Magic is as old as man.  It is as impossible to name the time when it sprang into existence as to indicate on what day the first man himself was born.

Whenever a writer has started with the idea of connecting its first foundation in a country with some historical character, further research has proved his views groundless.

Odin, the Scandinavian priest and monarch, was thought by many to have originated the practice of magic some seventy years B.C. 

But it was easily demonstrated that the mysterious rites of the priestesses called Voilers, Valas, were greatly anterior to his age. *

Some modern authors were bent on proving that Zoroaster was the founder of magic, because he was the founder of the Magian religion. Ammianus Marcellinus, Arnobius, Pliny, and other ancient historians demonstrated conclusively that he was but a reformer of Magic as practiced by the Chaldeans and Egyptians. **

The greatest teachers of divinity agree that nearly all ancient books were written symbolically and in a language intelligible only to the initiated.

The biographical sketch of Apollonius of Tyana affords an example.

As every Kabalist knows, it embraces the whole of the Hermetic philosophy, being a counterpart in many respects of the traditions left us of King Solomon.

It reads like a fairy story, but, as in the case of the latter, sometimes facts and historical events are presented to the world under the colors of a fiction.

The journey to India represents allegorically the trials of a neophyte. His long discourses with the Brahmans, their sage advice, and the dialogues with the Corinthian Menippus would, if interpreted, give the esoteric catechism.

His visit to the empire of the wise men, and interview with their king Hiarchas, the oracle of Amphiaraus, explain symbolically many of the secret dogmas of Hermes.

They would disclose, if understood, some of the most important secrets of nature. Eliphas Levi points out the great resemblance which exists between King Hiarchas and the fabulous Hiram, of whom Solomon procured the cedars of Lebanon and the gold of Ophir.

We would like to know whether modern Masons, even “Grand Lecturers” and the most intelligent craftsmen belonging to important lodges, understand who the Hiram is whose death they combine together to avenge?

Putting aside the purely metaphysical teachings of the Kabala, if one would devote himself but to physical occultism, to the so-called branch of therapeutics, the results might benefit some of our modern sciences; such as chemistry and medicine.

Says Professor Draper:

“Sometimes, not without surprise, we meet with ideas which we flatter ourselves originated in our own times.”

This remark, uttered in relation to the scientific writings of the Saracens, would apply still better to the more secret Treatises of the ancients.

Modern medicine, while it has gained largely in anatomy, physiology, and pathology, and even in therapeutics, has lost immensely by its narrowness of spirit, its rigid materialism, its sectarian dogmatism.

One school in its purblindness sternly ignores whatever is developed by other schools; and all unite in ignoring every grand conception of man or nature, developed by Mesmerism, or by American experiments on the brain–every principle which does not conform to a stolid materialism.

It would require a convocation of the hostile physicians of the several different schools to bring together what is now known of medical science, and it too often happens that after the best practitioners have vainly exhausted their art upon a patient, a mesmerist or a “healing medium” will effect a cure!

The explorers of old medical literature, from the time of Hippocrates to that of Paracelsus and Van Helmont, will find a vast number of well-attested physiological and psychological facts and of measures or medicines for healing the sick which modern physicians superciliously refuse to employ. *

Even with respect to surgery, modern practitioners have humbly and publicly confessed the total impossibility of their approximating to anything like the marvellous skill displayed in the art of bandaging by ancient Egyptians.

The many hundred yards of ligature enveloping a mummy from its ears down to every separate toe, were studied by the chief surgical operators in Paris, and, notwithstanding that the models were before their eyes, they were unable to accomplish anything like it.

In the Abbott Egyptological collection, in New York City, may be seen numerous evidences of the skill of the ancients in various handicrafts; among others the art of lace-making; and, as it could hardly be expected but that the signs of woman’s vanity should go side by side with those of man’s strength, there are also specimens of artificial hair, and gold ornaments of different kinds.

The New York Tribune, reviewing the contents of the Ebers Papyrus, says:–“Verily, there is no new thing under the sun. . . .

Chapters 65, 66, 79, and 89 show that hair invigorators, hair dyes, pain-killers, and flea-powders were desiderata 3,400 years ago.”

How few of our recent alleged discoveries are in reality new, and how many belong to the ancients, is again most fairly and eloquently though but in part stated by our eminent philosophical writer, Professor John W. Draper.

His Conflict between Religion and Science–a great book with a very bad title–swarms with such facts.

At page 13, he cites a few of the achievements of ancient philosophers, which excited the admiration of Greece.

In Babylon was a series of Chaldean astronomical observations, ranging back through nineteen hundred and three years, which Callisthenes sent to Aristotle.

Ptolemy, the Egyptian king-astronomer possessed a Babylonian record of eclipses going back seven hundred and forty-seven years before our era. As Prof. Draper truly remarks:

“Long-continued and close observations were necessary before some of these astronomical results that have reached our times could have been ascertained.

Thus, the Babylonians had fixed the length of a tropical year within twenty-five seconds of the truth; their estimate of the sidereal year was barely two minutes in excess. They had detected the precession of the equinoxes.

They knew the causes of eclipses, and, by the aid of their cycle, called saros, could predict them. Their estimate of the value of that cycle, which is more than 6,585 days, was within nineteen and a half minutes of the truth.”

“Such facts furnish incontrovertible proof of the patience and skill with which astronomy had been cultivated in Mesopotamia, and that, with very inadequate instrumental means, it had reached no inconsiderable perfection.

These old observers had made a catalogue of the stars, had divided the zodiac into twelve signs; they had parted the day into twelve hours, the night into twelve.

They had, as Aristotle says, for a long time devoted themselves to observations of star-occultations by the moon. They had correct views of the structure of the solar system, and knew the order of emplacement of the planets. They constructed sundials, clepsydras, astrolabes, gnomons.”

Speaking of the world of eternal truths that lies “within the world of transient delusions and unrealities,”

Professor Draper says:

“That world is not to be discovered through the vain traditions that have brought down to us the opinion of men who lived in the morning of civilization, nor in the dreams of mystics who thought that they were inspired.

It is to be discovered by the investigations of geometry, and by the practical interrogations of nature.”

Precisely. The issue could not be better stated. This eloquent writer tells us a profound truth.

He does not, however, tell us the whole truth, because he does not know it. He has not described the nature or extent of the knowledge imparted in the Mysteries.

No subsequent people has been so proficient in geometry as the builders of the Pyramids and other Titanic monuments, antediluvian and postdiluvian.

On the other hand, none has ever equalled them in the practical interrogation of nature. An undeniable proof of this is the significance of their countless symbols.

Every one of these symbols is an embodied idea,–combining the conception of the Divine Invisible with the earthly and visible. 

The former is derived from the latter strictly through analogy according to the hermetic formula–“as below, so it is above.” 

Their symbols show great knowledge of natural sciences and a practical study of cosmical power.

As to practical results to be obtained by “the investigations of geometry,” very fortunately for students who are coming upon the stage of action, we are no longer forced to content ourselves with mere conjectures.

In our own times, an American, Mr. George H. Felt, of New York, who, if he continues as he has begun, may one day be recognized as the greatest geometer of the age, has been enabled, by the sole help of the premises established by the ancient Egyptians, to arrive at results which we will give in his own language.

“Firstly,” says Mr. Felt, “the fundamental diagram to which all science of elementary geometry, both plane and solid, is referable;

• to produce arithmetical systems of proportion in a geometrical manner;

• to identify this figure with all the remains of architecture and sculpture, in all which it had been followed in a marvellously exact manner;

• to determine that the Egyptians had used it as the basis of all their astronomical calculations, on which their religious symbolism was almost entirely founded;

• to find its traces among all the remnants of art and architecture of the Greeks;

• to discover its traces so strongly among the Jewish sacred records, as to prove conclusively that it was founded thereon;

• to find that the whole system had been discovered by the Egyptians after researches of tens of thousands of years into the laws of nature, and that it might truly be called the science of the Universe.”

Further it enabled him “to determine with precision problems in physiology heretofore only surmised; to first develop such a Masonic philosophy as showed it to be conclusively the first science and religion, as it will be the last”; and we may add, lastly, to prove by ocular demonstrations that the Egyptian sculptors and architects obtained the models for the quaint figures which adorn the facades and vestibules of their temples, not in the disordered fantasies of their own brains, but from the “viewless races of the air,” and other kingdoms of nature, whom he, like them, claims to make visible by resort to their own chemical and kabalistical processes.

Schweigger proves that the symbols of all the mythologies have a scientific foundation and substance. *

It is only through recent discoveries of the physical electro-magnetical powers of nature that such experts in Mesmerism as Ennemoser, Schweigger and Bart, in Germany, Baron Du Potet and Regazzoni, in France and Italy, were enabled to trace with almost faultless accuracy the true relation which each Theomythos bore to some one of these powers.

The Idaeic finger, which had such importance in the magic art of healing, means an iron finger, which is attracted and repulsed in turn by magnetic, natural forces.

It produced, in Samothrace, wonders of healing by restoring affected organs to their normal condition.

Bart goes deeper than Schweigger into the significations of the old myths, and studies the subject from both its spiritual and physical aspects.

He treats at length of the Phrygian Dactyls, those “magicians and exorcists of sickness,” and of the Cabeirian Theurgists.

He says:

“While we treat of the close union of the Dactyls and magnetic forces, we are not necessarily confined to the magnetic stone, and our views of nature but take a glance at magnetism in its whole meaning.

Then it is clear how the initiated, who called themselves Dactyls, created astonishment in the people through their magic arts, working as they did, miracles of a healing nature.

To this united themselves many other things which the priesthood of antiquity was wont to practice; the cultivation of the land and of morals, the advancement of art and science, mysteries, and secret consecrations.

All this was done by the priestly Cabeirians, and wherefore not guided and supported by the mysterious spirits of nature?” **

Schweigger is of the same opinion, and demonstrates that the phenomena of ancient Theurgy were produced by magnetic powers “under the guidance of spirits.”

Despite their apparent Polytheism, the ancients–those of the educated class at all events–were entirely monotheistical; and this, too, ages upon ages before the days of Moses.

In the Ebers Papyrus this fact is shown conclusively in the following words, translated from the first four lines of Plate I.:

“I came from Heliopolis with the great ones from Het-aat, the Lords of Protection, the masters of eternity and salvation.

I came from Sais with the Mother-goddesses, who extended to me protection. The Lord of the Universe told me how to free the gods from all murderous diseases.”

Eminent men were called gods by the ancients.

The deification of mortal men and supposititious gods is no more a proof against their monotheism than the monument-building of modern Christians, who erect statues to their heroes, is proof of their polytheism.

Americans of the present century would consider it absurd in their posterity 3,000 years hence to classify them as idolaters for having built statues to their god Washington.

So shrouded in mystery was the Hermetic Philosophy that Volney asserted that the ancient people worshipped their gross material symbols as divine in themselves; whereas these were only considered as representing esoteric principles.

Dupuis, also, after devoting many years of study to the problem, mistook the symbolic circle, and attributed their religion solely to astronomy.

Eberhart (Berliner Monatschrift) and many other German writers of the last and present centuries, dispose of magic most unceremoniously, and think it due to the Platonic mythos of the Timaeus.

But how, without possessing a knowledge of the mysteries, was it possible for these men or any others not endowed with the finer intuition of a Champollion, to discover the esoteric half of that which was concealed, behind the veil of Isis, from all except the adepts?

The merit of Champollion as an Egyptologist none will question. He declares that everything demonstrates the ancient Egyptians to have been profoundly monotheistical.

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