mobile arms of a kind of gallows to be seen in the vicinity of many of the temples. At the end of each of these arms is fixed a pulley over which passes a rope terminated by an iron hook. This hook is inserted into the bare back of the fakir, who inundating the soil with blood is hoisted up in the air and then whirled round the gallows. From the first moment of this cruel operation until he is either unhooked or the flesh of his back tears out under the weight of the body and the fakir is hurled down on the heads of the crowd, not a muscle of his face will move. He remains calm and serious and as composed as if taking a refreshing bath. The fakir will laugh to scorn every imaginable torture, persuaded that the more his outer body is mortified, the brighter and holier becomes his inner, spiritual body. But the Dervish, neither in India, nor in other Mahometan lands, will ever submit to such operations.

DRUIDS.-A sacerdotal caste which flourished in Britain and Gaul. ELEMENTAL SPIRITS.-The creatures evolved in the four kingdoms of earth, air, fire, and water, and called by the kabalists gnomes, sylphs, salamanders, and undines. They may be termed the forces of nature, and will either operate effects as the servile agents of general law, or may be employed by the disembodied spirits-whether pure or impure-and by living adepts of magic and sorcery, to produce desired phenomenal results. Such beings never become men.*

Under the general designation of fairies, and fays, these spirits of the elements appear in the myth, fable, tradition, or poetry of all nations, ancient and modern. Their names are legion-peris, devs, djins, sylvans, satyrs, fauns, elves, dwarfs, trolls, norns, nisses, kobolds, brownies, necks, stromkarls, undines, nixies, salamanders, goblins, ponkes, banshees, kelpies, pixies, moss people, good people, good neighbors, wild women, men of peace, white ladies-and many more. They have been seen, feared, blessed, banned, and invoked in, every quarter of the globe and in every age. Shall we then concede that all who have met them were hallucinated?

* Persons who believe in the clairvoyant power, but are disposed to discredit the existence of any other spirits in nature than disembodied human spirits, will be interested in an account of certain clairvoyant observations which appeared in the London Spiritualist of June 29, 1877. A thunder-storm approaching, the seeress saw "a bright spirit emerge from a dark cloud and pass with lightning speed across the sky, and, a few minutes after, a diagonal line of dark spirits in the clouds." These are the Maruts of the "Vedas" (See Max Müller's "Rig-Veda Sanhita").

The well-known and respected lecturer, author, and clairvoyant, Mrs. Emma Hardinge Britten, has published accounts of her frequent experiences with these elemental spirits.

These elementals are the principal agents of disembodied but never visible spirits at seances, and the producers of all the phenomena except the subjective.

ELEMENTARY SPIRITS.-Properly, the disembodied souls of the depraved; these souls having at some time prior to death separated from themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for immortality. Eliphas Levi and some other kabalists make little distinction between elementary spirits who have been men, and those beings which people the elements, and are the blind forces of nature. Once divorced from their bodies, these souls (also called "astral bodies") of purely materialistic persons, are irresistibly attracted to the earth, where they live a temporary and finite life amid elements congenial to their gross natures. From having never, during their natural lives, cultivated their spirituality, but subordinated it to the material and gross, they are now unfitted for the lofty career of the pure, disembodied being, for whom the atmosphere of earth is stifling and mephitic, and whose attractions are all away from it. After a more or less prolonged period of time these material souls will begin to disintegrate, and finally, like a column of mist, be dissolved, atom by atom, in the surrounding elements.

ESSENES from Asa, a healer. A sect of Jews said by Pliny to have lived near the Dead Sea "per millia sæculorum”—for thousands of ages. Some have supposed them to be extreme Pharisees; and others—which may be the true theory-the descendants of the Benim-nabim of the Bible, and think they were "Kenites" and "Nazarites." They had many Buddhistic ideas and practices; and it is noteworthy that the priests of the Great Mother at Ephesus, Diana-Bhavani with many breasts, were also so denominated. Eusebius, and after him De Quincey, declared them to be the same as the early Christians, which is more than probable. The title "brother," used in the early Church, was Essenean: they were a fraternity, or a koinobion or community like the early converts. It is noticeable that only the Sadducees, or Zadokites, the priest-caste and their partisans, persecuted the Christians; the Pharisees were generally scholastic and mild, and often sided with the latter. James the Just was a Pharisee till his death; but Paul or Aher was esteemed a schismatic.

EVOLUTION. The development of higher orders of animals from the lower. Modern, or so-called exact science, holds but to a one-sided physical evolution, prudently avoiding and ignoring the higher or spiritual evolution, which would force our contemporaries to confess the superiority of the ancient philosophers and psychologists over themselves. The ancient sages, ascending to the UNKNOWABLE, made their starting-point from the first manifestation of the unseen, the unavoidable, and from a strict logical reasoning, the absolutely necessary creative Being, the

Demiurgos of the universe. Evolution began with them from pure spirit, which descending lower and lower down, assumed at last a visible and comprehensible form, and became matter. Arrived at this point, they speculated in the Darwinian method, but on a far more large and comprehensive basis.

*

In the Rig-Veda-Sanhita, the oldest book of the World (to which even our most prudent Indiologists and Sanscrit scholars assign an antiquity of between two and three thousand years B.C.), in the first book, "Hymns to the Maruts," it is said:

"Not-being and Being are in the highest heaven, in the birthplace of Daksha, in the lap of Aditi" (Mandala, i., Sûkta 166).

"In the first age of the gods, Being (the comprehensible Deity) was born from Not-being (whom no intellect can. comprehend); after it were born the Regions (the invisible), from them Uttânapada."

"From Uttânapad the Earth was born, the Regions (those that are visible) were born from the Earth. Daksha was born of Aditi, and Aditi

from Daksha" (Ibid.).

Aditi is the Infinite, and Daksha is dáksha-pitarah, literally meaning the father of gods, but understood by Max Müller and Roth to mean the fathers of strength, "preserving, possessing, granting faculties." Therefore, it is easy to see that "Daksha, born of Aditi and Aditi from Daksha," means what the moderns understand by "correlation of forces;" the more so as we find in this passage (translated by Prof. Müller):

"I place Agni, the source of all beings, the father of strength" (iii., 27, 2), a clear and identical idea which prevailed so much in the doctrines of the Zoroastrians, the Magians, and the medieval fire-philosophers. Agni is god of fire, of the Spiritual Ether, the very substance of the divine essence of the Invisible God present in every atom of His creation and called by the Rosicrucians the "Celestial Fire." If we only carefully compare the verses from this Mandala, one of which runs thus: "The Sky is your father, the Earth your mother, Soma your brother, Aditi your sister" (i., 191, 6),† with the inscription on the Smaragdine Tablet of Hermes, we will find the same substratum of metaphysical philosophy, the identical doctrines !

"As all things were produced by the mediation of one being, so all things were produced from this one thing by adaptation: 'Its father is the sun; its mother is the moon' . . . etc. Separate the earth from the

Translated by Max Müller, Professor of Comparative Philology at the Oxford University, England.

"Dyaríh vah pitâ, prithivi mâtâ sômah bhrâtâ âditih svásâ."

fire, the subtile from the gross. What I had to say about the operation of the sun is completed" (Smaragdine Tablet).

*

Professor Max Müller sees in this Mandala "at last, something like a theogony, though full of contradictions." The alchemists, kabalists, and students of mystic philosophy will find therein a perfectly defined system of Evolution in the Cosmogony of a people who lived a score of thousands of years before our era. They will find in it, moreover, a perfect identity of thought and even doctrine with the Hermetic philosophy, and also that of Pythagoras and Plato.

In Evolution, as it is now beginning to be understood, there is supposed to be in all matter an impulse to take on a higher form—a supposi tion clearly expressed by Manu and other Hindu philosophers of the highest antiquity. The philosopher's tree illustrates it in the case of the zinc solution. The controversy between the followers of this school and the Emanationists may be briefly stated thus: The Evolutionist stops all inquiry at the borders of "the Unknowable;" the Emanationist believes that nothing can be evolved-or, as the word means, unwombed or born-except it has first been involved, thus indicating that life is from a spiritual potency above the whole.

FAKIRS. Religious devotees in East India. They are generally attached to Brahmanical pagodas and follow the laws of Manu. A strictly religious fakir will go absolutely naked, with the exception of a small piece of linen called dhoti, around his loins. They wear their hair long, and it serves them as a pocket, as they stick in it various objects—such as a pipe, a small flute called vagudah, the sounds of which throw the serpents into a cataleptic torpor, and sometimes their bamboo-stick (about one foot long) with the seven mystical knots on it. This magical stick, or rather rod, the fakir receives from his guru on the day of his initiation, together with the three mantrams, which are communicated to him "mouth to ear." No fakir will be seen without this powerful adjunct of his calling. It is, as they all claim, the divining rod, the cause of every occult phenomenon produced by them. The Brahmanical fakir is entire

* As the perfect identity of the philosophical and religious doctrines of antiquity will be fully treated upon in subsequent chapters, we limit our explanations for the present.

"Rig-Veda-Anhita," p. 234.

Philostratus assures us that the Brahmins were able, in his time, to perform the most wonderful cures by merely pronouncing certain magical words. "The Indian Brahmans carry a staff and a ring, by means of which they are able to do almost anything." Origenes states the same ("Contra Celsum "). But if a strong mesmeric fluid-say projected from the eye, and without any other contact—is not added, no magical words would be efficacious.

ly distinct from the Mussulman mendicant of India, also called fakirs in some parts of the British territory.

HERMETIST.

From Hermes, the god of Wisdom, known in Egypt, Syria, and Phoenicia as Thoth, Tat, Adad, Seth, and Sat-an (the latter not to be taken in the sense applied to it by Moslems and Christians), and in Greece as Kadmus. The kabalists identify him with Adam Kadmon, the first manifestation of the Divine Power, and with Enoch. There were two Hermes: the elder was the Trismegistus, and the second an emanation, or "permutation" of himself; the friend and instructor of Isis and Osiris. Hermes is the god of the priestly wisdom, like Mazeus.

HIEROPHANT.--Discloser of sacred learning. The Old Man, the Chief of the Adepts at the initiations, who explained the arcane knowledge to the neophytes, bore this title. In Hebrew and Chaldaic the term was Peter, or opener, discloser; hence, the Pope, as the suc cessor of the hierophant of the ancient Mysteries, sits in the Pagan chair of "St. Peter." The vindictiveness of the Catholic Church toward the alchemists, and to arcane and astronomical science, is explained by the fact that such knowledge was the ancient prerogative of the hierophant, or representative of Peter, who kept the mysteries of life and death. Men like Bruno, Galileo, and Kepler, therefore, and even Cagliostro, trespassed on the preserves of the Church, and were accordingly murdered.

Every nation had its Mysteries and hierophants. Even the Jews had their Peter-Tanaïm or Rabbin, like Hillel, Akiba,* and other famous kabalists, who alone could impart the awful knowledge contained in the Merkaba. In India, there was in ancient times one, and now there are several hierophants scattered about the country, attached to the principal pagodas, who are known as the Brahma-âtmas. In Thibet the chief hierophant is the Dalay, or Taley-Lama of Lha-ssa.† Among Christian nations, the Catholics alone have preserved this "heathen" custom, in the person of their Pope, albeit they have sadly disfigured its majesty and the dignity of the sacred office.

INITIATES.-In times of antiquity, those who had been initiated into the arcane knowledge taught by the hierophants of the Mysteries; and in our modern days those who have been initiated by the adepts of mystic lore into the mysterious knowledge, which, notwithstanding the lapse of ages, has yet a few real votaries on earth.

*Akiba was a friend of Aher, said to have been the Apostle Paul of Christian story. Both are depicted as having visited Paradise. Aher took branches from the Tree of Knowledge, and so fell from the true (Jewish) religion. Akiba came away in peace. See 2d Epistle to the Corinthians, chapter xii.

Taley means ocean or sea.