While the doctrines, ethical code, and observances of the Christian religion were all appropriated from Brahmanism and Buddhism, its ceremonials, vestments, and pageantry were taken bodily from Lamaism. The Romish monastery and nunnery are almost servile copies of similar religious houses in Thibet and Mongolia, and interested explorers of Buddhist lands, when obliged to mention the unwelcome fact, have had no other alternative left them but, with an anachronism unsurpassed in recklessness, to charge the offense of plagiarism upon the religious system their own mother Church had despoiled. This makeshift has served its purpose and had its day. The time has at last come when this page of history must be written. CHAPTER V. “Learn to know all, but keep thyself unknown.”--GNOSTIC MAXIM. “There is one God supreme over all gods, diviner than mortals, Whose form is not like unto man’s, and as unlike his nature; But vain mortals imagine that gods _like themselves are begotten_ With human sensations, and voice, and corporeal members.” --XENOPHANES: _Clem. Al. Strom._, v. 14, § 110. “TYCHIADES.--Can you tell me the reason, Philocles, why most men desire to lye, and delight not only to speak fictions themselves, but give busie attention to others who do? “PHILOCLES.--There be many reasons, Tychiades, which compell some to speak lyes, because they see ’tis profitable.”--_A Dialogue of Lucian._ “SPARTAN.--Is it to thee, or to God, that I must confess? “PRIEST.--To God. “SPARTAN.--Then, MAN, stand back!”--PLUTARCH: _Remarkable Lacedemonian Sayings_. We will now give attention to some of the most important Mysteries of the _Kabala_, and trace their relations to the philosophical myths of various nations. In the oldest Oriental _Kabala_, the Deity is represented as three circles in one, shrouded in a certain smoke or chaotic exhalation. In the preface to the _Sohar_, which transforms the three primordial circles into THREE HEADS, over these is described an exhalation or smoke, neither black nor white, but colorless, and circumscribed within a circle. This is the unknown Essence.[394] The origin of the Jewish image may, perhaps, be traced to Hermes’ _Pimander_, the Egyptian _Logos_, who appears within a cloud of a humid nature, with a smoke escaping from it.[395] In the _Sohar_ the highest God is, as we have shown in the preceding chapter, and as in the case of the Hindu and Buddhist philosophies, a pure abstraction, whose objective existence is denied by the latter. It is Hakama, the “SUPREME WISDOM, that cannot be understood by reflection,” and that lies within and without the CRANIUM of LONG FACE[396] (Sephira), the uppermost of the three “Heads.” It is the “boundless and the infinite En-Soph,” the No-Thing.