This opinion does not, however, in the least implicate our statement that the secret doctrines of the Magi, of the pre-Vedic Buddhists, of the hierophants of the Egyptian Thoth or Hermes, and of the adepts of whatever age and nationality, including the Chaldean kabalists and the Jewish _nazars_, were _identical_ from the beginning. When we use the term _Buddhists_, we do not mean to imply by it either the exoteric Buddhism instituted by the followers of Gautama-Buddha, nor the modern Buddhistic religion, but the secret philosophy of Sakyamuni, which in its essence is certainly identical with the ancient wisdom-religion of the sanctuary, the pre-Vedic Brahmanism. The “schism” of Zoroaster, as it is called, is a direct proof of it. For it was no _schism_, strictly speaking, but merely a partially-public exposition of strictly monotheistic religious truths, hitherto taught only in the sanctuaries, and that he had learned from the Brahmans. Zoroaster, the primeval institutor of sun-worship, cannot be called the founder of the dualistic system; neither was he the first to teach the unity of God, for he taught but what he had learned himself with the Brahmans. And that Zarathustra and his followers, the Zoroastrians, “had been settled in India before they immigrated into Persia,” is also proved by Max Müller. “That the Zoroastrians and their ancestors started from India,” he says, “during the Vaidik period, can be proved as distinctly as that the inhabitants of Massilia started from Greece.... Many of the gods of the Zoroastrians come out ... as mere reflections and deflections of the primitive and authentic gods of the _Veda_.”[224] If, now, we can prove--and we can do so on the evidence of the _Kabala_ and the oldest traditions of the wisdom-religion, the philosophy of the old sanctuaries--that all these gods, whether of the Zoroastrians or of the _Veda_, are but so many personated _occult powers_ of nature, the faithful servants of the adepts of secret wisdom--Magic--we are on secure ground.