As was predicted by the great Hermes in his dialogue with Æsculapius, the
time had indeed come when impious foreigners accused Egypt of adoring
monsters, and naught but the letters engraved in stone upon her monuments
survived—enigmas unintelligible to posterity. Her sacred Scribes and
Hierophants became wanderers upon the face of the earth. Those who had
remained in Egypt found themselves obliged for fear of a profanation of
the sacred Mysteries to seek refuge in deserts and mountains, to form and
establish secret societies and brotherhoods—such as the Essenes; those who
had crossed the oceans to India and even to the (now‐called) New World,
bound themselves by solemn oaths to keep silent, and to preserve secret
their Sacred Knowledge and Science; thus these were buried deeper than
ever out of human sight. In Central Asia and on the northern borderlands
of India, the triumphant sword of Aristotle’s pupil swept away from his
path of conquest every vestige of a once pure Religion: and its Adepts
receded further and further from that path into the most hidden spots of
the globe. The cycle of —— being at its close, the first hour for the
disappearance of the Mysteries struck on the clock of the Races, with the
Macedonian conqueror. The first strokes of its last hour sounded in the
year 47 B.C. Alesia(542) the famous city in Gaul, the Thebes of the Kelts,
so renowned for its ancient rites of Initiation and Mysteries, was, as J.
M. Ragon well describes it:
The ancient metropolis and the tomb of Initiation, of the religion
of the Druids and of the freedom of Gaul.(543)
It was during the first century before our era, that the last and supreme
hour of the great Mysteries had struck. History shows the populations of
Central Gaul revolting against the Roman yoke. The country was subject to
Cæsar, and the revolt was crushed; the result was the slaughter of the
garrison at Alesia (or Alisa), and of all its inhabitants, including the
Druids, the college‐priests and the neophytes; after this the whole city
was plundered and razed to the ground.
Bibractis, a city as large and as famous, not far from Alesia, perished a
few years later. J. M. Ragon describes her end as follows:
Bibractis, the mother of sciences, the soul of the early nations
[in Europe], a town equally famous for its sacred college of
Druids, its civilisation, its schools, in which 40,000 students
were taught philosophy, literature, grammar, jurisprudence,
medicine, astrology, occult sciences, architecture, etc. Rival of
Thebes, of Memphis, of Athens and of Rome, it possessed an
amphitheatre, surrounded with colossal statues, and accommodating
100,000 spectators, gladiators, a capitol, temples of Janus,
Pluto, Proserpine, Jupiter, Apollo, Minerva, Cybele, Venus and
Anubis; and in the midst of those sumptuous edifices the Naumachy,
with its vast basin, an incredible construction, a gigantic work
wherein floated boats and galleys devoted to naval games; then a
_Champ de Mars_, an aqueduct, fountains, public baths; finally
fortifications and walls, the construction of which dated from the
heroic ages.(544)
Such was the last city in Gaul wherein died for Europe the secrets of the
Initiations of the Great Mysteries, the Mysteries of Nature, and of her
forgotten Occult truths. The rolls and manuscripts of the famous
Alexandrian Library were burned and destroyed by the same Cæsar,(545) but
while History deprecates the action of the Arab general, Amrus, who gave
the final touch to this act of vandalism perpetrated by the great
conqueror, it has not a word to say to the latter for his destruction of
nearly the same amount of precious rolls in Alesia, nor to the destroyer
of Bibractis. While Sacrovir—chief of the Gauls, who revolted against
Roman despotism under Tiberius, and was defeated by Silius in the year 21
of our era—was burning himself alive with his fellow conspirators on a
funeral pyre before the gates of the city, as Ragon tells us, the latter
was sacked and plundered, and all her treasures of literature on the
Occult Sciences perished by fire. The once majestic city, Bibractis, has
now become Autun, Ragon explains.
A few monuments of glorious antiquity are still there, such as the
temples of Janus and of Cybele.
Ragon goes on:
Arles, founded two thousand years before Christ, was sacked in
270. This metropolis of Gaul, restored 40 years later by
Constantine, has preserved to this day a few remains of its
ancient splendour; amphitheatre, capitol, an obelisk, a block of
granite 17 metres high, a triumphal arch, catacombs, etc. Thus
ended Kelto‐Gaulic civilisation. Cæsar, as a barbarian worthy of
Rome, had already accomplished the destruction of the ancient
Mysteries by the sack of the temples and their initiatory
colleges, and by the massacre of the Initiates and the Druids.
Remained Rome; but she never had but the lesser Mysteries, shadows
of the Secret Sciences. The Great Initiation was extinct.(546)
A few further extracts may be given from his _Occult Masonry_, as they
bear directly upon our subject. However learned and erudite, some of the
chronological mistakes of that author are very great. He says:
After deified man (Hermes) came the King‐Priest [the Hierophant]
Menes was the first legislator and the founder of Thebes of the
hundred palaces. He filled that city with magnificent splendour;
it is from his day that the sacerdotal epoch of Egypt dates. The
priests reigned, for it is they who made the laws. It is said that
there have been three hundred and twenty‐nine [Hierophants] since
his time—all of whom have remained unknown.
After that, genuine Adepts having become scarce, the author shows the
Priests choosing false ones from the midst of slaves, whom they exhibited,
having crowned and deified them, for the adoration of the ignorant masses.
Tired of reigning in such a servile way, the kings rebelled and
freed themselves. Then came Sesostris, the founder of Memphis
(1613, they say, before our era). To the sacerdotal election to
the throne succeeded that of the warriors.... Cheops who reigned
from 1178 to 1122 built the great Pyramid which bears his name. He
is accused of having persecuted theocracy and closed the temples.
This is utterly incorrect, though Ragon repeats “History.” The Pyramid
called by the name of Cheops is the Great Pyramid, the building of which
even Baron Bunsen assigned to 5,000 B.C. He says in _Egypt’s Place in
Universal History_:
The Origines of Egypt go back to the ninth millennium before
Christ.(547)
And as the Mysteries were performed and the Initiations took place in that
Pyramid—for indeed it was built for that purpose—it looks strange and an
utter contradiction with known facts in the history of the Mysteries, to
suppose that Cheops, if the builder of that Pyramid, ever turned against
the initiated Priests and their temples. Moreover, as far as the Secret
Doctrine teaches, it was not Cheops who built the Pyramid of that name,
whatever else he might have done.
Yet, it is quite true that
Owing to an Ethiopian invasion and the federated government of
twelve chiefs, royalty fell into the hands of Amasis, a man of low
birth.
This was in 570 B.C., and it is Amasis who destroyed priestly power. And
Thus perished that ancient theocracy which showed its crowned
priests for so many centuries to Egypt and the whole world.
Egypt had gathered the students of all countries around her Priests and
Hierophants before Alexandria was founded. Ennemoser asks:
How comes it that so little has become known of the Mysteries and
of their particular contents, through so many ages, and amongst so
many different times and people? The answer is that it is again
owing to the universally strict silence of the initiated. Another
cause may be found in the destruction and total loss of all the
written memorials of the secret knowledge of the remotest
antiquity.
Numa’s books, described by Livy, consisting of natural philosophy,
were found in his tomb; but they were not allowed to be made
known, lest they should reveal the most secret mysteries of the
state religion.... The senate and the tribunes of the people
determined ... that the books themselves should be burned, which
was done.(548)
Cassain mentions a treatise, well‐known in the fourth and fifth centuries,
which was accredited to Ham, the son of Noah, who in his turn was reputed
to have received it from Jared, the fourth generation from Seth, the son
of Adam.
Alchemy also was first taught in Egypt by her learned Priests, though the
first appearance of this system is as old as man. Many writers have
declared that Adam was the first Adept; but that was a blind and a pun
upon the name, which is “red earth” in one of its meanings. The correct
information—under its allegorical veil—is found in the sixth chapter of
Genesis, which speaks of the “Sons of God” who took wives of the daughters
of men, after which they communicated to these wives many a mystery and
secret of the phenomenal world. The cradle of Alchemy, says Olaus
Borrichius, is to be sought in the most distant times. Democritus of
Abdera was an Alchemist, and a Hermetic Philosopher. Clement of Alexandria
wrote considerably upon the Science, and Moses and Solomon are called
proficients in it. We are told by W. Godwin:
The first authentic record on this subject is an edict of
Diocletian about 300 years A.D., ordering a diligent search to be
made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art
of making gold and silver, that they might, without distinction,
be consigned to the flames.
The Alchemy of the Chaldæans and the old Chinamen is not even the parent
of that Alchemy which revived among the Arabians many centuries later.
There is a spiritual Alchemy and a physical transmutation. The knowledge
of both was imparted at the Initiations.