The Orient hides many secrets of occultism, and it is almost a platitude that the few secrets that the West has painfully deciphered have been known for all time to the East--and are nothing remarkable. This is one of those large gestures of speech that contain a half-truth and pass for a whole truth. It is on a par with the statement that all Chinese business men are honest--which they are not. Oriental occultism is far too vast a subject to be accepted or dismissed as summarily as this, but one thing is certain and that is that Oriental occult systems are not suitable to the Western man. There are one or two cardinal points that may be grasped at once. Firstly, the exiled native in a Western country who claims occult powers and the gift of being able to teach and transmit them is always and invariably a fakir of the lowest kind. He is usually a low-caste and disreputable native or half-breed, and it may be accounted to his credit that after all he is not expected to know any better. His dupes, on the other hand, the white men and women that listen to his balderdash and sit at his séances, are even guiltier parties than he is. They at least ought to know better than to listen to the first black-and-tan “Swami” or “Guru” that establishes a bogus tabernacle in the backwaters of Balham or Bayswater. The second point is that the true Eastern occultist, whatever his grade of adeptship in his mysteries, never practises any of his arts or knowledge for money or equivalent reward. This is a lesson which might well be learned by the fraternity of mediums and so-called occultists that infest London and other great cities at home and abroad. A medium in receipt of fees for séances or lectures will never and can never develop his or her powers beyond the stage at which they have arrived when it becomes possible to use them as a direct or indirect means of making money. In the East this is realized, and the vow of poverty is more than a metaphor, but they claim that it is a poverty of the body fully repaid by riches of the soul. Practically the whole of Hindu occultism is best described as peculiar methods of self-hypnosis with the object of provoking states of bliss and ecstasy. It is upon the basis of the induction of these peculiar phenomena that ninety per cent. of the Brahmin religious cults are established. By one path or another the various beliefs attain earnest of fulfilment, but the primary causes of these psychical phenomena are physiological in origin. This material path to spiritual success is admitted and glossed over as being but part of the mystery. None the less, there is little to show that anything beyond these self-produced states of hypnotism or suggested phenomena are ever attained by even the greatest of the adepts, and there is no justification of their dogmatic religious teachings even in the results attained.