A conviction, founded upon _seventy_ thousand years of experience,[51] as they allege, has been entertained by hermetic philosophers of all periods that matter has in time become, through sin, more gross and dense than it was at man’s first formation; that, at the beginning, {2} the human body was of a half-ethereal nature; and that, before the fall, mankind communed freely with the now unseen universes. But since that time matter has become the formidable barrier between us and the world of spirits. The oldest esoteric traditions also teach that, before the mystic Adam, many races of human beings lived and died out, each giving place in its turn to another. Were these precedent types more perfect? Did any of them belong to the _winged_ race of men mentioned by Plato in _Phædrus_? It is the special province of science to solve the problem. The caves of France and the relics of the stone age afford a point at which to begin. As the cycle proceeded, man’s eyes were more and more opened, until he came to know “good and evil” as well as the Elohim themselves. Having reached its summit, the cycle began to go downward. When the arc attained a certain point which brought it parallel with the fixed line of our terrestrial plane, the man was furnished by nature with “coats of _skin_,” and the Lord God “clothed them.” This same belief in the pre-existence of a far more spiritual race than the one to which we now belong can be traced back to the earliest traditions of nearly every people. In the ancient Quiché manuscript, published by Brasseur de Bourbourg—the _Popol Vuh_—the first men are mentioned as a race that could reason and speak, whose sight was unlimited, and who knew all things at once. According to Philo Judæus, the air is filled with an invisible host of spirits, some of whom are free from evil and immortal, and others are pernicious and mortal. “From the sons of EL we are descended, and sons of El must we become again.” And the unequivocal statement of the anonymous Gnostic who wrote _The Gospel according to John_, that “as many as received Him,” _i.e._, who followed practically the esoteric doctrine of Jesus, would “become the sons of God,” points to the same belief. (i., 12.) “Know ye not, ye are _gods_?” exclaimed the Master. Plato describes admirably in _Phædrus_ the state in which man once was, and what he will become again: before, and after the “loss of his wings;” when “he lived among the gods, a god himself in the airy world.” From the remotest periods religious philosophies taught that the whole universe was filled with divine and spiritual beings of divers races. From one of these evolved, in the course of time, ADAM, the primitive man.