These monoliths are sometimes carved, as for instance the famous colossal idols in the valley of Bamian, in Afghanistan, of which one is 173 feet high, or the five hundred and fifty monsters of Easter Island, in Polynesia, which, we may observe in passing, remain one of the most insoluble and perplexing riddles in the world. Hewn out of basalt, reclining or standing erect upon their platforms, these sculptures, one of which measures over 90 feet in height, are undoubtedly the most ancient human effigies to be found upon our earth. Official science ascribes to them an antediluvian origin, while esoteric tradition regards them as portraits of the giants of the last Atlantean race, which became degenerate and lapsed into witchcraft shortly before the disappearance of the mysterious continent whereof Easter Island is supposed to be merely one of the loftier summits to-day emerging from the lonely Pacific. I have before me as I write the photographs of some of these haunting giants; and I do not believe that in our most oppressive nightmares it would be possible to imagine faces more formidable, more impassive and unfeeling, more eternally ferocious, more coldly supercilious, more pitilessly disdainful and icily omnipotent. Are they Selenites or Martians, with their tightly-closed, implacable mouths and those eyes of theirs, hollow, like wells of malediction, or protuberant and framed in an airman’s goggles? They are not in any way simian, as one might have supposed, but rather represent demoniacal and abstract entities, such as evil, doom and fatality. They seem not so much inhuman as prehuman or posthuman; and they bear a horrible relation to certain ancestral memories which slumber in the marrow of our bones, warning us that such faces undoubtedly once existed. 2 But let us return to our great Initiates. They are, it appears, reputed to be the guardians of the irresistible and incommensurable sidereal force, the force which supports and directs the worlds and which is capable, if it were misused, of destroying in a moment the whole human species, all that lives upon the earth and this very earth itself; but it is also capable, if it were wisely tamed, of ensuring man an ultimate royalty, perhaps access to other heavenly bodies and, in any case, a power so great that the Golden Age which existed of old, thanks to the subjection of this force, might flourish once more upon our planet.