Only one of all these master-sorcerers is certainly to be taken in good faith, and as he is at the same time intellectually the most eminent among them, I will deal with him somewhat more in detail. This is M. Joséphin Péladan. He has even arrogated to himself the Assyrian royal title of ‘Sar,’ under which he is generally known. The public authorities alone do not give him his Sar title; but then they do not usually recognise any titles of nobility in France. He maintains he is the descendant of the old Magi, and the possessor of all the mental legacies of Zoroaster, Pythagoras and Orpheus. He is, moreover, the direct heir of the Knights Templars and Rosicrucians, both of which orders he has amalgamated and revived under a new form as the ‘Order of the Rosy Cross.’ He dresses himself archaically in a satin doublet of blue or black; he trims his extremely luxuriant blue-black hair and beard into the shape in use among the Assyrians; he affects a large upright hand, which might be taken for mediæval character, writes by preference with red or yellow ink, and in the corner of his letter-paper is delineated, as a distinctive mark of his dignity, the Assyrian king’s cap, with the three serpentine rolls opening in front. As a coat of arms he has the device of his order; on an escutcheon divided by sable and argent a golden chalice surmounted by a crimson rose with two outspread wings, and overlaid with a Latin cross in sable. The shield is surmounted by a coronet with three pentagrams as indents. M. Péladan has appointed a series of commanders and dignitaries of his order (‘grand-priors,’ ‘archons,’ ‘æsthetes’), which numbers, besides, ‘postulants’ and ‘grammarians’ (scholars). He possesses a special costume as grand-master and Sar (in which his life-sized portrait has been painted by Alexandre Séon), and a composer, who belongs to the order, has composed for him a special fanfare, which on solemn occasions is to be played by trumpets at his entrance. He makes use of extraordinary formulæ. His letters he calls ‘decrees,’ or commands (_mandements_). He addresses the persons to whom they are directed either as ‘magnifiques,’ or ‘peers,’ sometimes also ‘dearest adelphe,’ or ‘synnoède.’ He does not call them ‘sir,’ but ‘your lordship’ (_seigneurie_). The introduction is: ‘Health, light and victory in Jesus Christ, in the only God, and in Peter, the only king’; or ‘_Ad Rosam per Crucem, ad Crucem per Rosam, in eâ, in eis gemmatus resurgam_.’ This is at the same time the heraldic motto of the Order of the Rosy Cross. At the conclusion is usually, ‘_Amen. Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nominis tui gloriæ solæ._’ He writes the name of his order, with a cross inserted in the middle, thus: ‘_Rose_ ✠ _Croix._’ His novels he calls ‘_éthopées_,’ himself as their author ‘_éthopoète_,’ his dramas ‘_wagneries_,’ their table of contents ‘_éumolpées_.’