One day Chaudesaigues--poor honest fellow, who died long before his time, which I shall speak of in its place--proposed to take me to the Mapah, and I accepted. He recognised me, as he had once dined or taken supper with me in the days when he was Gannot; and he had preserved a very clear memory of that meeting; he was very anxious at once to acquaint me with his symbolic figures, and to initiate me, like the Egyptian proselytes, into his most secret mysteries. Now, I had, by chance, just been studying in earnest the subjects of the early ages of the world and its great wars, which apparently devastated those primitive times without seeming reason; I was, therefore, in a measure, perfectly able not only to understand the most obscure traditions of the religion of the Mapah, but also to explain them to others, which I will now endeavour to do here. At the period when the Celts had conquered India, that ancestor of Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilisations, they found a complete system of physical and metaphysical sciences already established; Atlantic cosmogony related to absolute unity, and, according to it, everything emanated from one single principle, called _Iswara_, which was purely spiritual. But soon the Indian savants perceived with fear, that this world, which they had looked upon for long as the product of absolute _unity_, was incontestably that of a combined _duality._ They might have looked upon these two principles, as did the first Zoroaster a long time after them, as _principiés_--_i.e._ as the son and daughter of Iswara, thus leaving the ancient Iswara his old position, by supporting him on a double column of creating beings, as we see a Roman general being carried raised up on two shields by his soldiers; but they wished to divide these two principles into _principiant_ principles; they therefore satisfied themselves by joining a fresh principle to that of Iswara, by mating Iswara with _Pracriti_, or nature. This explained everything. Pracriti possessed the _sakti_--_i.e._ the conceptive power, and the old Iswara was the _bidja_ or generative power. I think, up to now, I have been as clear as possible, and I mean to try to continue my explanations with equal lucidity; which will not be an easy matter seeing that (and I am happy to give my reader due warning of it) we are dealing only with pure science, of which fact he might not be aware.