The Secret Doctrine Volume 3.pdf

Having bidden farewell to his Chaldaean Initiator, the future Sorcerer and Saint went to
Antioch. His tale of “iniquity” and subsequent repentance is long but we will make it short. He
became “an accomplished Magician,” surrounded by a host of disciples and “candidates to
the perilous and sacrilegious art.” He shows himself distributing love-philtres and dealing in
deathly charms “to rid young wives of old husbands, and to ruin Christian virgins.”
Unfortunately Cyprianus was not above love himself. He fell in love with the beautiful Justine,
a converted maiden, after having vainly tried to make her share the passion one named
Aglaides, a profligate, had for her. His “demons failed” he tells us, and he got disgusted with
them. This disgust brings on a quarrel between him and his Hierophant, whom he insists on
indentifying with the Demon; and the dispute is followed by a tournament between the latter
and some Christian converts, in which the “Evil One” is, of course, worsted. The Sorcerer is
finally baptised and gets rid of his enemy. Having laid at the feet of Anthimes, Bishop of
Antioch, all his books on Magic, he became a Saint in company with the beautiful Justine,
who had converted him; both suffered martyrdom under the Emperor Diocletian; and both are
buried side by side in Rome, in the Basilica of St. John Lateran, near the Baptistery.
SECTION XX
The Eastern Gupta Vidya & The Kabalah
(Page 164) WE now return to the consideration of the essential identity between the Eastern
Gupta Vidya and the Kabalah as a system, while we must also show the dissimilarity in their
philosophical interpretations since the Middle Ages.
It must be confessed that the views of the Kabalists - meaning by the word those students of
Occultism who study the Jewish Kabalah and who know little, if anything, of any other
Esoteric literature or of its teachings - are as varied in their synthetic conclusions upon the
nature of the mysteries taught even in the Zohar alone, and are as wide of the true mark, as
are the dicta upon it of exact Science itself. Like the mediaeval Rosicrucian and the
Alchemist - like the Abbot Trithemius, John Reuchlin, Agrippa, Paracelsus, Robert Fludd,
Philalethes, etc. - by whom they swear, the continental Occultists see in the Jewish Kabalah
alone the universal well of wisdom; they find in it the secret lore of nearly all the mysteries of
Nature - metaphysical and divine - some of them including herein, as did Reuchlin, those of
the Christian Bible. For them the Zohar is an Esoteric Thesaurus of all the mysteries of the
Christian Gospel; and the Sephyr Yetsirah is the light that shines in every darkness, and the
container of the keys to open every secret in Nature. Whether many of our modern followers
of the mediaeval Kabalists have an idea of the real meaning of the symbology of their chosen
Masters is another question. Most of them have probably never given even a passing
thought to the fact that the Esoteric language used by the Alchemists was their own, and that
it was given out as a blind, necessitated by the dangers of the epoch they lived in, and not as
the Mystery-language, used by the Pagan Initiates, which the Alchemists had retranslated
and re-veiled once more.
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