1nCnVqgFI

INTRODUCTORY. 23
are divulged, or rather partially presented before the public in their
strange archaic form.
How is this to be done ; what is the best way for achieving such an
object, has been the ever-recurring question. To make our plan clearer,
an illustration may be attempted.
When a tourist, coming from a wellexplored
country, suddenly reaches the borderland of a terra incogiita,
hedged in, and shut out from view by a formidable barrier of impassable
rocks, he may still refuse to acknowledge himself baffled in his exploratory
plans. Ingress beyond is forbidden. But if he cannot visit the
mysterious region personally, he may still find a means of examining
it from as short a distance as can be arrived at. Helped by his knowledge
of the landscapes left behind, he can get a general and pretty
correct idea of the transmural view, if he will only climb to the loftiest
summit of the altitudes in front of him. Once there, he can gaze at it
at his leisure, comparing that which he dimly perceives with that which
he has just left below, now that he is, thanks to his own efforts, beyond
the line of the mists and the cloud-capped cliffs.
Such a point of preliminar>^ observation, cannot in these two volumes
be offered to those who would like to get a more correct understanding
of the mysteries of the pre-archaic periods given in the texts. But if the
reader has patience, and will glance at the present state of beliefs and
creeds in Europe, compare and check it with what is known to history
of the ages directly preceding and following the Christian era, then he
will find all this in a future volume of the present work.
In the latter volume a brief recapitulation will be made of all the
principal Adepts known to history, and the downfall of the Mysteries
will be described, after which began the disappearance and the systematic
and final elimination from the memory of men of the real nature of
Initiation and the Sacred Science. From that time its teachings became
occult, and Magic sailed but too often under the venerable but frequently
misleading name of Hermetic Philosophy. As real Occultism
had been prevalent among the Mj^stics during the centuries that
preceded our era, so Magic, or rather Sorcery, with its Occult Arts,
followed the beginning of Christianit3^
However great and zealous the fanatical efforts, during these early
centuries, to obliterate every trace of the mental and intellectual labour
of the Pagans, thej^ were a failure ; but the same spirit of the dark
demon of bigotry and intolerance has ever since systematically perverted
every bright page written in the pre-Christian periods. Kven