mass of flesh and blood, pounded to jelly under the blows of the club of Peter the Reader—that her youthful, innocent body would be cut to pieces, “the flesh scraped from the bones,” by oyster-shells and the rest of her cast into the fire, by order of the same Bishop Cyril he knew so well—Cyril, the CANONIZED Saint!![85]

There has never been a religion in the annals of the world with such a bloody record as Christianity. All the rest, including the traditional fierce fights of the “chosen people” with their next of kin, the idolatrous tribes of Israel, pale before the murderous fanaticism of the alleged followers of Christ! Even the rapid spread of Mahometanism before the conquering sword of the Islam prophet, is a direct consequence of the bloody riots and fights among Christians. It was the intestine war between the Nestorians and Cyrilians that engendered Islamism; and it is in the convent of Bozrah that the prolific seed was first sown by Bahira, the Nestorian monk. Freely watered by rivers of blood, the tree of Mecca has grown till we find it in the present century overshadowing nearly two hundred millions of people. The recent Bulgarian atrocities are but the natural outgrowth of the triumph of Cyril and the Mariolaters.

The cruel, crafty politician, the plotting monk, glorified by ecclesiastical history with the aureole of a martyred saint. The despoiled philosophers, the Neo-platonists, and the Gnostics, daily anathematized by the Church all over the world for long and dreary centuries. The curse of the unconcerned Deity hourly invoked on the magian rites and theurgic practice, and the Christian clergy themselves using sorcery for ages. Hypatia, the glorious maiden-philosopher, torn to pieces by the Christian mob. And such as Catherine de Medici, Lucrezia Borgia, Joanna of Naples, and the Isabellas of Spain, presented to the world as the faithful daughters of the Church—some even decorated by the Pope with the order of the “Immaculate Rose,” the highest emblem of womanly purity and virtue, a symbol sacred to the Virgin-mother of God! Such are the examples of human justice! How far less blasphemous appears a total rejection of Mary as an immaculate goddess, than an idolatrous worship of her, accompanied by such practices.

In the next chapter we will present a few illustrations of sorcery, as practiced under the patronage of the Roman Church.