MANUAL OF FREEMASONRY - Masonic High Council the Mother ...

viii
INTRODUCTION
Astrology, gipsy fortune telling, Modern Freemasonry,
Mahometanism, Christianity, and Judaism, now so called,
have sprung from, and are so many corruptions of, the ancient
mysteries of the Pagans. Star-gazing, without proper human
culture, has been the source of all religion. Lunacy is a dis-
order improperly ascribed to Luna, or the Moon ; for moonstruck
madness had never befallen any one who had not been
corrupted in education, and had the brain badly cultivated.
The first professions of Christianity, as visible in the New
Testament, were professed revelations of the ancient Pagan
mysteries ; but, as a revelation, it was a failure—and it would
have been better if the ancient Paganism had not been superseded
by the grosser mysteries that have, in ignorance, been
adopted, of the God’s-spell or gospel.
However, let them all now repent, for the kingdom of heaven
is at hand, and the key will be freely given to anyone
who will unlock and enter.
That there was no such a nation as the Israelites, is a truth
—found in the consideration that they are not mentioned beyond
the Bible in any records whatever. Egypt knew them
not, Persia knew them not, Hindoostan knew them not, Scythia
knew them not, Phœnicia knew them not, Greece knew them
not, as a nation. And in the first general notice that we have
of the Jews, they are introduced to the world as a sect, or a
series of sects, being Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes ; and
in that general notice, beyond that sort of mistaken allegorical
history which Josephus has copied from the books of the Old
Testament, and which is not otherwise corroborated, and no
better authority than the book of the Old Testament, there is
no presentation of the Jews as the descendants of a larger
nation of Israelites ; as a religious or philosophical sect of distinction,
mixed up with, and found in real human history,
they are not to be traced higher than the century before the
Christian era. It is satisfactory to be able to show the origin